Jon Holato » 3G

BGR: New iPhone Confirmed for this Summer

Jon Holato — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 01:26:55 +0000

The Boy Genius Report has confirmed 100% from a source “pretty high up in AT&T’s food chain” that a new iPhone will be announced around mid-June — who is really surprised let’s be serious, that’s when Apple’s annual WWDC takes places and that has also been around when the previous two iPhones were released, a duh!

According to BGR, the new iPhone will be faster than previous iPhone hardware — see my post from last week about the next iPhone supporting faster 3G — and will come with AT&T’s U-Verse software (which integrates control of other personal electronics such as your DVR, etc.). Of course it will ship with the new iPhone 3.0 software that was demoed last week.

Also rumored to be confirmed is a $99 3G netbook that will NOT run any Windows OS. Linux…or maybe Mac OS X?

2009 iPhone Will Support Faster 3G

Jon Holato — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 23:49:14 +0000

A report from the Silicon Valley Insider citing a “highly reliable mobile industry source” claims that Apple’s next release of iPhone hardware — most likely to be later this year according to the historical iPhone release cycle — will support significantly faster Internet connections.

Further, during a speech at Mobile World Congress last month AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega proclaimed that throughout the year AT&T would both extend its 3G coverage into more cities and increase network data speeds in an effort to maintain the title of America’s fastest network.

So just how fast will the next iPhone be able to go? Well, that all depends on the radio components Apple is able to source into the hardware. In the current iPhone 3G hardware, the radio chip supports HSDPA 3G networks up to 7.2Mbit/s, which happens to be the peak speed of AT&T’s current 3G network, also known as Release 6. According to de la Vega, the foundation for Release 7 has already started to be put down, and once ready AT&T will be able to offer speeds of up to 20Mbit/s (note: some countries already support such speeds and current iPhone hardware is unable to utilize these faster networks).

Release 7 will be AT&T’s focus for the rest of 2009 and into 2010, before they start to move into LTE in 2010-2011 — aka super fast speeds.

iPhone 2.1 Software Finally Brings Decent 3G Coverage

Jon Holato — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 01:22:33 +0000

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