AT&T Allowing Home Activation For New iPhone 3G!
Friday, July 11th, 2008 | Apple, Business, News, Twitter
Contrary to what AT&T and Apple have both been telling everyone, some stores are quietly selling iPhone 3G’s to customers and telling them to activate it at home via iTunes. A massive server overload this morning has rendered Apple’s Activation Servers useless at this moment, however representatives from Apple have already acknowledged this and are working to get them back online.
Until the activation servers go back online, anyone trying to purchase a new iPhone will find out that they have a “bricked” version – only allowing for Emergency calls as it will not have been synched with the wireless account.
Users trying to upgrade their 1st generation iPhones or iPod Touches will also “brick” their device, making it useless until Apple fixes their servers.
News of this, along with updates from stores all across the country, has been widely talked about on Twitter.com. A quick and easy way to search through ‘the noise’ on Twitter is to use a free service called Summize.com. Summize enables you to easily search for specific topics and arranges them based on the time/date that they were ‘tweeted.’ For example, to see all the messages posted to Twitter regarding the iphone activation servers, search on Summize for “iphone + activation.”
Apple should have been able to predict that there would have been a heavy strain on the servers with thousands of users trying to register, synch, and activate their Apple products simultaneously. This makes you think twice about using Apple’s server hardware in any production environment….bad move on their part.
2 Comments to AT&T Allowing Home Activation For New iPhone 3G!
why would it make you think twice – RIM servers have been down A LOT recently. No company could prepare for this and you can almost be assured that Apple did everything they could and spent HIGH dollar to go as smoothly as possible. It is probable that this is an AT&T problem anyway.
July 11, 2008
If even after doing “everything they could” there was the possibility of the servers going down, there are still low-tech solutions they could have tried to help prevent a negative user-experience with the product. They could have allowed for pre-registering, limited the # of simultaneous users (perhaps by even tossing each request into a lottery to protect them from being bogged down), segmented the activation software so that the servers used to activate new phones would not conflict with pre-existing users just trying to upgrade their already-in-service iPhone’s or iPod Touches, etc.. The possibilities are endless.
The old saying, “there is never an excuse to be rude,” holds true for customer service as well. There is always going to be a solution: throwing money at the problem isn’t necessarily going to be it.
-brent
Leave a comment
Other Places You Can Find Me:
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
July 11, 2008