UK iPhone - O2 recepion. And how many have seen EDGE yet

[emotion]

O2 have the worst coverage of all the providers where I live. I live in a rural area in the SW of UK. With voda I can get 3.5g upstairs, orange 3g, 3 3g, and o2 not even edge !! In my last house I often could not get a signal on o2 hence I changed networks.

So it is important for me to be able to unlock the iphone just to be able to use it !!!

In your house you should probably have wifi, it's better than all the above put together. The iPhone is great at picking up wifi (better than my Macbook and MBP).

However, I could be more impressed by O2s coverage. I know it was not so great for 3G but I was hoping O2 had sorted EDGE out. It's a software upgrade to the GPRS infrastructure after all.

My experience does not reflect the service announcements in the above link posted.

 

[colonelbutt]

its pretty much everywhere in London up to mill hill where I live.

some blackspots though

 

[jaymort]

No EDGE in Nottingham yet as far as I have noticed but over the last couple days I lost GPRS a couple times, but it came back on after about an hour. Maybe the towers are being upgraded? My only gripe with this iPhone so far is the rubbish battery life. It was advertised as beings able to be on the net for 6 hours but I'm lucky to get more than 3 which is disappointing to say the least.

 

[emotion]

I've noticed one area (Birchwood, nr Warrington) become EDGE enabled in the last week.

Re: battery, I easily get 5 hours of steady music/browsing(with gprs/EDGE and wifi)/small amount of phone use etc.

 

[hanxu]

I live in London and edge is everywhere, I don't have an iPhone yet, but with my blackberry it's still as slow as hell, compared to my last phone (3g) it's really bad.

 

[afd]

got my iPhone replaced at the apple shop and since then have not had any 'No Service" messages. Still not seeing EDGE much though, but at least I can use my phone to call and send texts.
Apple genie at the shop said that iPhones have a more accurate signal strength display than other phones so I suppose my previous phones must have been making calls and sending texts with no network connection... He also wouldn't swap phone without the box, so had to come in next day with the box. Genie I saw on next day didn't need the box...
Still, happy to have a working phone.

 

[Phil A.]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3B48b Safari/419.3)

edge is fine where I live and work in Shropshire. O2 coverage is better at home than orange was so in general very pleased with the move to O2

 

[sananda]

I live in London and edge is everywhere.

not in crystal palace, west norwood, streatham, or dulwich.

 

[EdYelland]

re: o2 reception

I've moved to o2 from Orange and have been very disappointed with the coverage. In many rural areas in the Southwest, In and around Bristol, London and the South East I've found huge gaps in areas where I previously had no problems with Orange.

All mobile networks have blackspots, but o2's coverage seems even worse than T-Mobile's which is saying something.

I'm not on an iPhone 18 month contract so as soon as I get the chance I'll be giving o2 the boot and returning to Orange.

 

[cblackburn]

I have to say that even though I was not very impressed with the EDGE coverage at first I have been noticing it improve. I now get reception in many more places.

Remember that EDGE works by using 8-PSK, this involves taking data in 3 bit chunks and sending that over the network, the same way a modem works. This yields much higher data rates but is much more prone to noise interference. You may well be in an EDGE area but unable to get EDGE signal, hence GPRS will be used.

Chris

 

[RoganJosh]

EDGE works ok in the sticks of N.Ireland - but my o2 signal is pathetic - phone calls fail and drop out - unlike my Motorola v3. I'm not happy