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“Fine Tuning” Still Needed Before Internet Tethering for iPhone, says AT&T

October 9, 2009 By Alex Jordan 1 Comment

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that after AT&T’s recent announcement that they will allow VoIP on their network, iPhone customers have now begun to ask if AT&T will ever deliver on their promise to offer internet tethering for iPhone owners.

So, what does AT&T have to say about this? The answer- more network upgrades are required before they can implement the feature.

An [sic] spokesman for the wireless carrier, however, said that tethering remains unavailable and stuck with the company’s prior statement: “Whenever we offer new features, we want to offer the best possible customer experience. For tethering, we need to do some additional fine tuning to our systems and networks so that we do deliver a great experience.”

He declined to say when it would be available, though Ralph de la Vega, who runs AT&T’s wireless unit, has previously said that iPhone tethering would be possible sometime this year.

Tethering allows iPhone customers to connect their computers to the internet via a shared mobile data connection.

Translation: AT&T can’t handle the data load they have, can’t upgrade their network fast enough, and are now stalling for time on a feature they have promised to deliver, and that many other iPhone customers in other countries have had since iPhone OS 3.0 debuted in June.

Filed Under All News, iPhone Tagged With AT&T, iPhone, os 3.0, tethering

Apple and Skype Respond to AT&T’s New Support for VoIP

October 7, 2009 By Alex Jordan 4 Comments

Both Apple and Skype have issued statements in the wake of AT&T’s announcement, that the company would begin allowing VoIP to be used on the iPhone via their 3G network.

The AP is reporting that Apple will be working quickly as to allow iPhone customers to take advantage of this new feature.

Apple welcomed the announcement. “We are very happy that AT&T is now supporting VOIP applications,” said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris. “We will be amending our developer agreements to get VOIP apps on the App Store and in customers’ hands as soon as possible.”

On the other side of this story, Skype president Josh Silverman was equally excited about the announcement, now Skype’s iPhone application can now support the 3G network, and not just WIFI as it does now.

All of us at Skype applaud today’s announcement by AT&T (in an FCC filing to be published shortly – update, it’s here in PDF format) that it’ll open up its 3G network to Internet calling applications such as Skype. It’s the right step for AT&T, Apple, millions of mobile Skype users and the Internet itself.

Excellent. I don’t know why AT&T didn’t allow this in the first place, users still have to have a cellular data plan to use this away from a WIFI hotspot, and that means you have to pay AT&T for that. The only thing I can guess, is that AT&T was afraid this feature would bog down the network even more than it already is, and that is something they can’t afford right now.

Filed Under All News, iPhone Tagged With Apple, AT&T, iPhone, Skype, VoIP

AT&T to Launch MMS ‘Late Morning’ PST

September 23, 2009 By Alex Jordan Leave a Comment

AT&T has announced today that a carrier settings update for iPhone, will be available “late morning” Pacific Standard Time, Friday September 25th.

MMS Update: We know you’ve been eager for this service so we wanted to offer a quick update on the launch plans for MMS on Friday, Sept. 25. Late morning, Pacific Time, on Friday, the new carrier settings update enabling MMS should be live and ready to download through iTunes. We’ll provide the steps and all of the details you need right here at that time.

There have been recent rumors suggesting that AT&T is rushing to improve the data service infrastructure for the expected explosion of data usage on Friday’s launch.
In short, expect shoddy intermittent cellular coverage.
Filed Under All News, iPhone Tagged With AT&T, Data, mms, september 25th

AT&T Delivers MMS To iPhone on September 25th

September 4, 2009 By Alex Jordan 2 Comments

AT&T has announced in a press release that MMS would be coming to iPhone users in the United States on September 25th.

We’ve been working for the past several months to prepare our systems and network to ensure the best possible experience with MMS when it launches – and that launch date is: September 25 for iPhone 3G and 3GS customers. MMS will be enabled through a software update on that day.

The bulk of this press release is AT&T attempting to explain their lack of MMS support since Apple announced the feature would be included in iPhone 3.0 software. That announcement was made way back in June, and most carriers in other countries were able to accommodate MMS from the beginning. Not AT&T. So now they are making excuses for their inability to cope with the large demands placed on their services.

Also notice there is no mention of tethering, and I suspect it will be a long time before we see it.

Filed Under All News, iPhone Tagged With AT&T, mms, tethering

Leaked AT&T memo Suggests iPhone 3GS Launch was “best ever sales day”

July 2, 2009 By Alex Jordan Leave a Comment

MacDailyNews has posted a leaked internal AT&T memo they received from an anonymous source.  The memo notes that this year’s iPhone 3GS launch was their best sales day ever, and outsold last year’s iPhone 3G launch or major sales holidays like Black Friday. Here’s the memo in it’s entirety:

1. Fact of the Week: On June 25, the day Michael Jackson died, text messages sent on our network spiked at 65,000 messages per second — the largest volume ever recorded — surpassing events like American Idol voting and New Year’s Eve, when millions of our customers wish their friends and family a happy new year via text.”

