iPhone 5 Drops 4G LTE Connections Constantly, Android Rivals Solid

The headline 4G LTE capability of the iPhone 5 has been compared against its Android rivals and found to be lacking. In tests conducted in areas where 4G LTE from AT&T coverage is officially available, the iPhone 5 was found to repeatedly switch between 4G LTE, 4G HSPA+, 3G, and 2G EDGE, “Tests were done in San Francisco, California; San Jose, CA; Los Angeles, CA; Oakland, CA; and San Diego, CA and the results on 10 different iPhones were the same. It’s unclear at this early point if the results would be similar on Sprint’s and Verizon’s network, but at least on AT&T, the iPhone 5 constantly switched between 4G LTE, 4G HSPA+, 3G, and 2G EDGE connections. The tests were conducted in areas where AT&T has promoted 4G LTE coverage and the coverage is existent on Android devices.”

The iPhone 5 was compared to rivals like the Samsung Galaxy S III (which Apple is attempting to have banned over alleged patent infringements) and the HTC One X, which didn’t once lose their 4G LTE signals. There’s a suspicion that the problem could be in the specially designed 2G/3G/4G LTE single-chip chipset in the iPhone 5. No doubt this will make for lots of unhappy iPhone 5 users and isn’t an acceptable problem for a device that’s much newer than its competition which already support the feature, since any teething troubles with the technology should have been learned by now and avoided in a commercial device – a very expensive one at that. Hopefully, further tests will zero in on the root cause of the problem and possibly lead to a solution.