iPhone 2.1 Software Finally Brings Decent 3G Coverage

The iPhone 2.1 software update released last Friday has been a blessing for most iPhone users. It served as mainly a bug fixes release and was it ever necessary. One of the main bugs was poor 3G reception. Customers were complaining that AT&T showed “good” 3G coverage on their online coverage map but in reality the coverage was bad or in some cases non-existent.

Since the update last Friday I’ve come to find out that I actually do have 3G in many of the places I thought I didn’t, and the quality of the signal isn’t half bad either. Here is a screen shot of a speed test on the 3G network in Northern New Jersey this morning:

iPhone 3G Speed Test

As you can see 954/158 isn’t half bad for a cell phone. The 158 Kbits/s upstream could be a bit better, but I don’t do all that much uploading. If anything I’ll wait until I’m home on the Wi-Fi network to send large files, when the bandwidth is much greater:

iPhone Wi-Fi Speed Test