2. “iLaunch day 2009 was one for the record books, as AT∓T customers scrambled to get their hands on the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet.

Here’s a look at some of the milestones we achieved:

* Best-ever sales day in our retail stores
* Second-largest traffic day in our retail stores
* Most transactions processed via our IT systems in a single day
* Most upgrade eligibility checks in a single day
* Largest order day in att.com history
* Largest features sales day in att.com history

On this year’s launch day, iPhone sales exceeded sales recorded on 2008’s iPhone launch day, Black Friday 2008 and Dec. 26, 2008 — all heavy-volume sales days. In fact, this year we surpassed 2008’s launch day sales at about noon Central time, and sustained our previous peak hour record, also set in 2008, for 11 straight hours.

Sometimes AT&T almost sounds grateful to be partnered with Apple, they just don’t seem to want to cater to their customers very much.

Filed Under All News, iPhone Tagged With AT&T, best sales day, memo

AT&T Extends Upgrade Pricing to More Customers

June 18, 2009 By Alex Jordan Leave a Comment

MacRumors is reporting that AT&T is revising their “upgrade pricing” policy to include many more customers. This means customers that wouldn’t have been eligible for upgrade pricing until July, August or September now are. This means those customers can now purchase the 16GB iPhone 3G S for $199, and the 32GB model for $299. This will save affected customers $200.

Furthermore, any newly-eligible customers who pre-ordered the iPhone 3G S will recieve store credits for the price difference. You can check their upgrade eligibility status here. You can view AT&T’s press release here.

Filed Under All News, iPhone Tagged With AT&T, iPhone 3G S, policy, revised, Upgrade pricing

AT&T Sells Out of iPhone 3G S Pre-Orders

June 13, 2009 By Alex Jordan Leave a Comment

The Boy Genius Report is claiming that the first shipments of iPhone 3G S have been claimed by pre-orders, and if you haven’t pre-ordered a phone you’ll have to wait.

Here’s the meat of the article:

“…if you did not pre-order an iPhone 3G S from AT&T yet, (we’re not talking about Apple because we don’t have information on their pre-ordering/stock levels, etc) your iPhone 3G S won’t be shipping to you/your store until “7-14 days” after the order date. It seems that all AT&T’s pre-order stock is depleted leaving only iPhone 3G Ss for dying-in-line purchasing on this coming Friday, and all pre-orders going forward won’t be fulfilled until after the June 19th launch date.”

I’ll wager, that the situation will be much like last year, Apple stores will have a larger number of phones pn hand, and thus won’t sell out as fast as AT&T.

Filed Under All News, iPhone Tagged With AT&T, iPhone 3G S, pre-orders, sold out

AT&T Launch and Pricing Details

June 9, 2009 By Alex Jordan Leave a Comment

MacRumors is reporting on AT&T’s launch day details. The biggest difference between this iPhone launch and the others is you can now preorder your device and walk in and pick it up on launch day.

The video explains the situation plainly. New and qulifying customeers get the iPhone for $199/$299 for the 16 or 32GB respectivly. iPhone 3G 8GB model is availibe for $99 and the 16GB model is availibe for $149 while supplies last on the 16GB model. Two lines will form; one for preoders and one for regular customers. Customers with preorders get priority, while everyone else waits to enter at regular business hours.

Remember this all goes down on June 19th.

UPDATE: The video should be fixed, sorry about that.

Filed Under All News Tagged With AT&T, iPhone 3G S, June 19, Launch Day

Apple Planning to Stay with AT&T

April 22, 2009 By Alex Jordan Leave a Comment

Straight from the mouths of Apple’s Tim Cook and Peter Oppenheimer comes news of future plans for the iPhone during today’s financial results conference call.

When asked about Apple’s exclusivity with AT&T, they responded that they are pleased with AT&T and feel they have done a good job promoting the iPhone. Despite some recent rumors that Apple might expand the iPhone to other networks, Apple said that they have no plans to change the AT&T exclusivity at this time, if for no other reason than Verizon is on the CDMA networks requireing differnent hardware to be built into the iPhone. This may change when Verizon upgrades it’s networks.

Filed Under All News Tagged With AT&T, exclusive, iPhone

New Speeds Comming to AT&T Networks?

April 20, 2009 By Alex Jordan Leave a Comment

Telephony Online is reporting AT&T is in the middle of upgrading its 3G network from the current 3.6 Mbps download standard to 7.2 Mbps, with the possible future of 21Mbps. The rumored new iPhone is expected to take advantage of these new speeds.

It appears AT&T isn’t going to get all it can out of the  HSPA standard however. HSPA has the capability of supporting 14.4 Mbps through upgrades, instead it appears AT&T to be planning to bypass those upgrades and move directly to the HSPA+ standard, offering download speeds of up to 21 Mbps by years end.

This is all happening while AT&T is preparing the LTE (4G) network, currently set for a 2011 launch.

Filed Under iPhone Tagged With 3G, 4g, AT&T, HSPA, LTE
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