Tens of thousands of gadgetry fanatics are waiting outside 164 Apple retail locations in hopes to purchase ‘the phone of dreams’ today as the iPhone will be on sale starting at 6:00 p.m. local time.

AT&T, in preparation for the iPhone launch, have been busy working on its EDGE network, for the past couple months, in an internal operation known as “Fine EDGE.” This plan was to increase the bandwidth and speed of the network’s towers.

This, in addition to the work AT&T’s been doing for the past couple years (to the tune of $16 billion) has AT&T CEO and Chairman, Randall Stephenson, saying, “I feel good about the coverage and the performance.”

This morning, users of AT&T’s EDGE network are reporting significant speed increases, some with bandwidth well over 200Kbps. Has AT&T finally flipped the switch on the “Fine Edge” program?

But some are criticizing the decision by Apple & AT&T to use the EDGE network for the iPhone. The EDGE is a more available network, but suffers from drastically slower speeds than other accessible networks.

“I’m sure that will all change in the future,” said Apple CEO, Steve Jobs. “Edge is good, but you’d like it to be better.”

Jobs noted that the faster 3G capable networks used a chip that was not quite “mature.” It was physically too large to use in the iPhone and consumed too much battery life. “We felt it wasn’t the right trade-off now.”

Still, Jobs added that the EDGE network combined with the iPhone’s ability to switch to any known Wi-Fi network within range, including illegally piggybacking off a victim’s unprotected wireless network, permits the iphone to be “way faster than 3G.” 

“People are in areas with Wi-Fi much more than they think. I walk into work with the iPhone, and it instantly switches to a Wi-Fi network,” Jobs said in an interview with USA Today’s Jeff Graham.

In an internal meeting on iPhone-eve, Jobs announced that Apple employees who work full time or have been with the company for over a year will be receiving a free 8GB version of the iPhone by the end of July.

Apple wouldn’t release information on how many iPhones are available, but rumors suggest there will only be one out of three million available in the first week.

Jobs said, “we’ve certainly built a lot of iPhones, although it may not be enough.”

iPhone availability can be checked online at apple.com/retail/iphone/.

Related:

Entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 6:59 am under Uncategorized.

Read more entries by George Gardner.
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