Apple has released an official letter saying that the signal problems are due to faulty software showing 2 bars as 4 bars. The problem is that this won’t solve the real problem of bare hands touching the lower left corner of the phone.

For all of us that hate cable clutter, a new coalition of consumer electronics manufacturers have created the HDbaseT standard using common Category 5e or 6 Ethernet cables.  The new standard can carry up to HDMI, 100BASE-TX Ethernet, control signals, and even power.  Furthermore, the standard can operate at up to 100 meters or over 300 feet which dwarfs HDMI cable lengths.  The Thinq.co.uk article mentions that the new standard can handle HDMI 1.4 and USB though I didn’t see specific mention of that in the HDbaseT announcement.  Upon hearing …

We were surprised to see that Anandtech only managed to get Wi-Fi performance of 7.2 Mbps downstream and 7.96 Mbps upstream using the SpeedTest.net app for iPhone OS. We ran our own tests and found that the iPhone 4 can sustain 20 Mbps over Wi-Fi. These are much better results, but they fall short of optimum 802.11g much less 802.11n.

Anandtech has posted another thorough review and this time they give a detailed analysis of the iPhone 4.  There’s a lot of great information in the article and it’s worth reading, but I’ll list some of the notable highlights below.

Squeezing the iPhone 4 can result in a 24 dBm loss in signal strength.  Holding it naturally results in a 19.8 dBm loss.  This drastic signal drop could result in the bar strength indicator going from 5 bars to 5 bars or 5 bars to zero bars.  The reason for this …

Michael Weinberg of Public Knowledge demonstrates for us the problem with ignorance based policy by claiming that games and VoIP “works just fine” on a dumb and neutral network. I don’t know how Mr. Weinberg defines “works just fine”, but 150 to 1000 millisecond latency is not “just fine” when half your words are cutting out in a phone call or when you’ve been fragged a whole second before you even see it. The fact that Mr. Weinberg perpetuates this shows how ignorant the hard line Net Neutrality proponents are.

I’ve spent much time debunking the notion that all applications should be treated equally by the network. I’ve also published data showing the harmful effects of BitTorrent which was supposedly “network friendly”, but I haven’t talked about the harmful effects of video streaming from popular services like Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu up until now.

Update – Our own data confirms this. If you hold the edge frame of the iPhone 4 with your bare hands, reception is dramatically slashed. The image below shows this effect in full effect.

Silicon Valley types are so infatuated with big broadband and they just can’t understand why more than 70% of Americans are happy with their existing broadband service. The usual knee jerk explanation for this is that there are no applications driving consumer demand because broadband is too slow to allow for higher bandwidth applications, but it completely ignores the reality that it’s applications that lag broadband.

I was just trying to imagine how terrible it would be if we lived in a Bizarro World where law abiding citizens who refuse to pay for things they never stole are deemed criminals, but criminals who have stolen are shielded by the law. Then I remember that many European countries are already like this, and Andrew Keen’s column shows us that that the United States might be headed for a similar path if groups like Free Press get their way.

Many pundits like Chris Foresman are angry at AT&T for counting femtocell usage (what AT&T calls “MicroCell”) against a customer’s usage cap.  They’re angry because they assume that the service only uses the broadband connection and not AT&T’s network.  But AT&T MicroCell service does in fact use AT&T’s back-end infrastructure in addition to the user’s broadband connection.
A 3G femtocell acts as a miniature base station inside a customer’s home.  It simulates a GSM or CDMA based voice and data 3G network, and it uses the customer’s broadband connection as a back-haul to the 3G …