Sharing the experience of many urban iPhone owners, CNET’s Elinor Mills explains how she’s been having iPhone voice issues for the past two years. In fact she’s gone so far as to say that with the US iPhone’s carrier, AT&T, the iPhone isn’t even a phone. Clearly there is a disparity here. Most people outside of New York, San Francisco and a few other densely populated areas don’t have the same type of iPhone voice issues and they’ll state loudly that they get crystal clear reception and no dropped calls. However, step into densely populated areas (where many journalists live – perhaps that’s the reason for th eoutcry) and you’ll get a different story. Mills did an informal polling of her friends who probably live in the Bay Area, on their AT&T experience. A list of horror stories follows. People can’t make calls. If they do connect, it is choppy and drops off after a minute or two. Some have resorted to using VoIP clients and landlines.
She spoke to an AT&T rep about the situation and kept getting responses like “we’re rolling out 850GHz in the future” and EDGE data is the issue, which clearly isn’t the case. At this point, over two years after the iPhone has been on sale and years away from the first complaints of network outages, there is nothing left to say. It is now up to AT&T deliver service that people pay dearly for. As many urbanites (including me) have found, AT&T’s coverage has basically rendered the phone part of the iPhone useless.
