Telstra continues work on iPhone 4S faults

Network upgrade causes teething problems.
Telstra has continued to apologise for reception issues suffered by iPhone 4S users due to an acknowledged "hardware incompatibility" issue with the telco's ongoing LTE network upgrades.

The company yesterday maintained confidence that a network settings refresh would be made available "overnight" to fix the issue.

But Telstra's support team could not provide a timeframe for the settings fix this morning.

"We've already started implementing changes to our network to address iPhone4S coverage issues, no ETA for fix yet though," one of Telstra's social media team told iTnews this morning.

It has continued to advise users to try restarting their phone and getting rid of SIM password settings in order to fix the issue, which causes Apple's fifth generation smartphone to alternately lose all reception or 3G access to Telstra's NextG network.

Telstra yesterday acknowledged the reception issue for iPhone 4S users, attributing the issue to its network upgrades in metropolitan areas to Long Term Evolution technology.

Users took to the Whirlpool user forum and official Telstra support forum to complain of the issue, with some complaints dating back to October.

The telco's engineers were yesterday set on fixing the problem as quickly as possible.

Telstra said further software updates from Apple would not be required to solve the issue.

The problems have been felt beyond Telstra, however, with issues alternately blamed on the iPhone 4S hardware and Apple's iOS 5 software update, affecting several versions of the phone.

Users of Apple's fifth generation smartphone have complained about reception issues since the phone's launch, prompting the US consumer giant to ready two software updates in as many months.

Telstra users have complained of dropped calls, lost reception and in some cases the phone's inability to pick up signal, reverting simply to SOS or emergency only mode.

Customers using the beta version of Apple's forthcoming iOS 5.1 software update on the iPhone 4S have reported that they continue to experience problems.

Telstra has been rolling out Long Term Evolution (4G) upgrades to a five-kilometre radius of Australia's capital cities as well as major regional and metropolitan areas, before expanding the deployment more widely.

While the iPhone 4S is not compatible with LTE technology, upgrades to mobile base stations can change the way some Telstra infrastructure handles the 850 MHz spectrum used for the telco's existing 3G network.

The phone does included an upgraded baseband chip over previous 3G models, improving peak downstream speeds to 14.4 Mbps, compared to 7.2 Mbps on the iPhone 4.