As the iPhone 3G launch grew nearer, people were pointing and shouting and jumping up and down at AT&T’s sparse 3G US coverage map, and those Swedish scientists saying that it’s not the iPhone 3G’s fault has shifted the focus of everyone’s attention away from hardware and onto reception. Luckily, AT&T CTO John Donovan knows that now is the time to improve, and shared his plan with Gizmodo’s Brian Lam.

Donovan shared the steps he hopes to implement:

• Cell site splitting. We’re deploying about 1,500 new cell sites this year. This enhances service quality in two ways – we’re expanding the geographic reach of the network, and in some places, we’re adding cell sites in existing territory to improve coverage and capacity.
• We monitor the usage for both data and voice on each and every cell site sector, combine that with our forecasts and customer feedback to target specific locations where we need to augment capacity via further cell splits.
• TDMA turndown. Earlier this year we turned down our TDMA/Analog networks. That allowed us to free up key spectrum to redeploy into the UMTS/HSPA network. Not only does that give us the opportunity to increase overall capacity on UMTS/HSPA, it enables us to deploy UMTS/HSPA at 850 Mhz (vs 1900 Mhz). This 850 spectrum provides optimum in-building coverage. We’re in the midst of turning up this spectrum on the UMTS-HSPA network across the country.
• Short measurement intervals. We’re deploying capabilities to measure network performance in much shorter intervals. This capability will be especially important to maximize service quality during major events. For example, during a Final Four or World Series game, traffic on the network will spike during time outs, or when a great play, bad call, or something else big happens. In normal circumstances, we might measure traffic and performance a few times per hour, but in these situations, we’ll monitor every few minutes to ensure maximum performance during the spikes that occur in real time.
• Wireless backhaul. We’re leveraging our U-verse and metro Ethernet fiber deployments to enhance wireless backhaul connections in many areas. We’re moving more and more of our wireless backhaul onto the 40 Gbps AT&T backbone network. So … the investments we’re making to maximize service quality on the wired side also benefit our wireless customers.
• Drive testing. AT&T technicians and other third-party vendors will drive-test its network nearly 30 million miles in the next year to improve the network’s coverage and quality.
• Hundreds of technicians from third-party testing companies, infrastructure vendors and AT&T technicians use specially designed vehicles to travel throughout the country and test the signal strength and coverage of AT&T’s ALLOVER Network.
• Along with drive-testing its own network, AT&T drive-tests competitors’ networks to ensure that its coverage and quality are equal to or better than other companies providing service in the area.
• The drive-test results help to prioritize where the company invests in new cell sites and equipment that enhances the network quality and coverage.

Posted on August 27th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: AT&T iPhone | No Comments »

Lots of annoyed iPhone users today in the central US. Apparently, the servers responsible for running the EDGE network for AT&T are down, depriving many iPhone users of their normal connectivity.

This outage is affecting users from Chicago to Kansas. If you’re part of the affected customer base, let us know in the comments. According to poster BBuehner at the Apple Support discussions forum, AT&T says the problem should be fixed by the end of today but could go as long as February 5th.

Posted on February 1st, 2008 by admin
Filed under: iPhone News, AT&T iPhone | No Comments »

For those following this stuff religiously: the iPhone “Elite” Team has released a method to downgrade the baseband on v1.1.1 iPhones. Ok, that basically means if you accidentally disabled the phone end of your iPhone with anySIM or iUnlock during the upgrade (or just decided v1.0.2 is where it’s at), now you can revert to the last working version and restore order to your iPhone’s wayward cell radio. Right, for free without paying iPhoneSimFree a cent for their unbricking solution. Alright, maybe you don’t care about any of this stuff — honestly, we don’t blame you. Anyway, it’s out there, so for those in the crowd who’ve been waiting for the iphone downgrade tool — and judging by our tips, that’s a lot of you — enjoy.

Update: How to Downgrade screwed up baseband 4.0 (after anySIM and 1.1.1 firmware upgrade)

Posted on October 12th, 2007 by admin
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Hackers not part of the official iPhone Dev Team have released an iPhone 1.1.1  jailbreak that’s based upon the Safari TIFF image exploit we first saw a few days ago. There are a few major things wrong with it, which means this isn’t exactly ready for normal people to use yet. We’ve been researching it all day, and have come to the conclusion that we can’t recommend this jailbreak to anyone except people who recompile their kernel on the weekend for fun.First off, if you apply this patch you won’t be able to sync any data to iTunes in its cracked state. To sync again, you’re going to have to “delete the symlink Media [directory] and rename OldMedia to Media.” Or restore to the previous state, which of course means you will lose the jailbreak.

