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as much as i want to hate the servers and hate everything for being so slow, it's my own fault for falling asleep at 330 right before preorders went up. And honestly with how many times it took me to get one successful rerservation (around 20, I can imagine everything was extremely overloaded far beyond 600,000 attempts
 
Here's my experience from yesterday:

Went to att.com to order yesterday at 6 AM EDT. Made it through all the screens in about three minutes, entered my credit card info, and clicked "Place Order". My browser sat there for about 60 seconds and then I got a message that it had timed out. No confirmation screen, no confirmation e-mail. When I tried to check my orders on att.com, it said I had no orders.

Thinking that the order didn't go through, I tried again several times on att.com, and at about 2 PM EDT, I was able to place an order and get to a confirmation screen with a number, which I printed. About 30 minutes later, I got an e-mail informing me that AT&T had cancelled this order.

At this point, I downloaded the Apple Store app and reserved a phone at my nearest Apple Store that way.

About 6 PM EDT last night, I decided to try again--this time at apple.com. After three or four attempts, I was able to add a phone to the cart for 6/24 delivery and checkout. I received the e-mail confirmation from Apple, and figured I was all set.

This morning, I woke up to find that AT&T charged my card $212.93. I went to att.com and it was now showing that I have an order (that is not backordered) consisting of a 16 GB black iPhone and a SIM card. Since there was no way to cancel the order on AT&T's site and they had already charged my card, I went to apple.com and cancelled my order there. I received an e-mail stating that because I had cancelled my order, I would not be charged.

Keep in mind that all of these different orders and reservations are for one line of service. I suspect I could've left my order on apple.com in place and I would've had two iPhone 4's at the subsidized rate delivered to me on launch day.

Until I get a shipping confirmation from AT&T, I am keeping my reservation at my local Apple Store for 6/24. I suspect a lot of other people are potentially in the same boat as I am after yesterday's debacle -- multiple phones coming to them from different places.

If many people receive multiple subsidized phones on launch day, they'll sell the extra phones on eBay and make a couple hundred bucks per phone, most likely.

Yup I had a similar situation, tried to order from AT&T but thought it failed so later in the day ordered it from Apple except I was charged for both iPhone 4's :eek: one charge from AT&T and one from Apple both for the same line and at the subsidized price, hmmm guess I am going to have an extra 32gb iPhone 4 to sell ;)
 
a lot?

The iPhone accounted for 58% of all mobile browsing in the US. So, while Verizon has smart phones, their users don't use the data to anywhere near the extent of AT&T's users do. And the 58% doesn't account for the other smart phones AT&T has on its network. Safe to say that at a minimum, 60% of all high-data-rate browsing is being done on AT&T (and fair to say more than that with all the Blackberrys they sell), all the other carriers divide up the balance. Therefore, Verizon doesn't even come close, even if they accounted for a full half of the rest of the market, that would leave them with 20% at the very max.
:rolleyes:

Yup exactly right. It's easy to hate on AT&T for the network issues, but a lot of the hate should be going to all the fellow iPhone users who suck the network dry of bandwidth way more than any other carrier or all the carriers combined lol.
 
Wait a minute, so AT&T was brought to it's knees because of 600,000 account look ups? Are you kidding me? AT&T can't do 600k database lookups in a whole day? Hell my little web application running on one low end blade with mysql running on the same box can handle more then 40 transactions per second that's 3.5 million transactions a day.

God I hate AT&T so much.

f
 
a lot?

The iPhone accounted for 58% of all mobile browsing in the US. So, while Verizon has smart phones, their users don't use the data to anywhere near the extent of AT&T's users do. And the 58% doesn't account for the other smart phones AT&T has on its network. Safe to say that at a minimum, 60% of all high-data-rate browsing is being done on AT&T (and fair to say more than that with all the Blackberrys they sell), all the other carriers divide up the balance. Therefore, Verizon doesn't even come close, even if they accounted for a full half of the rest of the market, that would leave them with 20% at the very max.
:rolleyes:

If you are saying ATT handles the most smartphone traffic, I would concede that point. All I said was 2 other carriers had more traffic each last last year. Maybe 99 percent of that is laptops (Lord knows we have almost 150 laptops here with 3G cards), but it all fighting for space like anything else in the cell world.

Smartphones aren't the only thing using up cell data bandwidth.
 
Where are all these posters who said preorders would go 5-6 days before non-launch delivery, lol??!!

