Like a few million other people I recently bought an iPhone 3G. But unlike a few million other people I bought TWO of them -- one for my young and lovely wife. That puts me in the rare position to actually speak from experience about a current networking issue: what's the deal with these iPhones? Is it the phone or the network that is causing problems? And the answer is: both.

Our experience with the iPhone 3G is not good, though not terrible. It is a fantastic device, if flawed. The main flaw is the phone, rather than the iPod Touch bits that comprise the rest of the unit. Voice service is not good, calls are dropped, and the iPhone won't work places where my old Nokia N80 easily did. But my iPhone, oddly enough, works better than does my wife's. This variation is how I know at least part of the problem is with the phone, not just the network.

But the network sucks, too. We switched from Verizon (I know you can't use an N80 on Verizon, smarty-pants -- I have more than one cell provider) which claims the best network but had the nagging problem of delivering th