Phone companies adding to iPhone 3G woes?

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 26 August 2008 05:58

Business IT - Technology

Wired's survey, along with user reports of iPhones that give poor performance in the US but function well when taken overseas, gives credence to the idea that the mobile networks are at least partly to blame for the iPhone 3G's perceived inadequacies.

But it doesn't explain why iPhones are sometimes observed giving inferior performance to another brand of handset in side-by-side comparisons.

Allegations are starting to emerge that carriers may be playing dirty pool and artificially limiting 3G data speeds to iPhones.

One such suggestion was published by iPhone Atlas, which reports French customers of Orange are getting significantly lower speeds than can be achieved by using other carriers, and that "a very few" Orange iPhone users have had their accounts "unlocked" to allow much higher speeds.

There is limited evidence at this stage that phone companies are explicitly targeting iPhone users.

What might be their motivation? One possibility is that experience with the original iPhone showed that owners were far more likely to use the Web than owners of other Internet-enabled handsets. It's not beyond belief that carriers might choose to damp this demand by throttling iPhone speeds as well as imposing relatively high tariffs for data use.

That could explain part of the problem as far as data is concerned, but what about voice? Please read on.