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Comment by abstractbill | Hacker News Reader

AT&T's suckage continues to amaze me.

I carry both an iPhone 3gs and a Blackberry around most of the time (I'm currently justin.tv's iPhone developer). I find the iPhone pretty much useless around San Francisco because of AT&T's abysmal network coverage - I tend to just not bother and use the Blackberry instead, even though it has a worse web browsing experience (at least it always works! I haven't found a place yet that doesn't have good Sprint coverage).

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The iPhone is the only reason I've stuck with AT&T. Reception is bad at my home (in MD), I have few conversations that don't drop at least once during any given 10-15 minute call. Worse though, I take classes part time, and the phone shows full signal on campus but calls typically go straight to voicemail and the 3g connection is completely non-functional. Attempting to call out just gives me a network error 95% of the time.

I friend if mine lives under the hill and he solved this problem by installing phone signal booster. He mounted device to the ceiling of the living room and patched antenna to the roof. Since then he has quite good signal in his house. Ironically, neighbors' phones piggyback on it too.

I have no problems with ATT. I started with Sprint in the DC area (they started there, and tried to corner Baltimore & DC when they first went mobile). They sucked bad. Moved to North Shore (Boston), still sucked. Switched to ATT and never looked back.

Having said that, we have three generations of iPhones in our family, and when we go to remote regions everybody has to use my Motorola. I think that if Apple switched to Verizon, everybody would realize it's the phone and not the network.

Having said that, every iPhone has gotten closer and I'm hoping the 4th is a ringer, 'cuz I'd like to get one.

I've always been impressed with RIM's phones, though; they have impressive transceivers (I say that anecdotally; I don't know any specs).

New iPhone has new quite ingenious antenna design - parts of the external steel frame are used as antenna, so there is a good change it will work better than the old iPhone.

According to the review, the opposite is the case. The demo at WWDC also indicated that the iPhone 4 was worse than the 3GS even for wifi.

How so?

I don't think the 3GS was on wifi. Where did you find out this was the case?

They were both on wifi. The problem on the 4 was likely caused by it supporting N, which is of course much better than 3GS's G but is more sensitive to the edge case of ~500 people in the same room as you running wireless base stations without bothering to set up channels properly.

I don't think a change to the antenna would affect how it behaves in the same room as its base station, anyway.

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