my Could not activate Cellular Data Network
post proves to be pretty popular, so i guess i am far from being the only one getting this message. the interesting questing is whether this problem is an iPhone problem, where the network works fine and the iPhone is just unable to use it, or whether the iPhone works fine and the AT&T network has problems with its data service. without testing, this question cannot be answered, and from the customer perspective, it does not really matter all that much, the simple end result is that i cannot use my iPhone for the service that i am paying for.
the iPhone 2.1 software update promises to give fewer dropped calls, but when even the announcement of such a fix does not claim to just make your phone work, but simply make it a little less unstable than it currently is, i am not very hopeful for getting a working phone out of that.
for me, living with a phone that drops the majority of incoming calls and requires me to hit redial a couple of times before i can call anybody is not all that bad. i am mainly using the data service anyway, and while that also has its issues, on average it at least seems to work better than the phone service.
finding out what exactly is going wrong would be really interesting, however. while the failure to simply connect calls looks like a network problem, on the other hand there seem to be many complaints in other countries as well, so maybe it is the iPhone after all? hard to tell, i guess, since probably many cellphone carriers use the same vendor for building their networks, so it might be just some incompatibility thing between the iPhone and that equipment?
the one thing i would really be interested in would be to see other 3G phones on the networks that don't work very well with the iPhone (such as AT&T), and see whether they have the same problems with connecting calls and using the data service. that could be a pretty interesting starting point to figure out who's to blame...
I've had my iPhone 3G since the beginning of August. I've upgraded the software twice (I'm now on 2.1). From day one it has dropped almost every single incoming call immediately after I answer it. I then have to reboot the phone before it shows any signal and before it will make outgoing calls or "receive" new incoming calls. (I forgot about this once and two calls went directly to voice mail in about an hour's time.)
I went to AT&T and got a new sim for it, since some people seemed to indicate that helped them when they saw similar behavior. It has not helped me at all. I'm like you; the thing is mostly for data, but today as I left voice mail for a doctor's office to call me back I realized how much I really do care about this. I'm rather pissed at this point.
Posted by: Lusty | Thursday, September 18, 2008 at 15:43