I'm with Vodafone and the problem I'm finding is that the phone will try with all it's might to stay on the 3g signal...

I've always had pretty ordinary 3g reception in my apartment but I've been able to make phone calls just fine with other 3g phones. With the iphone it's constantly on either 1 bar "3g" or no signal, and I have to try about 3 or 4 times before I can make a phone call...

However if I turn 3g off in the settings I get full reception!!!

I have to admit though, my last phone was a 3g phone and i always had 1 or 2 bars of 3g reception. So the reception is definitely worse on the iphone for some reason?

just a quick reply from my phone via 3g. In bed now and signal wavers between 1 and 5 bars. No rhyme or reason. No idea where my nearest tower is either.

Yes, the theory from Optus engineers is that the antenna is not sensitive enough for the 2100MHz network. I have the same issues when I insert a Vodafone sim.
A friend of mine picked his iPhone up on Friday afternoon, when he got it home in Greenacre (Bankstown) he could get minimal coverage downstairs in his house, but "No Service" upstairs. I got a call that night to ask me why. I had to tell him to switch 3G off for the time being and only switch it on when he needed the internet to browse web pages.
As I've said before, I'm not 100% sure, Optus is not 100% sure and Apple is not 100% sure, what is happening. They are sending out field testers around Sydney today to find out what's going on. I'll find out soon afterwards and share the findings with everyone here.
Optus is definitely stumped though, their engineer tried to call me on Friday night, even though I had one bar of signal, the phone call couldn't come through.
I guess that a little patience is needed by us all. We will all know in good time, hopefully tonight, tomorrow night or Friday night.

So if it is a bad antenna, then the only choice Apple have is to replace them all. Imagine how long that's going to take. It also shouldn't matter what carrier you are with, it's really got nothing to do with the carrier.

Hopefully it's a software update fix.

If it turns out to be hardware. Wow!!! Massive recall.
If Apple were to recall it would have to include those on other networks that aren't having problems. ie Telstra. Worldwide. How many iPhones is that!

Thanks to vandozza & macrich in particular for continuing to push this.

even though I don't understand all of this article, it was the most reassuring thing I have read, in regards to this being a software issue and fixable by a software/firmware update.

i would recommend everyone has a read of this. as i don't like the thought of a massive recall for apple, and don't really want to send my otherwise perfect iPhone back!

thanks to kevinnugent for finding and posting this.

oh, and no need to thank me, the squeeky wheel gets the grease as they say. i'm also paranoid that this is effecting everyone, and maybe they aren't technical enough/havn't have 3g before to know any better.

Yep, radio stack problems were legendary in WM5/6. When upgrading ROMS you are able to separately upgrade the Radio stack if you know what you are doing. It would appear in the iphone however the radio stack is part of the overall firmware and not a separate package like with WM6.

I tend to agree (and also hope) that it's probably some ROM type problem. Hopefully we get an update soon.

The worse part about this is that I'm sure some Telstra people will be sitting back talking about knitting about now, which is annoying as all crap.

the telstra crowds "problems" will start shortly after they receive their first bill...

i shudder to think how many (again probably non-techy) people are going to SMASH thier download limits.

Okay, so this arvo I went on a little Iphone Odyssey. I started out in Hawthorn and ended up at Fitzroy Pool where i had a lovely swim.

anyway along the way I basically watched my signal meter like a hawk.

Most places in melb offered 3G, and it rarely went below 4 bars and a lot of the time was on 5. My route was Hawthorn, up Bridge Road, along Church St to Victoria St, Along Victoria Pde to Brunswick St, and then along Brunswick to the pool. I walked the entire way there (but cheated and trammed back, mostly).

The only annoying place is where I live in Hawthorn itself, near Hawthorn Station. I can see several towers out my window and a couple on nearby buildings, but I still rarely have more than 1 bar of 3g coverage. I'm up fairly high but it still eludes me. Also walking back into Hawthorn from the 109 Tram it seemed to drop off again.

Along the way I was also GPSing with Google Maps, and surfing and stuff, reading Mactalk and just general bull. BTW as an aside, I think 500mb is going to be PLENTY of data for a month.

It all seemed to work very well.

I think the worst thing is the psychological aspect of not having 5 bars of reception. But the phone itself doesn't seem to suffer to much apart from switching to GSM every so often, but I don't really care about that.

Oh and obviously I'm on Optus at the moment in case you can't tell

these are the Optus towers in the 3122 area -
-Site No: 3122004 Swinburne University Main Building, William St HAWTHORN VIC 3122
-Site No: 3122005 442 Auburn Rd HAWTHORN VIC 3122
-Site No: 3122006 139-141 Burwood Rd (14 Lynch Street) HAWTHORN VIC 3122
-Site No: 3122008 674 Glenferrie Road HAWTHORN VIC 3122
-Site No: 3122010 852-858 Glenferrie Rd HAWTHORN VIC 3122
-Site No: 3122012 SPI Tower #413, (opposite Kooyongkoot Rd) H.A. Smith Reserve, Reserve Rd HAWTHORN VIC 3122

any towers that you can see, but aren't at the above locations, most likey won't be optus towers.

Woohoo...approximately 7 days to go and way under my data allowance pack according to the Telstra Data Usage Counter (and my iPhone cellular network data counter)!

And to think, had no problems with reception.

can i ask what your allowance is? 5mb? 100mb?

and good on you for checking, as the people that only signed up for the base 5mb, and aren't tech enough to check are the ones who are going to run into trouble

i think people on mactalk etc are tech enough to realise that -
-5mb is almost useless on an iphone.
-excess usage fees are bad
-you can check your usage via sms/web etc

The Telstra Data usage meter is still almost a week behind for me. To be as polite as possible, it's a piece of crap and about half as useful.

Re the Hawthorn towers... well, out of that list, the 139 Burwood Road tower is the closest to me. Checking with Google Maps it's 526 metres away as the crow flies but there's a fair bit (in the way of buildings) between me and it.

Are you sure those are the ONLY towers in Hawthorn? Hawthorn is a big suburb... those towers seem to be congregated mostly around the glenferrie rd area, leaving a lot of it uncovered! Could the Swinburne Tower be like a "main" tower, because I'm assuming it's on top of the building and therefore covers a larger area?

I'm actually not far from Richmond either so I could be getting reception from there as well.

EDIT Here's a google mashup I found of Cell Tower Locations. It claims to be up to date as of June. Mobile Tower / Google Maps Mashup Experiement

as i said, its just the towers in th 3122 postcode, it doesn't account for nearby towers in neighbouring postcodes.

but as far as i can tell these are the only Optus cell towers in that postcode. there are certainly many more towers, but they are telstra operated, or other.

thats an interesting google maps mash-up though! hadnt seen that before. thanks!

As suspected no news yet. Apple though are admitting that there is a "known issue". Customer Relations made contact last night just to let me know that there isn't anything new from the engineers yet. I'll update again when I hear more.