Apple Admits iPhones Drop Nearly a Third of All Calls   - 560 Views,

The nice Apple employee at the Genius bar hooked Gupta’s phone up for analysis, and reviewed the phones log, and determined that Manoj Gupta’s iPhone had been dropping 22% of all of his calls.

Note that the report from the Apple store states that dropping nearly a quarter of all calls “is consistent with the service provided by AT&T.”

But here’s the corker: The Apple Genius also told Manoj that he was lucky! That the average number of calls dropped by the iPhone in the New York area is closer to 30%!

Now, of course, technically this is not the iPhone’s fault - rather it is a problem with the underlying service provided by AT&T.

But that said, it was Apple’s choice to allow AT&T to exclusively provision the iPhone. And as we said last week, the moment that Apple got into bed with AT&T, they sold their soul for that unholy alliance..

And of course, the problem isn’t limited just to New York. In fact, a post on Manoj’s problem over on Gizmodo prompted a comment from one reader:

I live in San Francisco and I am in New York on business for the next two weeks. I thought service was bad in San Francisco. It is awful in New York. Half of my calls do not go out in Manhattan, I have to try and dial two or three times to connect a call. This is much more annoying than SF where there are just dead spots across the entire city (including my house, in the center of town). What is most frustrating about AT&T is that when you do not expect to have service say while in a quiet mountain town, you have full service. However, some how cities like San Francisco are riddled with dead spots.

This, by the way, has been exactly our experience here at the Internet Patrol. In fact, in the mountains around here, AT&T is the only service available - they have a virtual monopoly on phone service in the mountain towns because they somehow got a lock on having towers up there - and the service up there is crystal clear and consistent. But down below the mountains - where, you know, most of the the people using cell phones are - the service is horrible.