Also, just to apply the patch, you’re going to have to be familiar with IPHUC, a command line utility that that lets you browse your phone’s file structure. It also involves directory manipulation when you’re inside the phone, also not a basic task. This alone requires you to have basic linux command line knowledge, and rules out most of the regular folks who just want Super Mario on their phone.

In addition to this, if you have an iPhone, this tool won’t activate it. The iPod touch doesn’t require activation.

So our recommendation is to wait. This is a good start, a step in the right direction, but wait until a much friendlier jailbreak is out. (Additional reporting by Jesús Díaz) [toc2rta][engadget]

Via  http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/iphone-jailbreak/non-dev-team-iphone-firmware-111-jailbreak-released-verdict-wait-309413.php

Posted on October 11th, 2007 by admin
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Although the iPhone/iTouch Dev team hasn’t published a general jailbreak yet, the developer community is working hard and furious to make sure that your arrival will be pleasant when you get there. Today brings this marvelous SpringBoard patch from Nicholas “Drudge” Penree, NerveGas and Pumpkin. It allows you to add as many 3rd party applications to SpringBoard as you’d like and offers a kicking-new paging feature; notice the paging dots at the bottom of SpringBoard.

The trip1pogostick patch is available from Drudge’s beta repository. To access it, you must jailbreak your iPhone and access this link from Mobile Safari.

Via http://www.tuaw.com/2007/10/09/1-1-1-iphone-multipage-springboard-hack/

Posted on October 10th, 2007 by admin
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The iPhone/iTouch Dev guys have been hard at work for weeks and have finally managed to jailbreak 1.1.1. Right now, they’re nowhere near releasing a general-use tool but the first steps have been made. Congratulations to dinopio, asap18, netkas, Martyn, mjc, Niacin, BloomFilter, pytey, tE_gU, pumpkin, roxfan, sam, SmileyDude, NerveGas, Nate True, Arminius, DirectriX, Edgan, ixtli, kroo, xorl, and the rest of the team.

So what does this jailbreak mean?

• Third Party apps run. Kind of. We probably have to recompile many of them for the new frameworks because many of them crash.
• Springboard no longer recognizes DisplayOrder.plist. And the list of “whitelisted” apps (that is, the official Applications including Safari, Photos, Calendar, etc) seems to be hard-coded into Springboard.app
• The iPhone has been activated via third-party workarounds.
• The 1.1.1 binaries barely work with 1.0.2 — at least not well enough to run the music store without major hacking.
• The Mobile Terminal App works on 1.1.1.
• The entire bsd suite still works — as do standard command-line utilities compiled for ARM.
• 1.1.1 references both com.apple.mobile.radio and com.apple.mobile.nike.
• The jailbreak method is nowhere near ready for prime time. So please be patient.

This is indeed great news on the iPhone 1.1.1 unlockfront after couple of weeks of lull. But it is still early days, as the iPhone Dev Team need to release a tool or set of instructions that will make jailbreaking easier which will eventually help third-party application developers to get their iphone applications to work on firmware 1.1.1 till then the recommendation would be to stick to iPhone firmware 1.0.2.

From http://www.tuaw.com/2007/10/08/announcing-a-preliminary-iphone-1-1-1-jailbreak/

Posted on October 9th, 2007 by admin
Filed under: AT&T iPhone | No Comments »

In case you missed the news, AT&T is readying a 6X speed increase in its 3G network that will finally put the service on par with EVDO Revision A. Sounds good, right? Well, unfortunately the service is obviously not compatible with the current iPhone and chances are, it probably won’t be put to the test for quite some time.

Regardless, this story tells us one thing: the second version of the iPhone will definitely support 3G and data transfers on the device will be on par with the hefty speeds currently witnessed on Verizon and Sprint’s services. So what does that mean for iPhone 2.0 owners? Well, you can expect one of the most common complaints about the venerable device to be swept away — email and Internet is too slow! But what it also might promote is the loss of the “made for iPhone” Internet apps that were engineered to run on the EDGE network. In other words, we’ll finally be able to access everything we actually want at fast speeds without hoping that it’s EDGE-optimized.

