AT&T Boosting EDGE Data Network For iPhone Launch

Gizmodo is reporting that an AT&T employee who works on Operations said that the carrier has begun a last-minute boosting up of its EDGE data network throughput, latency and coverage in anticipation of the iPhone. The re-vamping, referred to internally as “Fine Edge,” will continue until June 15th, and has already been running for as many as six weeks.

According to Gizmodo:

EDGE is slow, but at least at AT&T, the implementation isn’t limited by the protocol itself. Rather, the limiting factor is, according to our source, the data backend and the way the towers are configured to allocate bandwidth to data and calls. And according to an internal doc, they’re dropping in more T-1s in their poorest performing towers, hoping to get that paltry 40kbps performance to a new minimum of 80kpbs.

What does this mean for all of my non-tech readers out there? Basically AT&T is expecting a huge strain on their network in the wake of the iPhone launch with hundreds of thousands of iPhones accessing the network, so they’re taking pre-cautionary measures to ensure that the network can handle the increase in demand. Additionally, they want to double the minimum performance so that iPhone users are satisfied with the speed at which their iPhones operate on AT&T’s network.

This a great move by AT&T and definitely shows me they are as serious as Apple with providing the best possible service for iPhone, so far…