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One More Example of How My iPhone’s Edge Network Sucks

So there I was this weekend out at Fort Mason in San Francisco. I was at the Guardsmen Christmas Tree Lot and was walking back from there to my car parked far away. I decided to check my Zooomr Social Stream on my iPhone. Now here’s the dilema. How long do you wait for Edge to try and connect to a website before aborting and trying to tell it to reload? Do you wait one minute? two minutes? 5 minutes? In my case I waited from the time I left the tree lot until I got to my car — which was about 8 minutes. I saw that little bar running across the screen and just felt any second it was going to load — but then it *never* did.

Now if you abort and retry, you might be waiting a whole other 8 minutes to get a web page. Or if you abort you might get your page on reload in 45 seconds. It’s just a hell of a gamble with the devil. Do you wait? Or do you reload? In my case when I reloaded after 8 minutes the site came up within 60 seconds. But other times it hasn’t. It’s just such a crap shoot.

Bottom line is that Edge sucks. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Apple and AT&T; need to do something significant to fix this system. Having to wait 8 minutes for a web page to load in one of the largest cities in the United States is simply unacceptable. I guess when you are AT&T; and have a monopoly you can just tell everyone to bug off rather than to spend money improving your platform and infrastructure. And I guess if you’re Apple you’ll just take the crap that AT&T; feeds you because… well, because you’re greedy I guess.

I will say that my Verizon EVDO card on my Mac is 1000% better than my iPhone’s crappy Edge service.

10 Replies to “One More Example of How My iPhone’s Edge Network Sucks”

  1. I have AT&T; and EDGE, too. Most of the time it doesn’t suck as much as it does for you, but I’m guessing that’s because I’m using the Blackberry browser which is primarily text-based.

    So..is there a Zooomr mobile site or something I should be bookmarking, because when I try to get to zooomr now, I can’t ever get past the open id sign in screen.

  2. Its interesting, because the relative suckiness of EDGE seems to vary greatly depending on where I am and what sites I’m trying to look at (big duhs for both). While I generally don’t have the shitty experience that you seem to get, when a page stops loading, I’ll try rotating the iphone. This is because the status bar gets much longer and gives a more accurate indication of how much is loaded.
    I’m fairly impatient, so if the bar stops for more than a few seconds, I’ll reload and see what happens. If it gets stuck at the same point, I’ll either open a new tab and do something else, or I’ll just stick it in my pocket to see if it opens later.

    Trying to play the Frenzic demo on EDGE kills.

  3. starting to sound like a broken record on this one Thomas. we all know the edge network is slow. why don’t you switch to some other device that you won’t complain about so much?

  4. Umm Thomas… Tech savvy people like yourself, knew Edge sucked before you bought the iPhone. I bought the iPhone knowing this as well. It sucks… but going on about it like its something new… getting kinda old…

  5. why don’t you switch to some other device that you won’t complain about so much?

    Because it’s the best music/phone on the market right now. I just wished they hadn’t settled for Edge.

  6. I have an AT&T; 8525 (that’s an HTC Hermes to you winmo dorks. I can call you dorks because I do support and testing for a windows mobile software company. ;)) and it has HSDPA/UMTS.

    While neither of those is slow by any stretch of the imagination, there’s a stunning amount of ‘lag’ compared to a standard desktop broadband connection. Also, if your iPhone had the battery life of my 8525, you’d hate it even more than you hate it with EDGE.

  7. “I just wished they hadn’t settled for Edge.”

    Options:

    a)bad battery life
    b)use CDMA, and end up with an even more hampered device (Verizon has been known
    to cripple their phones) which leads to:

    i)no market for europe and most of asia
    ii)no roaming overseas

    c)or you could just wonder if you’re willing to pass on all the ‘great’ times you’ve had so far with it, in favor of waiting for a much better iPhone.

  8. Thomas… get yourself a Kyocera KR1 WiFi router, keep it in your car (it comes with a car charger), and plug the VZW EVDO card into it (works with ExpressCard & USB EVDO adaptors… I use it with the USB720)… you can then use WiFi on your iPhone to connect to that nice EVDO network. I did this about a month ago and life with the iPhone is much happier… between WiFi at home, public hotspots, and using the WiFi/EVDO connection in my car I rarely have to suffer through an EDGE connection anymore.

  9. Thomas, the good news is a 3G IPhone is coming out in 2008. But I still think Zooomr will be slow to load on the phone until the mobile site gets rolled out to the US.

    I’m curious, do you know if anyone has benchmarked IPhones EDGE vs a G3 device.

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