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AT&T's 3G Network Gets Top Ranks

I would love to get the new 3G iPhone. But I am very concerned about its 3G coverage, and I really may have to hold off until they have expand their 3G coverage. I live in Columbus, OH and looking at their coverage, it is simply pathetic. I basically cannot drive outside of Columbus, and once I do, then say goodbye to my 3G. What good is this going to do for my new phone? nothing. So I will have to see how they are expanding their coverage. AT&T can tell me all they want, unless I can see it happen in real life, this is all but a smokescreen to me. :eek:
 
woody88 said:
I basically cannot drive outside of Columbus, and once I do, then say goodbye to my 3G. What good is this going to do for my new phone? nothing.
Click to expand...

Well, your device gives your seamless fallback to EDGE speeds in these areas outside HSPA coverage. You are still connected! Great news!

You can be speaking mid call and not even know this has happened. You could be in the middle of downloading an important email and the network can handover silently and seamlessly. It's exquisite in practice.

When HSPA coverage is expanded, as it is each day, your handset will automatically gain the faster speeds. No action required by you! Great news!

Both T-Mobile and AT&T are rolling out HSPA. T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon are also planning on rolling out LTE for even faster speeds.

Sprint may announce before year end they are rolling out LTE as well - especially if they are bought by T-Mobile.

Competition looks good for the coming years in the US Wireless market.
 
SirOmega said:
Increase the speed all you want between the tower and the phone, but as long as the bandwidth between the towers and the network is a few bonded T1s then it wont do much good.
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Cell sites are tiny in the city centre, with 16x T1 and more to the node B. As more capacity is needed, it is easily added. Network builders do a good job of managing capacity - the building and management of the network is usually outsourced to an equipment supplier. The telco doesn't do it and the equipment vendors take great pride in their network.
 
AT&T Web Site

white iphone
 

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Well THAT'S interesting...


Hmm... maybe that's why AT&T had an "iPhone Black" option. It would make sense.

Boy, if this is the real deal, Apple will not be pleased....:rolleyes:
 
retroneo said:
Cell sites are tiny in the city centre, with 16x T1 and more to the node B. As more capacity is needed, it is easily added. Network builders do a good job of managing capacity - the building and management of the network is usually outsourced to an equipment supplier. The telco doesn't do it and the equipment vendors take great pride in their network.
Click to expand...

But they're going to need an OC3 (155Mb/s) to each tower when this Rev 7 stuff rolls out if they want to deliver 10-20Mb/s to each end user. If you look at the ratio of average customer experience (1Mb/s) vs a tower with 20Mb/s of connectivity, scaling that up to a 10Mb/s customer experience is 200Mb/s of connectivity.
 
SirOmega said:
But they're going to need an OC3 (155Mb/s) to each tower when this Rev 7 stuff rolls out if they want to deliver 10-20Mb/s to each end user. If you look at the ratio of average customer experience (1Mb/s) vs a tower with 20Mb/s of connectivity, scaling that up to a 10Mb/s customer experience is 200Mb/s of connectivity.
Click to expand...

They generally oversubscribe the towers .... you won't have all your customers pushing full bandwidth at the same time.
 
What I am confused about, concerning 3G networks in general, are their availability. I currently live in the suburbs and I'm fairly certain that there is in 3G available here. Regardless of which carrier has the fastest 3G capabilities, does this even affect non city areas?
 
retroneo said:
Well, your device gives your seamless fallback to EDGE speeds in these areas outside HSPA coverage. You are still connected! Great news!

You can be speaking mid call and not even know this has happened. You could be in the middle of downloading an important email and the network can handover silently and seamlessly. It's exquisite in practice.
Click to expand...

Is this from personal experience?

I've read a lot of comments from people with the opposite view. They say they often get dropped when they move from 3G to an EDGE environment, and it takes them a while to get going again.

Perhaps it's a phone-specific thing.
 
Given that the handoff from one cell tower to another is often something substantially less than 'seamless', I wouldn't be surprised if there's a drop when you switch out of 3G to EDGE.

Sprint has clearly been working hard on 3G for quite a while, and their network shows it. However, the reality for me is that 99% of my time, including travel, both business and personal, is inside AT&T's 3G area. If I spend two days a year outside that, it's a big surprise. I realize that's not true for everyone, but the VAST majority of AT&T customers will have 3G connections from the minute they have a 3G device. I'll also have EDGE everywhere the phone can get a signal at all. And in Europe. And in Asia.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that my iPhone had EDGE in Turkey, Russia and Ukraine (major cities) a few weeks back. It's worked very well on two European trips also.

Don't mean to knock Sprint - they get a ton of credit for the job they've done with EV-DO - you can't really argue that it's the #1 3G network by far. Just that it's not even close to enough to convince me to switch to Sprint - I really want/need a GSM provider, and worldwide EDGE is a major benefit of that. Can't wait for a 3G iPhone - with that and GPS, it's a major upgrade. Though for the record the current triangulation location is surprisingly good - it's been a tremendous addition to the iPhone, enough so that I don't miss GPS at the moment.
 
winterspan said:
I don't personally know whether CDMA EV-DO technology or AT&T's UMTS/W-CDMA competitor is more efficient with regards to transmission power and signal processing power. I also don't know whose network is built better, but, judging by reports and coverage maps, it appears to almost exclusively depend on your local area. for 3G specifically, it appears Verizon has a larger coverage area for suburban/rural America, but AT&T is gaining fast and apparently has a better 3G network in the areas that is does service.
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I won't go that far.

