Gadget news sites today are carrying reports of upgraded EDGE speeds on the AT&T wireless data network. EDGE performance seems to be at the core of most of the negative reviews of and objections to the iPhone (see Why You Don’t Want an iPhone — Yet for one example), so any improvement is welcome news. It’s clearly good for existing AT&T customers, and probably a great sigh of relief for all of the new iPhone owners who’ll jump on the network starting this evening.
This factor is also important to me, since EDGE performance has been building in my mind as a serious drawback, reminding of my less-than-stellar experience with 1xRTT data speeds for my Treo 650 on Verizon Wireless. Eventually, I got so fed up with the price vs. performance — even though I wanted pervasive ’net access — that I cancelled the data portion of my plan. (It didn’t hurt a bit that we shaved around $45 dollars off our monthly cellular charges.)
I did some research this week and discovered that with AT&T’s current data coverage, none of the cities in the Empire State other than New York City have any 3G data. Not Buffalo … not Rochester … not Syracuse … not Albany-Schenectady-Troy … not Yonkers … not Binghamton. That’s right, only one of the state’s top cities/MSA’s has 3G UMTS data. It’s exactly like watching those commercials about wireless cards for laptops where the two competitors are responding to questions about their coverage, and the Cingular guy keeps saying “No,” for every city named.
Sure, more of the metro areas will be upgraded in time — perhaps as early as this summer, if I remember some news/rumors correctly. Hopefully my home will be one of them. But, this is still a significant drawback today.
Those that (rightly) see EDGE as a weakness of the iPhone should still take a dose of reality by looking at those coverage maps. That will clearly point out that AT&T’s 3G network is currently deployed in very limited geographical areas. Why have 3G support on the iPhone (or even other AT&T devices) if it can’t be used? If AT&T really has been upgrading their EDGE capability to support higher speeds, that change will have a significant and widespread impact in the short term and be of particular benefit to the iPhone launch.
Anyway, my conspiracy theory is that UMTS (or even HSDPA) support is actually in the iPhone, but will only be revealed later as an update when the network can handle it.
Update: Thanks to the iFixit take-apart, 3G support through a software update no longer has any credibility for me. If the chipset doesn’t handle 3G, game over.