I like the blokes who called us fools for staying up late or fussing, for hours in some cases, trying to pre-order. They said they'd wait a few days and then preorder w/o the headaches and still get their phone on launch day, ha, ha, ha!

That's cool!:cool:
 
Wait a minute, so AT&T was brought to it's knees because of 600,000 account look ups? Are you kidding me? AT&T can't do 600k database lookups in a whole day? Hell my little web application running on one low end blade with mysql running on the same box can handle more then 40 transactions per second that's 3.5 million transactions a day.

God I hate AT&T so much.

f
I think you're foolish if you think they don't have a cluster of servers better than your blade on a faster connection.

They had 600k successful lookups for just iphones not to mention the other 1million+ people that didnt get in and kept jamming everything up. I don't think many people that got one even got it on the first attempt. And this still totally disregards all the other people just accessing att as usual for account info not to mention the other stuff going on at the store.
 
Wait a minute, so AT&T was brought to it's knees because of 600,000 account look ups? Are you kidding me? AT&T can't do 600k database lookups in a whole day? Hell my little web application running on one low end blade with mysql running on the same box can handle more then 40 transactions per second that's 3.5 million transactions a day.

God I hate AT&T so much.

f

Ok Mr. Hater, those DB lookups you're referring to, are just the very tiny tip of the server overload iceberg. I suspect there were MANY millions of DB lookups, though only 600k had completed transactions. OH, and lest us not forget the ACTUAL TRANSACTIONS being processed by AT&T. And their normal course of business during their far above average business day. There's quite a bit of server load we're not even aware of.

God I hate the ignorant so much.
 
I didn't get a chance to read all of the replies, but I have a question/comment. Knowing what happened yesterday, will AT&T and Apple lease servers and additional bandwidth between now and next Thursday?

Apple has created a desirable product and now they need to do what it takes to sell it and set it up smoothly.
 
I haven't heard of one story where the person was able to order smoothly and/or quickly.

Now here's a question, would Verizon be able to handle this amount of load on a single day?

-Brian

I woke up at 5am PST and had NO problem at all pre-ordering my 32g Iphone 4 through the AT&T website. I think you are not hearing much about those of us that had no problem because there's really no reason to announce to everyone that we anticipated the rush, acted accordingly and had no problem ordering.

I think any company would have had a problem with that number of orders on a launch date.... 600,000 is a lot! :eek:
 
If you are saying ATT handles the most smartphone traffic, I would concede that point. All I said was 2 other carriers had more traffic each last last year. Maybe 99 percent of that is laptops (Lord knows we have almost 150 laptops here with 3G cards), but it all fighting for space like anything else in the cell world.

Smartphones aren't the only thing using up cell data bandwidth.

I will have to do some checking on this to be sure, but I believe a 3G card is actually considered in the "mobile browsing" stats. The stat is actually that 58% of all "mobile browsing" is done on the iPhone, not that 58% of smartphone browsing is done on the iPhone. So your lap top connect cards/dongles etc are considered in the original number I posted of the iPhone share of all "mobile" browsing. So nothing would change in consideration of Verizon's share of US mobile broadband use as compared to AT&T. It would be a share of the 40% of mobile browsing that is done by non-AT&T carriers. Laptop cards or smart phones are all using the same network data path for their respective carrier and mobile browsing.
 
I think you're foolish if you think they don't have a cluster of servers better than your blade on a faster connection.

They had 600k successful lookups for just iphones not to mention the other 1million+ people that didnt get in and kept jamming everything up. I don't think many people that got one even got it on the first attempt. And this still totally disregards all the other people just accessing att as usual for account info not to mention the other stuff going on at the store.

I would think they would have a cluster of computer's to handle this. That is why I'm surprised that they fell down. My point is that 600k Db transactions or even if it takes let's say 10 times that number of queries to actually complete each order that's still NOTHING. I can afford 3.5m Db transactions per day for pennies. Either AT&T didn't buy the 5 friging computers it would take to handle this traffic load, or their data management is so horrendous that a whole room full of computers couldn't look up the data for 600,000 to 2,000,000 people without crying to mama. Either way that's a massive FAIL.

f
 
I didn't get a chance to read all of the replies, but I have a question/comment. Knowing what happened yesterday, will AT&T and Apple lease servers and additional bandwidth between now and next Thursday?

I rather suspect the servers in question -- or at least the services -- are different ones from the e-commerce servers.

