Filed under: iPhone
Is an EDGE speed bump the iPhone's "one more thing?"
If the iPhone has an Achilles' heel, I'd say it's the sluggish performance of AT&T's "2.5G" EDGE wireless data network, which (while gentle on battery life) is substantially slower in real-world use than the competitive EVDO/CDMA technology from Sprint and Verizon, not to mention AT&T's own lightly-deployed HSDPA network... but has EDGE really been performing at top speed? Those millions of dollars of network infrastructure improvements leading to "Touch Friday" must be doing something, and according to Engadget and the HowardForums & MacRumors boards, those dollars may have been put towards a bundle of enhancements called "Fine EDGE." Maybe it's a group hallucination, maybe a temporary anti-glitch, but forum posters are reporting dramatically better EDGE speeds than they were getting just days earlier -- around 200kbits/sec, edging up close to the maximum speeds allowed by the protocol and in some cases double the performance they were accustomed to seeing.
Is this the iPhone Halo effect at work? Or just a coincidence, a measurement error, an illusion? We'll find out more over the weekend.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
bluemonq said 2:41AM on 6-29-2007
Faster it may be for now, but if the iPhone is going to be as popular as everyone says it is, I'd imagine it'd slow a bit after tomorrow... right?
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Brent Dax said 3:56AM on 6-29-2007
Amazing--the Reality Distortion Field can even influence telecommunications grids...
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Daniel said 4:38AM on 6-29-2007
I feel for you US peeps, dammit you have one of the poorest telecoms networks I've ever seen. Even Kenya, yes thats right, 3rd world country, has a better damn mobile network.
This will be the iPhones biggest headache, using 2007 technology on 2002 networks.
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basscadet said 4:41AM on 6-29-2007
Yes, and if people are hyped they can claim it also levitates so it will never fall down and get scratched. Actual numbers documented can show if this is true. The "it seems faster" claim sounds too wishful thinking-ish...
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artifex said 4:57AM on 6-29-2007
We've known for a while about the incremental network improvements AT&T has been pushing out. I'm not surprised people are seeing faster throughput, even if all they do is add more capacity on the towers.
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Dan Baxter said 5:09AM on 6-29-2007
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
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cryton said 8:37AM on 6-29-2007
I beleive it is actually called Razors Edge, not Fine Edge. A little birdie told me about this.
:|
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jOe said 8:56AM on 6-29-2007
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.
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Ig said 9:36AM on 6-29-2007
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.
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joe said 9:40AM on 6-29-2007
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
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Grammar freak said 10:28AM on 6-29-2007
Any word yet on whether the iphone can be used as a wireless modem? I'm guessing not.
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Chris said 10:37AM on 6-29-2007
@Grammar freak, re. whether it can be used as a wireless modem:
According to the New York Times, it cannot.
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chief said 10:39AM on 6-29-2007
@11: No. David Pogue said that it couldn't be used as a modem in his review. :( bummer...
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Frank said 1:40PM on 6-29-2007
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. :)
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zahadum said 12:44AM on 6-30-2007
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!).
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