I'm not in a classic blackspot area, even in ultimo the coverage on the iPhone is horrendous. I'm sticking to my original thought of faulty iPhones. As for others, well I'll soon find out this afternoon when a friend of mine picks his phone up in neutral bay. But I wouldve thought it be evident from the pics posted here, that the iPhones are faulty

If by "the iPhones", you mean the one's you have in your possession, yes that's possible. But not if you mean all iPhones. That does not make sense.

It has been suggested that it is the SIM card that is faulty?, is that a possibility.

if you ever call tech support, this is always what the problem is...

i dont know, i suspect ALL the iPhones share the same problems, if it's a hardware/firmware/software or compatibility with carriers i'm not yet sure.

what i do think is happening is that people in excellent coverage areas (major cites) do not see any performance problems due to the good signal strength, coming from multiple ponts.

in areas of borderline coverage, i think this is where the problems in the iphone start to become obvious. in these areas we are relying on one or two towers to provide coverage.

silverdreamer, i have a feeling that if we were to put your phone into the same coverage area/carrier as mine, then we would see the same issues. there is an issue in the way the iphone handles it's prioritisation of signals, when it chooses to change between 2/3G, in picking up coverage after losing service.

if you look at some of the towers in melbourne (for example) -




These tower locations continue up to 300302. and thats just postcode 3000. yes its multiple carriers, but the point is that each carrier is going to have 75+ (? - voda, optus/virgin, telstra, 3) towers, and the phone can take it's pick.

my point is simple, if you are in a central location, with good coverage, then your coverage has plenty of overlap. part of the reason is to deal with the volume of calls occuring, a tower is not always positioned to simpy cover an area, but maybe to deal with the volume of calls coming to/from that area. you are always going to receive 5 bars of coverage, and report "no problems" in a situation like this. using the above as an example, there is probably never more than 500m in between towers!

where i'm coming from, i have 3-4 towers locally. probably with very little, if any "overlap." to make tower placement cost-effective. i think it's people in similar situations that are struggling.
the iphone's ability to hold onto a 3g signal seems to drop of much faster than other 3g phones, it's 3g range seems to be much less.

sorry for a long rant, but i think that it's incorrect to write this off as a problem that only some of the iphones have. just because you get good coverage where you are located, doesn't mean that your phone isn't exactly as sucky as the next guys... you just havn't noticed it yet :P

EDIT- but then again, i dont know how this "theory" apples to people reporting problems in NYC/LA/japan, as i imagine they have pretty good coverage too...
back to the drawing board!

lol this is true.

i can't completely rule out sim issues. but i have found that a virgin sim works in an optus iphone without the need to unlock.

putting a virgin sim into this optus phone results in the same 1 bar reception, i dont have a data pack on the virgin sim to test the download speed.

i think the fauly sim theory for the most part is bs. (maybe for the occasional user, say those with old 2g only sims, then yeah, changing the sim may help!)

Just got my 3G iPhone today
What a relief.
I have no bars 3G signal though, I'm with Optus.
I just tried to load a page and it seemed to load quickly.
I am hoping that the indicator is faulty and that I don't actually have almost no bars reception as I am in my building in Sydney city.
Time will tell, I'll give it a decent workout after work. Might even stop at the Apple store and ask them why :P

Update: Getting 2-3 bars now. I am inside a thick building, it may just be because of that.
Good luck guys.

Hi guys,
I'm with Telstra (at the moment). Prior to this I had a Nokia 6120. I did notice this morning when I got in the lift at work that my phone dropped to one bar (first time I ever saw it go that low). My Nokia never did this in the lift, I could have a conversation in the lift all the way from top to bottom without dropping out where other people would always drop out (i assumed the were gsm, but maybe they were optus?) i haven't tried my iphone in the lift yet, will give it a go and report back.

I did also notice on the train this morning between hawthorn and burnley I dropped from 5 bars to 3 at one stage, though that's always been a bit of a dead spot. But at least it shows the signal meter is working.

Well, that would have to mean that Vodafone and Optus sims are all faulty and that my V3XX is also faulty for picking up perfect coverage with the faulty sim cards......

Can you see this option as being unlikely?

Judging by performance, Im guessing reception strength bars are wrong, it's either Full or one bar, but still good performance on one bar.

Hopefully this will be fixed with the soon to released 2.1 firmware.

i dont even get one bar when im at home and my sony ericsson k800i had full bars all the time, whats going on? Im with vidafone by the way.

we don't know whats going on dave.

it would be wonderful if a network engineer, or someone from apple could fill us in!

at the moment all we have is bad, inaccurate speculation coming from many angles, myself included!

the suggestion to people who thinks they might have a problem is to make sure your carrier, and apple know. give them a call.

we are all waiting for 2.0.1, or 2.1 to see what improvements might occur.

I'm in sydney and my 3g reception is quite good in the city and in surry hills where I work, constant 4-5 bars. In Newtown it's quite good, although my house is a bit of a 3G deadspot, there are 3 towers right near me apparently according to their map but I can only get 1 bar on 3G some of the time, a lot of the time it switches to 2G which it gets a good signal on.

at least they sound like they know what they are talking about, unlike me!

i could live with this as an explanation, and would hold onto my iphone to give apple a chance to get stuff sorted if this were the case!

To be honest, vandozza, I think it's a radio software issue with the people who are on a "single" band network like Optus and are in marginal areas. I fully expect Apple to take notice of the considerable worldwide groundswell - it's not just you.