Love it or hate it, our mobile phone is hard to do without, provided you have a reliable phone network in your area. Apart from making and receiving calls; text, email, web browsing and using apps are essential parts of our day-to-day lives. But ultimately, a phone is pretty useless if it has poor reception and cannot send and receive calls and data from a tower. Engineers Ben White and Josh Giumelli returned to outback New South Wales to test 30 Next G phones, making this report our biggest phone test to date. Unfortunately, we have found a general decrease in reception strength once again. 

Kondinin Group has been testing mobile phones for 15 years, and in that time we have seen the demise of the CDMA network, the rise of Telstra’s Next G network, the implementation of faster 4G services in rural centres, including the recent installation of 4GX in selected areas. 

Next G remains the cornerstone of rural communications, as it is the most widely-used network in the bush, even though the Optus ‘Yes G’ network is available in many areas now. But handsets now seem to compromise receptive strength for form and style, with no handsets matching the best performing phones from previous tests.

RECEPTION STRENGTH WANES

In previous tests, phones with the best reception were capable of reaching or just exceeding 40 kilometres from the phone tower at our test location at Oxley, New South Wales. This time round, two units topped the test with a score of 36.5km, the Alcatel Pixi Vibe and the Telstra Easycall 4. 

While tests from one year to the next are not perfectly comparable due to variations on the day such as the weather and atmospheric effects, there has been a noticeable decrease in reception over recent years to be significant.

What is concerning is that successive new models of popular smartphone models such as the Apple iPhone have continued to exhibit weaker reception over the past few tests. We tested several iPhone models, with the discontinued 5C topping the test at 35km, and the 5S and Blue Tick 6S managing 35km. Disappointingly, the new iPhone 7 and 7 plus could not make a call past 31.5km.

The flagship Samsung smartphone, the Galaxy S7 Edge, is labelled as a Blue Tick phone by Telstra, but was our worst performing phone on the day, failing to work past 25km. The phone test was repeated but the result stayed the same, leading engineers to wonder whether the unit was faulty. Either way, we face the same luck-of-the-draw as any consumer when purchasing handsets off the shelf for our testing purposes. We are hoping the new model Galaxy S8, due later this year, will put in a better performance.