Notesboy

Here is a problem I have heard from 3 clients of mine. One of them uses the new iPhone , the other uses a Motorola Q and the last uses a Blackberry Bold. All these phone are 3G phones.

Their voice calls drop anywhere between 12-25 minutes into the call.  Initially we thought it was a problem with the phones, then we suspected the firmware (at least in the case of the Blackberry Bold and the Motorola Q as we have means to upgrade them) and then we suspected the SIM card. None of these made sense as we were able to reproduce the problem consistently.

I took the Motorola Q which uses a AT&T sim card and disabled the 3G on it and moved it to just GSM/EDGE (GSM for Voice and EDGE for Data). We did a 1 hour telephone call and during that call sent the user multiple emails and the call never dropped. Remember we used to drop calls every 12-25 minutes while 3G was turned on.

Then the user comes back to me with an even more shocking/revealing observation. He goes "my web browsing on my Q is so much faster now that when it was before we made this change" This means the web browsing using Edge is a lot faster than on 3G. Does not make sense but it is what it is.

Then I called up my iphone user who was also complaining about the dropped calls. He has since turned off her 3G and says his calls are no longer dropping.


So that brought me to the last suspect, the Blackberry Bold.  Now based on my previous tests and results, I decided to try and turn off 3G on the Bold.

I got 2 Blackberry Bolds. One on AT&T and the other on TMobile (which was an unlocked phone). The Bold on AT&T consistently dropped the voice calls and the one that was unlocked but using the TMobile SIM/Network did not drop calls at all.

Now on the AT&T phone I tried to turn off 3G but found the option was no found (it was hidden/blocked out...whatever you want to call it!).

So I put that AT&T SIM card into the unlocked bold, turned off 3G and continued the test and calls have not dropped so far. Now you got to remember this was the same unlocked Bold that was running 3G on a TMobile network with no dropped calls.

So that gave me 1 conclusion and the obvious solution. Any phone with 3G turned on the AT&T network tends to drop voice calls regularly.
The obvious solution was to turn off 3G and things settle down. Now the added advantage we are seeing is that the browsing is quicker on AT&T EDGE network rather than the AT&T 3G network.
So that brought up yet another question , is the AT&T network not truly compatible or what is wrong with it? That is something I will not be able to answer.

I will do a post with detailed instructions how to turn of 3G on all phones discussed above in the next few days with screen captures.

Notesboy  March 2 2009 04:39:49 PM