Verizon and Sprint both use ev-do rev A --- which uses 1.5 MHz channels (uplink plus downlink = 3 MHz). AT&T uses WCDMA/HSDPA --- which uses 5 MHz channels (uplink plus downlink = 10 MHz). So basically Verizon and Sprint use 1/3 of the spectrum space to achieve 60-80% of the average download speed and 40-50% of the average uplink speed.

What does that mean? Verizon and Sprint can deploy their 3G network on a larger area because it requires less spectrum space.

Another issue is the browser speed --- all 3 networks take the same time to load a webpage. So it doesn't matter for just internet browsing.

A third issue is that EV-DO rev A has better QoS features than HSDPA -- so even though EV-DO has slower uplink speed, it would be better than HSDPA on VoIP apps.
 
kdarling said:
Is this from personal experience?

I've read a lot of comments from people with the opposite view. They say they often get dropped when they move from 3G to an EDGE environment, and it takes them a while to get going again.

Perhaps it's a phone-specific thing.
Click to expand...

There is a carrier operating in nine countries (Hutchison 3) which famously doesn't enable this feature - because it charges differently if you are using EDGE as uniquely they don't have their own 2G network. They (im)politely disconnect from the network to avoid a customer from unexpected charges.

This is likely where you are hearing this from. Hutchison's 3 brand at launch in 2003 was synonymous with 3G as it had an early lead. It garnered bad press for poor coverage that wasn't compensated by the soft handovers to 2G that other carriers use.
 
samab said:
What does that mean? Verizon and Sprint can deploy their 3G network on a larger area because it requires less spectrum space.
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That's whacky physics you got there.

The width of the spectrum slice doesn't affect the coverage characteristics. The frequency affects the signal propagation characteristics.

AT&T's and Verizon's 850MHz towers are capable of having similar coverage area (large).

AT&T's, Verizon and Sprint's towers which use 1900MHz are capable of having similar coverage area (small).

Handsets and networks are multiband to offer a combination of conflicting coverage properties (better distance, better in-building, higher density cells)

Building more sites will always yield better coverage and network capacity, regardless of technology.
 
retroneo said:
That's whacky physics you got there.

The width of the spectrum slice doesn't affect the coverage characteristics. The frequency affects the signal propagation characteristics.
Click to expand...

You mis-understood me.

Carriers have limited spectrum space in a given market --- say 20 MHz. If they need 12 MHz for their voice network, then they have 8 MHz space left for their 3G network.

But 8 MHz can't do WCDMA/HSDPA because you need 5 MHz for the downlink and 5 MHz for the uplink. The same 8 MHz can do EV-DO because you only need 1.5 MHz for the downlink and 1.5 MHz for the uplink.

That's why VZW will have larger 3G coverage than AT&T.
 
New Orleans area is quite small but I am soon moving to either Chicago or D.C. so I figure I will be ok 3G wise

I am going to upgrade to 3G anyway even if I stay here because I want the capability to upgrade from EDGE anyway possible

So aggravating crawling at terrible speeds during lunch hours trying to just get to Google
 
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makes no sense to me

Was on Verizon mobile since 84. Just left for iPhone. Verizon's EVDO coverage, in my experience isn't even comparable to ATT. I get 3G probably 40% of the time in metro DC. EVDO was 100%. Never had dropped calls on Verizon...maybe once every couple of months. It's daily on ATT, and I'm constantly switching over to EDGE.

One GSM side effect I wasn't ready for is that the phone's radio causes interference to all kinds of things, clock radios, my home theater. How annoying that I can't even take my phone into my home theater, or that I have to leave it on the other side of the room in my bedroom.

Verizon is platinum. ATT is copper at best.
 
littlewaywelt said:
Was on Verizon mobile since 84. Just left for iPhone. Verizon's EVDO coverage, in my experience isn't even comparable to ATT. I get 3G probably 40% of the time in metro DC. EVDO was 100%. Never had dropped calls on Verizon...maybe once every couple of months. It's daily on ATT, and I'm constantly switching over to EDGE.

One GSM side effect I wasn't ready for is that the phone's radio causes interference to all kinds of things, clock radios, my home theater. How annoying that I can't even take my phone into my home theater, or that I have to leave it on the other side of the room in my bedroom.

Verizon is platinum. ATT is copper at best.
Click to expand...


So are you going back to Verizon? I'm with Verizon now, want to get a couple iPhones, but am very concerned about the #1 function = making/ receiving/keeping calls.

We just moved to the Larchmont/Mamaroneck, NY area. One would think the 3G service would be fine here by looking at their coverage map. There's no way I can handle dropping calls down here after having to deal with rural NH for 4 years...
 
All of this reminds me of when Sprint first came around. It would show you the coverage maps and make you think you'd have no dropped calls, but it was maddening to have that happen all the time.

So as much as I would love to try out this phone, you just can't really travel anywhere with it. Because you just never know when you will get a dropped call or lose service.

I really think it's going to take a while based on those maps for them to fill in the gaps. There still are gaps of service for Verizon. But for the most part whenever we travel even within the state we have service. And most of all that's what's most important to me right now.

It's too bad that have to have all the exclusivity with companies. I guess I don't know enough about the technology to question why they make the decisions they make, but why not go with a company that has more coverage. It just is less frustrating for the customers.
 
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