Sun, 08 Jul 2007

1 in 300 Americans, EDGE grows up?

I am breaking one of my rules blogging about something as overblogged and amateur reviewed as the iPhone, but it is a noteworthy topic in some aspects.

With over 1 million units sold, 1 in 300 americans is prancing around with a glass and stainless steal battery-sucker-o-matic. In what was nearly an impulse buy, and after listening to some of my wife's friends convince her the night before that only celebrities could obtain these "rare" phones, I figured I could not lose buying his and hers iPhone's. In fact, its reception was better than bringing home jewelry...aside from being comical and worthy of its own blog...and for those who have read my "black box" OSX Xterm window rant involving the IRC client "BitchX", and my suspicious wife, you can only guess. I opt for the 8 gig unit, as the improvement was almost at cost, and the fact it has no expansion.

Yes, thats right, CDMA and EVDO fanboy is on a GSM network.

What is the most interesting about this Cingular/AT&T Wireless, now AT&T, EDGE network is this carrier had an ace up their sleeve. Apparently, for unknown motives, Cingular launched EDGE crippled. It was under-engineered in more ways than one. Not only were there less EDGE carriers, but the backend was not fast enough to even support the most basic of speeds on the network. This means that the reason why you only got 40Kbps on EDGE was probably not just the air interface, but the back-end connectivity to the tower.

The short story is that AT&T dumped 50 million dollars into a project called "Operation Fine Edge". This project involved installing more EDGE line-cards into cell sites (boosting air interface capacity), but actually making sure the back end connectivity in the poorest performing towers was there too.

This effort bumped EDGE to about 200Kbps on average, depending on location, time of day, and signal strength. I have seen 200Kbps in residential areas in the evenings, and about 90-110Kbps in the business cores during peak times. Not bad. Infact, EDGE is about as fast as their UMTS offering. Sad, but true.

Its too bad the iPhone does not have EVDO, but taking in account that nobody knows how to optimize a TCP stack on a handset to begin with, the EDGE network on the iPhone has the visual apperance of an EVDO network. Pages load fast.

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Sat, 07 Jul 2007

Jumping in

I cancelled satellite service thursday in favor of a mix of AppleTV and potentially "over-the-air" HDTV receiption. Not in a rush for local channels just yet, I guess we'll see.

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