All of the major SmartPhone operating systems allow you to see GSM signal quality in an exact dB measurement. It should be pretty easy for someone with access to many GSM handsets to do field testing. Arguing back and forth with anecdotal evidence is pointless when it's so easy to obtain the facts.
Who Do You Believe, Randall Stross or Your Own Lying Eyes?
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Re: Who Do You Believe, Randall Stross or Your Own Lying Eyes?
#12When the problem is limited to highly populous areas like New York and Chicago and the phones work better if not flawlessly in suburbs and smaller cities the network most definitely is the problem.
Funny, I'm writing this from my iPhone while on vacation in tahoe, nv. My first thought when gettng online was that the network qualtiy here is great, much better than sf.
Re: Who Do You Believe, Randall Stross or Your Own Lying Eyes?
#13When the problem is limited to highly populous areas like New York and Chicago and the phones work better if not flawlessly in suburbs and smaller cities the network most definitely is the problem.
Funny, I'm writing this from my iPhone while on vacation in tahoe, nv. My first thought when gettng online was that the network qualtiy here is great, much better than sf.
I live in Honolulu, have a 3GS, and have no idea what all these “AT&T sucks” articles are about. Yeah, I think it’s a SF/NY thing, but y’all are the ones who control the media.
Re: Who Do You Believe, Randall Stross or Your Own Lying Eyes?
#14I think people need to stop jumping to conclusions. Maybe the "problem with the network" is that "there are too many iPhones on the network." This deals with every actual piece of evidence that people are putting forward to try to refute the original article. Is it really so hard to believe that Apple could put out a piece of hardware that does not behave nicely to others? I'm not saying that the nytimes article is r…
> As an analogy, you can take the routers that were stupidly configured to use stratum 1 NTP servers. These misbehaving devices placed too much strain on the NTP "network" because they used it inappropriately. But it was only the NTP servers that a lot of these routers were configured for that were having problems. Yet no one would claim that it's the NTP network's fault for the issues. A poor analogy: - AT&T sells t…
Right, I'm not saying that AT&T isn't responsible or that people don't have good cause to be dissatisfied with them. All I'm trying to say is that it's possible that the root technical cause of the bad service issues isn't in AT&T's network, but in bad behavior from iPhones that manifests itself when you have a large concentration of them in one area.
Re: Who Do You Believe, Randall Stross or Your Own Lying Eyes?
#15When the problem is limited to highly populous areas like New York and Chicago and the phones work better if not flawlessly in suburbs and smaller cities the network most definitely is the problem.
Happy iPhone user here in North Eastern US, but I think your logic (and the TFA's) is faulty:
It is completely possible that it is a problem with the iPhone, but one that is only visibly affecting the network when there's a high density of iPhones being used in a small geographical area.
It's like the whole controversial 'pre-fetch' setting on Fasterfox and other 'web accelerators'. It's fine for individual users, but it violates the contract of how network clients (browsers) are expected to act.
Once there's a sizable number of people using the technology it becomes a problem that affects everyone.
To say that the issues only occur in large metropolitan areas does not completely exclude the iPhone itself from being a contributing factor.
Re: Who Do You Believe, Randall Stross or Your Own Lying Eyes?
#16We can answer this pretty easily by looking at AT&T Blackberries. If 3G Blackberries also have issues, then it's the network. If not, it's Apple's problem. Anybody out there with a BB care to comment?
I've been all over SF and the bay area. No complaints with blackberry. I've never owned an iphone.
Re: Who Do You Believe, Randall Stross or Your Own Lying Eyes?
#17I don't think this piece is very well-argued. For one thing, I've been trying out a new android phone (my iPhone is on the back burner but I doubt I will be making a permanent switch) and the signal quality does seem to be a little better with the Android phone.
Many of the points rely on comparisons to other countries, but analytical people will recognize that problems can be caused by interactions in systems that otherwise work fine on their own too. For example, I had an old wireless router that worked fine with my Windows computers, but not with my Macbook Pro. But my Macbook Pro worked fine with other b/g access points. Without better information, how could we possibly tell which one is at fault? But Gruber (fanboy that he is) is drawing the conclusion that AT&T must be at fault.
As for the "Apple would have fixed it" assertion, or the question of why the number of complaints have gone up as iPhone users have, Gruber's blindness to his own biases is truly startling. You could as easily argue that AT&T has had three years to fix their network, so it must be Apple's fault because if the blame lay at AT&T's door it would have been fixed by now. And _of course_ the number of complaints will rise as iPhone users rise if the problem is some interaction between the iPhone specifically and AT&T's network: there are more iPhone users in existence to complain!
All in all this is very, very poorly done. I have no idea who's at fault but I do know that I won't be going to Gruber for anything more than entertainment if I'm reading about this whole fiasco.
Re: Who Do You Believe, Randall Stross or Your Own Lying Eyes?
#18We can answer this pretty easily by looking at AT&T Blackberries. If 3G Blackberries also have issues, then it's the network. If not, it's Apple's problem. Anybody out there with a BB care to comment?
I have an LG phone with at&t, and a droid with verizon. Verizon gets where at&t can't, even if you just compare non-3g.
That's interesting, but not quite what I'm looking for. I'm trying to find out if the iPhone is a good phone on a crappy network, or a crappy phone on a crappy network.
How does your LG perform in urban areas like SF, Seattle, or NYC? How's the 3G performance in those situations?
Re: Who Do You Believe, Randall Stross or Your Own Lying Eyes?
#19When the problem is limited to highly populous areas like New York and Chicago and the phones work better if not flawlessly in suburbs and smaller cities the network most definitely is the problem.
Happy iPhone user here in North Eastern US, but I think your logic (and the TFA's) is faulty: It is completely possible that it is a problem with the iPhone, but one that is only visibly affecting the network when there's a high density of iPhones being used in a small geographical area. It's like the whole controversial 'pre-fetch' setting on Fasterfox and other 'web accelerators'. It's fine for individual users, bu…
See I understand where you are coming from but the comment about Hawaii's network makes me think otherwise. (Usually the AT&T complaints are limited to Chicago California and New York so that also brings to question why isn't everyone else experiencing such issues.)
Re: Who Do You Believe, Randall Stross or Your Own Lying Eyes?
#20My own little data point fwiw - I'm using an iPhone 3GS in Perth, Australia on the Vodafone network. The reception is definitely worse than my old Nokia on the same network. I've heard similar things from friends using iPhones on Optus which has a separate network from Vodafone.
I definitely think there's an issue with the iPhone's reception, but it's not so bad that I'd go back to my old "dumb phone".