AT&T LTE No Service: Too many LTE iPhone 5 users?

by Justin Horn on Oct 1st, 2012 @ 9:08 pm

UPDATE It’s actually having trouble holding “4G” signal now. A lot of times it now shows a few bars, but not data icon; no E, no 4G, just blank. When it does show 4G, the data isn’t actually working half the time.

UPDATE 2 Ooops… Girlfriend’s iPhone 5 was working normally at my house and then realized I had not tried a reboot. Short story short, LTE is working again. Also, got like 5 voice mails from earlier this morning.

UPDATE 3 [10.23.2012] Apparently something weird is going on. I’ve had to reset my phone at least once a week since I’ve had it because of this issue. Maybe it’s a software glitch in iOS 6? Hopefully it’s fixed when iOS 6.0.1 comes out.

If you read my previous post, you know that I got my iPhone 5 preorder in NYC instead of at home in Miami. It worked great on LTE for the afternoon (12:30 – 8:30PM) I was in Manhattan that Friday. Then it worked well on over the weekend in Long Island on 3G (AT&T 4G) for the 3G service. When I returned home to Miami the following Monday, it worked pretty well on LTE, just not hitting the same speeds as NYC. That started to change for the worse in the last few days.

Yesterday alone I noticed on at least 5 occasions where my iPhone 5 would go to No Service. After about 30-60 seconds it would come back on. Not sure how many times it did this I when I was looking at the phone.  This happen while at home on WIFI, so didn’t affect me much, but wasn’t a good sign. Today was even worse, in addition to the 5+ No Service occasions, even when showing I had service I was having trouble getting messages through. I wasn’t on WIFI and was about 10 minutes from home, so they started sending as text messages instead of iMessage…even then some send as text messages failed.

My gut is telling me as more and more iPhone 5 users come on board, the AT&T LTE towers are getting hit hard, overloaded, and dropping connections. My LTE worked much better right after returning home, but now a week later it’s starting to turn bad. Yes, I know there are other LTE phones already on the market, but all these new LTE iPhone 5′s could be the straw breaking AT&Ts backbone. This should get better as AT&T converts more and more towers to support LTE. I’m confident that there are still a lot of 3G (AT&T 4G) only towers (at least in Miami) as I’ve actually been able to get faster speeds on occasion with LTE turned off. Most likely because the LTE tower is further away than the 3G, as suggested by Brian Klug in response to me on Twitter:

@justin_horn different bands, different path loss, different cell sites entirely most likely.

I’m going to turn off my LTE service on my phone for the next few days and see how it goes, but I have a feeling it will go back to my good “4G” service I had on my iPhone 4S.

How is LTE holding up in your city on AT&T?

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at&t, iPhone 5, Speculation

iPhone 5 cellular usage while on WIFI bug affects AT&T users as well

by Justin Horn on Oct 1st, 2012 @ 7:24 pm

AppleInsider is now reporting that the bug affecting Verizon customers may also be affecting AT&T and Sprint as well. This makes perfect sense to me after I ran into some weird data issues on iPhone launch day. Here’s my story…

I was out of town in NYC when the iPhone 5 came out, so I sent my preorder to a friend’s office in Manhattan.  So after getting the phone around 12:30PM I went over to Brother Jimmy’s on Lex to have lunch and setup my new phone. I did just the basic activation over mobile data, then I found a free, fast WIFI, thanks to NYU Langone Medical Center. I setup as a new phone, so didn’t do a big iCloud restore. Once on WIFI, I just started downloading apps and a few albums of music from iTunes Match.

Within a few hours of my initial setup, I got a 65% usage warning text on my 2GB plan. I thought it was a bug, so didn’t think about it too much. Then a little while later I got the 90% warning. Then for some strange reason I got another  65% warning. That was promptly followed up about 15 minutes later by a 100% warning.

Checking the data usage on my phone it looks like I actually did burn through a lot of data, even though I was on WIFI for most of the setup process.

I posted this on Twitter about 8PM on launch day, although most of that usage was done within less than 2 hours:

 Um, think I’m going to have an expensive cell phone bill this month. Activated as a new phone at 12:30 EST. it’s 8:30PM

Now it gets even weirderer, 10 days later (still in same billing cycle), my data usage on the AT&T iPhone app shows only 500 MB out of the 2GB.  I’m thinking AT&T may have know about the problem and done some sort of reset? As of right now, my phone is showing about 2.1 GB of data usage since I setup the phone. So I guess I’ll find out what’s going to happen with my data usage in a few days when I get the bill for this past cycle. I’ll update the post when that happens.

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iOS 6, iPhone 5

iPhone 5 screen vs iPhone 4: Really close up

by Justin Horn on Sep 25th, 2012 @ 2:43 pm

Really cool stuff here by Bryan Jones:

However, looking at higher magnification is where you can really see the difference in images.  It turns out that the pixels in the iPhone 5 are *precisely* the same size as the iPhone 4 pixels, but the iPhone 5 pixels have better color saturation with more contrast, seen particularly in the blue pixels.  I did not calculate the difference in color saturation between the two iPhones, but it is pretty clear to the eye which is which.  Apple claims 44% increase in color saturation and from these images, I believe them.

In the normal image you can still see the quality of the color. I can’t really see the pixels being closer to the screen though.  If you have trouble seeing the difference in the color saturation from the normal pic, taking a look at the microscopic, straight on one clears up any doubts as to which screen is better.

(via Daring Fireball)

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iPhone, iPhone 4, iPhone 5

iPhone 5 line at 5th Ave Apple Store (Updated 11PM)

by Justin Horn on Sep 20th, 2012 @ 6:01 pm

UPDATE Here is the new stuff from about 11PM EST


Back in Black!

Another Video


Inside the black curtain (looks like a fun house)


The Line (part deux)


Another shot of the line

;

First a quick video to give you a feeling of the action. Then some pics of the 5th Ave and 14th St. store lines.


Otter Box outside the front


The Line


Dude in front of the line. Not the same guy as the other day.



First in line yesterday


The line as seen through THE CUBE!!!


Another pic of the line, bored yet?


And the 14th Street Apple Store, not very exciting…but if you actually want to get a phone and not be on TV, this might be the place to go.

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iPhone, iPhone 5

Banned iPhone 5 promo video

by Justin Horn on Sep 17th, 2012 @ 2:49 pm

We knew it was coming and here it is!

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Humor, iPhone 5

The Official List: Here is what’s missing from iPhone 5

by Justin Horn on Sep 15th, 2012 @ 3:56 pm

Nothing.

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Humor, iPhone 5

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