It looks like AT&T is preparing this update to not only compete with Verizon, but ready itself for the new iPhone. Does timing have anything to do with this? Could it be that because the network should be ready to go by October or November, that rumored iPhone 2.0 really will hit store shelves for the holidays? I definitely think that’s a possibility and to be honest, it’s becoming more likely by the minute.

Don Reisinger is a freelance technology journalist who covers everything from HDTVs to the iPhone. He writes The Digital Home for CNET, product reviews for InformationWeek and PC World, and contributes to over 15 publications throughout the world.

Posted on October 2nd, 2007 by admin
Filed under: iPhone News, AT&T iPhone | No Comments »

Remember that bit where I said upgrading from 1.1.1 to 1.0.2 was a one-way trip? Looks like I spoke prematurely. Tonight, reports are trickling in about successful 1.1.1-to-1.0.2 iPhone firmware downgrades using this method described at the “iPhone Devteam” wiki, which relies on a combination of firmware-fu and the INDependence software. TUAW reader skwasha tipped us off to an ongoing conversation at the hackint0sh forums that got the ball rolling on this.

I have not yet been able to confirm this downgrade so let us know in the comments if the method worked for you or not.

pdate: After downgrading your iPhone will most likely not work as a phone. But you’ll be able to use it with third party apps and WiFi. Developing.

Update 2: More detailed instructions here at Nate True’s blog.

Update 3: This method is now called “pulling a kmac” after the original poster who figured this out.

Update 4: If you’re getting the “Please Connect to iTunes” thing, you’ll need to set some environmental variables. You can do this with either iBrickr/iphoneinterface or with iPHUC. Instructions for both at Nate’s blog.

Via http://www.tuaw.com/2007/09/29/breaking-reports-of-1-1-1-to-1-0-2-iphone-downgrades-trickling/

Posted on September 30th, 2007 by admin
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Guys from  Modmyiphone.com find a way to skin your iphone keypad,really cool!

Posted on September 26th, 2007 by admin
Filed under: AT&T iPhone, iPhone Background, iPhone Tips, iPhone Themes | No Comments »

Hey guys - this is a bit of a detour form what we usually cover on the blog - but I just wanted to share this little trick I thought of for the iPhone.

However, in case you are looking for a free option then there is some good news as folks at Embraceware Software have published the below procedure which should help you stream music from the iTunes library on your Mac to the iPhone for free.

Step 1
Open “Sharing” in System Preferences and enable “Personal Web Sharing” - this will turn on the built in web server installed with OS X. When enabled, it will display an address (your IP or computer network name) as the URL for accessing the site on your network. Note this address - we’ll be visiting it on our iPhone via Safari later.

Step 2
The root of the web site is located in /Library/WebServer/Documents.
Open the Terminal and type the following:
cd /Library/WebServer/Documents/
and press ENTER.

Step 3
Still in the Terminal we will continue by creating a Symbolic link to your iTunes “Movies” directory and place this link in the root of your web server by typing the following:
ln -s /[path ti your iTunes Movies folder] Movies
example: ln -s/Volumes/Machintosh HD/users/john/Music/iTunes/Movies Movies

Step 4
Open Safari on your iPhone and visit the address provided when you enabled the Personal Web Sharing in your iPhone followed by /Movies
Example: http://192.168.2.20/Movies/

You will be presented with a text directory listing of all of your iTunes movies. Simply tap on any movie link and it’ll launch QuickTime on the iPhone and play the movie - just like any other video streamed on the web.

Technically if your home internet connection has a high upload speed you could even stream your content over the internet - outside of your local network - assuming your ISP doesn’t block port 80.

Just thought I’d share that with you - it’s a quick and simple thing you can do with no special software required.Enjoy your iphone videos right now!

From http://embraceware.com/blog/2007/09/21/out-of-the-box-itunes-streaming-to-your-iphone/

Posted on September 24th, 2007 by admin
Filed under: iPhone Videos, AT&T iPhone, iPhone Tips | No Comments »