Is an EDGE speed bump the iPhone's "one more thing?"

what is interesting is the cost-benefit analysis of the $50M att reportedly spent on upgrading EDGE ...

turns out that many carriers are paying a huge sum (25% total operations) on the just the backhaul - ie moving the traffic to/from the tower back to the carrier backbone - because they are using a) leased lines & b) T1 not ATM lines ... which obviously dramatically balloons costs.

read what the smart kids at "Heavy Reading "say

http://www.heavyreading.com/details.asp?sku_id=999&skuitem_itemid=880&promo_code=&aff_code=&next_url=%2Fsearch%2Easp%3F
Clearly, if you have to add 5,10,20 T1 lines to every cell tower every time you move to a new service plateau, then you dont have a platform that will scale -- as compared to simply dropping in an OC-1 right from the get-go ...

that piece of fiber installed today would scale for decades! ... even as 4G wimax, 6G holographics or whatever else delivers HD rates in the future pushes data rates even higher!

(fyi: HD stationary wireless requires at least 8Mbps (more for mobile) using mpeg4 (h.264) ... more fyi: amazingly the dumb-ass titles first released for blueray/hddvd are wasting 36Mbps on mpeg2 (still!), believe it or not!).

Of course the network's faster. Steve made sure to install RDF switches at all the major nodes. And the RDF, as we know, cuts down on interference. :)

@11: No. David Pogue said that it couldn't be used as a modem in his review. :( bummer...

@Grammar freak, re. whether it can be used as a wireless modem:

According to the New York Times, it cannot.

Any word yet on whether the iphone can be used as a wireless modem? I'm guessing not.

They probably increased internet bandwidth to the cell towers, with the expectation that there would be more users. Give it a few weeks and once everyone has an iphone and is hammering the network with traffic, it'll drop back down to normal

I am in the NYC Area and was downloading 3MB ppt slides for a class and the files seemed to have downloaded faster than normal on my treo 680. So that means that if the network is faster all EDGE devices will benefit. And its all most likely thanks to the iPhone.

AT&T did spend a cool $50 mil improving their network to get ready for the iPhone, so it's possible that actually did some good.

I beleive it is actually called Razors Edge, not Fine Edge. A little birdie told me about this.

:|

I'm getting 1600 kbit/sec in Delaware on an old Nokia 6230 with EDGE. This is just insane, here are some pics. http://www.baxtr.com