AT&T Expands Wi-Fi Hotzone Project; Also Plans To Fix iPhone 4 Data Upload Issue Over Next 2 To 3 Weeks

Few months back, AT&T announced a pilot Wi-Fi project in the bustling Times Square area of New York called "Hotzone". The project sought to reduce data congestion issues in high smartphone density areas by automatically switching users in the hotzone from 3G network to Wi-Fi.

The carrier was expected to deploy similar Wi-Fi hotzones in other network congested areas across the country.

AT&T has now announced that they are expanding the Wi-Fi hotzone project to Charlotte in North Carolina. The new Wi-Fi hotzone shall be located over the South Brevard street from the area surrounding the NASCAR Hall of Fame plaza to East Trade Street. The hotzone can also be accessed by AT&T customers who use the Lynx light rail. In the media statement, AT&T has indicated that a third hotzone shall be deployed in Chicago "in the coming weeks".

The carrier has also been battling other iPhone-related issues in recent times. Several iPhone customers had complained earlier this month about a drastic drop in the data upload speed on AT&T's 3G network. The carrier had attributed the issue to a software bug on an Alcatel-Lucent equipment.

We have now heard from AT&T that a fix for the issue has been developed and that the patch shall be deployed in a phased manner over the next two to three weeks. According to a statement released yesterday, the software patch would restore the uplink speeds for the high speed data services that make use of the network's HSUPA technology. Users affected by the issue may hence have to wait for up to three weeks to see normal data upload speeds.

Despite concerns about network congestion, AT&T has seen impressive growth over the past quarter. The company has announced activations of 3.2 million iPhones during the second quarter which is a new company record. However, only 27% of these activations are reported to have come from new customers. For a perspective, the corresponding number in earlier quarters was steadily over the 40% mark.

AT&T is speculated to lose its exclusive carrier status within the next two quarters. It will be interesting to see how the entry of new iPhone carriers will affect the network performance and subscriber growth moving forward.