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While the iPhone 3G 
has been selling millions of units around the world, a small but vocal percentage of customers have been having irritating -- if not debilitating -- experiences with their shiny new phones. Their issues reportedly include dropped calls when using 3G networks and weak or flaky 3G reception. Reports of the cause are wide-ranging and rife with speculation, if not outright rumor. Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) 
, for its part, isn't talking to anyone, it seems, and the company didn't respond to an inquiry by press time.
AT&T (NYSE: T) has said its network is fine -- which seems to be the trend in affected areas. Earlier this week, T-Mobile's Netherlands division pointed the finger at Apple in a company blog post, saying the issue appeared to be a hardware problem. However, the carrier put its hands back in its pockets with a new post that softly stated, in a Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) translation from Dutch, "The fact remains that there [are] iPhone 3G customers in the Netherlands and in other countries who believe that the user experience on this device is not enough."
T-Mobile also noted that the service provider does not know why users are having trouble but that the carrier is actively investigating.
Problems Down Under
Meanwhile in Australia, in a Sydney Morning Herald report, Jessica Forrest, a Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) Australia spokesperson, said the iPhone 3G issues were device-specific and had nothing to do with the carriers' networks. She declined to elaborate in the report.
Apple's own user discussion forums have been flooded with activity, and one thread, "iPhone 3G Reception Problems? You're Not Alone" became so long that some browsers were timing out trying to load it. Apple's discussion hosts locked it and extended it with a new thread, "iPhone 3G Reception Problems? You're Not Alone -- Continued," and then locked that one and added yet another.
Returning to the north, Max Schmitt, a systems and network administrator in Switzerland, summed up the problem on his post on the Apple discussion thread.
"Here in Switzerland we have very mature 3G networks with excellent coverage, yet side by side in the same office on the same network the iPhone 3G has no 3G service while all other 3G phones have maximum signal and happily place and receive [calls] and don't drop any," Schmitt noted.
Immature 3G Chipset?
On Tuesday, Nomura analyst Richard Windsor blamed an immature Infineon Technologies-supplied 3G chipset and radio protocol stack, making a software fix by Apple out of the question. However, others aren't so sure. A BusinessWeek.com article by Peter Burrows cites two unnamed yet "well-placed" sources that say the problems are related to a chip inside the iPhone but add that Apple is working on fixing the issues with a software update.
Burrows also reported that an Infineon spokesperson declined to comment on the iPhone 3G but did say that some Samsung phones are using the chips as well and the company is unaware of any issues in the Samsung devices.
Clearly, some customers are having problems, but just how large a segment is having issues? Burrows' unnamed sources believe that it's only 2 to 3 percent of the iPhone traffic, larger than AT&T's average of 1 percent dropped calls.
What About Service Coverage?
Because iPhone users tend to use their phones especially hard -- calling, Web browsing, e-mailing, running applications, etc. -- the problem could be that service carriers haven't been able to provide enough 3G bandwidth to handle heavy loads in some of the more densely populated cites and neighborhoods. Then again, if the iPhone 3G's operating system tries to figure out whether there's enough of a signal available to run on 3G and doesn't like what it finds, there could be a problem with it switching to a slower network like AT&T's EDGE.
"It could be the chipset, it could be how they've implemented it -- there could be a lot of things," Ken Dulaney, a vice president and analyst for Gartner's (NYSE: IT) mobile and wireless practice, told MacNewsWorld.
Apple, Dulaney said, has only had about a year of experience in figuring out how bits are handled over phone networks, while other phone manufacturers have had much more time to work on this.
"Phone code is probably the most difficult to do per line of code of any code that I can think of. Almost everybody who has built an operating system for mobile phones ... it has taken them a number of years to mature it. It's just a process everybody has to go through," Dulaney explained.
"In terms of radio reception, I've noticed that the iPhone 3G will take longer than normal time to re-associate itself ... and in some cases where I know there's a signal, it just won't find it. In some cases it has weaker reception than with other phones," he added.
"These could be due to many situations, and it could even be due to the carrier. It's almost impossible to tell. The only one who can tell us is Apple -- and I'm sure they won't," he added.
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