“An AT&T employee who works on Operations tells us that the carrier ordered a last-minute beefing up of its EDGE throughput, latency and coverage in anticipation of the iPhone. The operation, internally referenced as ‘Fine Edge’ will continue until June 15th, and has been going on for as many as 6 weeks,” Briam Lam reports for Gizmodo.
Lam reports, “Before ‘Fine EDGE’ and the iPhone, most efforts were going towards building out AT&T’s 3G. The upgrades hopefully will make the neglected 2.5 infrastructure better, but maybe its just to keep the whole thing from going down when all the fanboys start browsing on June 29th. Of course, these upgrades will help all EDGE handsets.”
Full article here.
Paul Roberts reports for InfoWorld, “AT&T spokesman John Kampfe declined to specifically respond to questions about whether the ‘Fine EDGE’ upgrade was linked to the upcoming release of iPhone. ‘We continue to enhance the capacity and coverage of our EDGE network to ensure that our customers have the best experience,’ Kampfe said.”
Roberts reports, “He declined to comment on the rumors about the iPhone/Fine EDGE link… but noted that AT&T’s EDGE network sports speeds of between 75Kbps and 135Kbps, countering a claim by Gizmodo that the upgrade would enhance EDGE performance from 40Kbps to 80Kbps.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Zorrin” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: We predict that iPhone users will be surprised at how much Wi-Fi access they find and how much they use it for things that demand greater speed such as Web browsing, Widget use, HTML email, etc. We also predict that some iPhone naysayers will be struck dumber than usual at the lack of iPhone users’ complaints about connectivity speed.
