[selowitch]

My father has an original 8GB iPhone and wonders if there's any sense in upgrading to the 16GB G3 iPhone. GPS is nice, but he already owns one of those. We're wondering, though, since he spends about a month each year in Italy, whether the improvement in reception/voice quality (and speed of Internet access) would be worth the money.

Any thoughts?

[turtle777]

I'm not sure if 3G automatically adds better reception.

I have noticed that I sometimes get really horrible 3G voice reception, and when I turn off 3G and fall back on 2G, I get great reception.

-t

[Simon]

Supposedly 3G gives you better reception and voice quality. And indeed, 3G is ubiquitous in many European countries.

That said, I hope this is a purely voice-related issue. Keep in mind that data roaming is extremely expensive and I doubt somebody would want to make heavy use of 3G data abroad if they have to pay for it themselves. As an example, I would pay about $20 per MB to use 3G in Italy!

[Cold Warrior]

I've never read any data that shows 3G providing better reception at long ranges. (But maybe I just haven't read the right stuff yet.) However, voice quality is better if you can draw a 3G signal.

3G uses higher frequencies than plain old GSM. Higher freqs do not propagate as far as lower ones given the same environment/atmospheric variables and the same power output of the transmitter. 3G also uses wideband CDMA, which is why it's better/faster with data, but W-CDMA may be more susceptible to multipath (radio waves bouncing around off of buildings, for example, before arriving at the handset or tower) -- even though it's supposed to actually take advantage of multipath. I suspect it doesn't mitigate it well enough at longer distances.

You could look into a femto cell or a cellular repeater.