[Infowarrior] - AT&T takes the phone out of iPhone

[Richard Forno]

AT&T takes the phone out of iPhone
by Elinor Mills
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10358156-245.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Three weeks ago, I got a call on a friend's iPhone while in the middle  
of a desert; cell phone coverage had come to Burning Man. By contrast,  
several calls I made last night to my parents from my San Francisco  
apartment were dropped and a subsequent connection became garbled.

That happens daily when I try to converse on my first-generation  
iPhone in my apartment and in certain other neighborhoods. I've come  
to anticipate that if I can even make a call it's likely to be short- 
lived or poor quality.

Frustrated by the numerous interrupted calls, I decided to try to find  
out why my iPhone service is so poor that it's easier to have a Web  
video conference over AIM with my boyfriend because neither of us can  
use our iPhones (his is 3G) reliably inside either of our homes.

This is not a new problem. AT&T was criticized when traffic from  
attendees at the South By Southwest conference in Austin, Texas,  
overwhelmed the network earlier this year. And there were widespread  
complaints about dropped calls and spotty service after the launch of  
the iPhone 3G a year ago.

I wondered why, a year later, the service still seemed unreliable. I  
called AT&T (on my reliable landline at work) to find out. AT&T  
spokesman Mark Siegel blamed the problem on the increasing amount of  
data traffic iPhone users are creating, which CNET News and others  
wrote about earlier this month.

"We lead the industry in smart phones," he said. "As a result, we are  
having to stay ahead of what is incredible and increasing demand for  
wireless data services."

I wanted to know specifically why my problems haven't been resolved  
nearly one-and-a-half years after getting my iPhone and why my voice  
reception would be impacted by data traffic on a different network.  
"Well, it wouldn't," Siegel conceded.

Initially, he had suggested that my problems were related to the fact  
that the first-generation iPhone uses the EDGE data network, which is  
slower than the 3G network. However, not only am I on a different data  
network than the 3G data bandwidth hogs, but there should be no  
connection between general data usage and my voice reception.

Other factors are at play, though, such as proximity to a cell tower,  
the thickness of walls in the building and amount of demand on the  
network at the time, according to Siegel.

Asked what AT&T is doing to address the reception problems, Siegel  
said the company is rolling out 850 MHz frequency, which penetrates  
walls better than the higher frequency 1900MHz band; adding 2,000 cell  
towers to increase coverage; beefing up its back-haul capacity that  
connects the cell towers to the Internet; spending as much as $18  
billion this year to upgrade its wireless and broadband networks; and  
moving to the LTE, or 4G, network standard known next year.

"We recognize unique challenges have been posed by all of these smart  
devices being increasingly used by more and more people and I think we  
are on the forefront of architecting our network to continue to stay  
ahead of the demands that those devices place on our network," he said.

Despite listing the improvements AT&T plans to make, Siegel kept  
insisting that there was no story here; that my concerns and the many  
comments on the Apple iPhone forums about reception problems and  
dropped calls was not newsworthy.

While I do have friends who report no problems with their iPhone  
reception, many of my friends have complaints. I did an informal  
survey of friends on Facebook and learned that people suffer from  
dropped calls, as well as inaccessible voice mail and delayed voice  
messages. Also, I am not alone in being forced to cut back on talking  
on the phone as a result of the reception problems. Here are some  
examples of the responses I got:


	•"As soon as I move and do not have an ATT bundle, I am throwing the  
iphone, and ATT in the trash," wrote a San Francisco friend using a  
first-generation iPhone.

	•"When i first got my iPhone (July 2007), i had fine coverage. In the  
past nine months or so, something changed. Now i have *horrible*  
reception in my neighborhood, especially in my apartment, and most  
especially in my bedroom. My phone virtually never rings there, and i  
almost never get voicemails or text messages until somewhere between 2  
minutes and 2 hours after the communication went through," wrote  
another first-generation Bay Area iPhone user on Facebook.

	•"Terrible in SF. Probably 1 out of 3 calls gets dropped," wrote a 3G  
iPhone user.

	•"I've come to use it as a portable computer and a phone only in  
emergencies. I hardly talk on the phone anymore," another Bay Area  
friend who has a 3G iPhone told me.

	•"My (3G iPhone) won't work inside my house. I'm thinking about  
selling my house and finding a new one. Until then, I just use the  
forwarding feature, but it's a pain. And yeah, it means I tend to talk  
on the iPhone less. It's definitely a problem with my line o' work,  
although I'm trying to use Google Voice to solve the problem, too,"  
wrote a friend in Arizona.
Siegel was not amused.

"So you are actively asking folks to submit their experiences? Sorry,  
but you and I have a basic disagreement about why you are doing this  
story. What is the news here beyond what others have covered?" he  
wrote in an e-mail.

Maybe I should pose that question to all the iPhone users who can't  
make a basic phone call with their phones much of the time.

Siegel said he would look into my particular situation. I hope he does  
and if so, I'll let you know what I find out.

While I can't speak for other parts of the country, there do seem to  
be problems in San Francisco at least. This is significant given the  
high percentage of iPhone users in the area.

What's your experience?