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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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...
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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. :)
June 29 2007 at 1:40 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply@11: No. David Pogue said that it couldn't be used as a modem in his review. :( bummer...
June 29 2007 at 10:39 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply@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.
June 29 2007 at 10:28 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyThey 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
June 29 2007 at 9:40 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI 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.
June 29 2007 at 9:16 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyAT&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.
June 29 2007 at 8:56 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI 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
June 29 2007 at 5:09 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyHot Apps on TUAW
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