iPhone 4 on the 3 network

fred252

I'm getting the issue where my 3G connectivity drops to 2G and I have to manually toggle airplane mode on/off to get it to return to 3G (or I go into carriers and switch to O2 then back to 3G). On top of that the reception is just generally very poor as soon as I go indoors. On the street I get full bars 3G but as soon as I go indoors, pretty much anywhere, I'm down to 1/2 bars of 3G and most of the time it reverts to three's 2G network (which we know is really Vodafone's 2G network). In other words I spend a lot of time forcing it to pick up a weak 3G connection.

I've updated the iOS to verison 4.1 and the 3 carrier to 8.1 with no improvement. I've spoken to 3 support and they are telling me to take to a repair center (fonemenders just off grafton st.). I called them on the phone to ask what the potential fix would be and he said that they would just be replacing the phone. Before doing this I called Apple and they have offered to replace it but I would be without the phone for a week or I could pay €29 and they would have a replacement to me in 1 day. I'm not sure which option I should take: fonemenders or apple. I bought this phone in mid-september so I would assume the hardware is fairly recent.

Either way I'm not confident that a replacement phone will resolve the issue. There seems to be an underlying issue with the Iphone on 3's network. I know 3 put in a "fix" that allows some data roaming on the 2G network but this is very slow and not what I bought the Iphone for.

I was in the states last week and although roaming is activated on my account I was able to roam for all of 5 minutes while I was over there. I was onto 3's tech support three times but they could not resolve the issue. I'm thinking it might be part of the same problem i.e. roaming on other networks (because 3's 2G network in Ireland is really vodafone) and 3G connectivity is not configured properly for the Iphone 4 and 3 Ireland.