iPhone Info Blog

After much thought and many complaints from AT&T customers, AT&T has gone ahead and changed the eligibility for their best upgrade pricing to the iPhone 3G S. When the iPhone 3G S eligibility rules were released, current iPhone 3G customers were taken back and began complaining against the upgrade prices of $399 and $499. Customers who previously would not have become upgrade eligible until July, August, or September of this year, will now qualify for AT&T’s lowest upgrade pricing starting tomorrow, making them eligible to purchase the iPhone 3G S at $199 (16GB) and $299 (32GB).

We’re now pleased to offer our iPhone 3G customers who are upgrade eligible in July, August or September 2009 our best upgrade pricing, beginning Thursday, June 18.

The updated eligibilty tools will reflect this change on June 18th. If you’ve already pre-ordered an iPhone 3G S, the price of the device will be adjusted when picked up, or credit will be given for the difference in price. If you still aren’t eligible for our best upgrade pricing and you still want iPhone 3G S now, you do have options:

• You may qualify for the iPhone 3G S early upgrade price of $399 (16GB) or $499 (32GB).
• You can pay full retail—and not have to sign a 2-year contract—at $599 (16GB) or $699 (32GB).

Users can check their upgrade eligibility status by visiting AT&T’s iPhone page, calling *NEW# on their AT&T handset, or visiting any AT&T store. Remember, the new pricing will not appear in the eligibility tools listed until Thursday, June 18th.

So will these changes encourage you to go buy an iPhone 3G S. Do you plan on waiting in the lines this Friday or will you wait for the crowds to die down?

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AT&T’s Vice President, Scott McElroy confirms that the US provider is undergoing various upgrades resulting in an increase of data speeds up to two times it’s current capacity. The plan is to upgrade the HSPA network speeds and eventually venture in to HSPA+. The speed increase will upgrade the downlink capacity on it’s high-speed packet access (HSPA) from 3.6 megabits per second to 7.2 mb/s through software upgrades at each base station.  The next generation iPhone is rumored to feature hardware able to support these speeds, giving the handset full advantage of these network upgrades.

AT&T could technically upgrade their network to 14.4 mb/s, however will be skipping that option at the moment due to technical problems and a stronger focus on upgrading the network’s backbone. Simultaneous upgrades to the network’s backbone are being performed in order to handle the increased traffic resulting from its network upgrades. The next generation coupled with these upgrades is going to be blazing fast! Technology just keeps getting better and better.

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