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The release of the iPhone has come and gone (story coming later this week — we’re a bit miffed, and not because we didn’t get one), and it seems we’ve all survived. Of course, that doesn’t mean our coverage of it will stop. There’s still plenty floating around there. Best of all, all of the post-release stories are related to customer satisfaction, which is what we’re looking for in the first place. As with last week, we’ll limit this to one post per day. So for today’s installment, we bring you AT&T’s enhancement of the scorned EDGE data network.

This was the main critique of the iPhone. How could you release this “revolutionary” phone and have it run on such a primitive (relatively speaking) network? iPhone detractors everywhere kept harping on the EDGE network as a reason to not buy the device initially — if ever.

Well, it appears that AT&T finished an upgrade of the EDGE network late Thursday, upping the speed from between 70 and 135 kbps to over 200 kbps. Before that, most AT&T users were experiencing the floor of that range, so this represents a rather significant upgrade. The speed is still much slower than 3G networks, though.

AT&T spokesman Mark Seigel downplayed the increased speeds: “We’ve been enhancing EDGE since we first introduced it. We’re not making any different performance claims today.” Well, that’s one hefty coincidence there, Mark. (We’re obviously not buying it.)

Here’s the thing: users may have experienced speed increases late Thursday and early Friday, but those speeds could be negated by the influx of iPhone users. EDGE is a shared resource, so the more people that are on the network, the slower it will go. This speed increase, then, was a necessity upon the iPhone’s release. So there’s a good chance that users now are not experiencing 200 kbps.

[PC World]

Posted By : Joe
Posted at : July 2nd, 2007 - 8:00 am
Filed under : AT&T, iPhone