Using a test box that is said to be similar to a bank vault supplied by a small company called Bluetest, an antenna engineer has come to the conclusion that the iPhone 3G’s antenna is not the one to blame for the choppy signal reception.
Magnus Franzén, the said antenna engineer, says that the test values for the iPhone 3G’s antenna are “completely normal.” Even though it was more often seen with an EDGE signal and while on 3G it only displayed 2-3 signal bars, it came out OK in the conducted antenna test.
The test was also done on a Sony Ericsson P1 and an old Nokia N73, with which the iPhone 3G was compared to show fairly normal findings once again.
Here’s their statement regarding the result comparison between the iPhone 3G, Sony Ericsson P1 and Nokia N73:
We compare the results with those of a Sony Ericsson P1 belonging to Bluetest’s CEO Mats Andersson, and my Nokia N73. The P1 is a little better at receiving signals and the N73 a little better at transmitting signals. But the difference is small. The difference between the iphone’s and the P1’s receive sensitivity is 2 dB.
So now that we’re finally clear on the iPhone not having bad internal antennas, maybe it’s time to consider taking a look at the local 3G networks with which the iPhone is supposed to connect. If another future firmware update from Apple still doesn’t fix problems, this just might be the case.