But, yeah, AT&T should have a good idea of the demand since they know just how many phones were sold. I suspect their engineers are huddling even as we speak to game-plan for June 24.
 
An excellent theory, I think a quite likely explanation.

It may be an explanation, but it's not a terribly reasonable one.

RDBMSs have been around for 30+ years now. These are problems that, on the server side, have largely been solved.

This is exactly the problem we had when I was working at a large console-game maker bringing up the beta of a much-anticipated game with online play.

We had database locking issues due to poorly-tested software.

See, now that is probably closer to the truth - it's a bug or poor design of the client-side. Which it almost always is, this day and age. Those times it isn't, it's because they failed to scale the server properly.
 
I don't see why it would be so prohibitive for them (both Apple AND AT&T) to have a massive amount of servers to be able to handle the rush. Sure it'd be a waste for most of the year, but the frustration faced by me and EVERYONE else yesterday was ridiculous for a 4th year in a row now! I haven't heard of one story where the person was able to order smoothly and/or quickly.

Now here's a question, would Verizon be able to handle this amount of load on a single day?

-Brian

Here you go, I had no real problems. Took me about 10 minutes. Some of that time was due to me not reading the instructions correctly. I ordered off of the AT&T store.

I work for a Fortune 50 company that has to deal with high demand web access. The amount of technology that is required to process customer requests is amazing. The costs are staggering. Redundant data centers, disaster recover, it all adds up to something that is challenging if you do not scale your every day activity to that load. Basically, it's not possible to do it for a single event.
 
Ok Mr. Hater, those DB lookups you're referring to, are just the very tiny tip of the server overload iceberg. I suspect there were MANY millions of DB lookups, though only 600k had completed transactions.

All the more reason Apple should have cached the data - and preloading the cache with the data on all iPhone owners would have been a good idea too.
 
I would think they would have a cluster of computer's to handle this. That is why I'm surprised that they fell down. My point is that 600k Db transactions or even if it takes let's say 10 times that number of queries to actually complete each order that's still NOTHING. I can afford 3.5m Db transactions per day for pennies. Either AT&T didn't buy the 5 friging computers it would take to handle this traffic load, or their data management is so horrendous that a whole room full of computers couldn't look up the data for 600,000 to 2,000,000 people without crying to mama. Either way that's a massive FAIL.

f

Yes, and I'm sure there's nothing you're over-looking (sarcasm), like how many of those transactions were attempted at the same time. 600,000 got though, how many tried at the same time? Not counting the Multiple times people tried..... I'm sure it's not as simple as those complaining are assuming it is....
 
All the more reason Apple should have cached the data - and preloading the cache with the data on all iPhone owners would have been a good idea too.

Do you actually have any idea what you are talking about? Caching the customer account data for how many millions of customers? And where do you think that's going to be cached...memory somewhere?

Not to mention the fact that the data needs to be fresh so the client systems (e.g. Apple) can validate account information.

Sounds like a lot of back seat drivers that have not dealt with large sized systems.
 
At&t

I didn't get a chance to read all of the replies, but I have a question/comment. Knowing what happened yesterday, will AT&T and Apple lease servers and additional bandwidth between now and next Thursday?

Apple has created a desirable product and now they need to do what it takes to sell it and set it up smoothly.

I THINK that all of this was on the AT&T bed, not the apple bed. so, there IS going to be an AUTHENTICATION/ACTIVATION server issue possibly, but for the most part the ITUNES/Activation should be pretty well worked out these days. And, the authentication from the AT&T side AFTER the itunes activation is taking place over the air, and should not be hampered by 500K people doing it on a rolling basis throughout the day.

Just my .02$
 
jeez, what a condescending bunch of crap.

AND off topic.

what a jackhole.

Man, who shot your dog today????
Your post is so out of proportion to the post you were ostensibly responding to.

Chillax dude. Didn't know there were troll wizards.

Hmm, I thought wizard's post was one of the best in the thread. Far too many self-absorbed nitwits crying about whether they could preorder an iPhone on the first day. It would be nice if maturity and respect were still values that parents passed on to their kids. Not happening in this country, that's for sure.
 
Jokes on you

I would think they would have a cluster of computer's to handle this. That is why I'm surprised that they fell down. My point is that 600k Db transactions or even if it takes let's say 10 times that number of queries to actually complete each order that's still NOTHING. I can afford 3.5m Db transactions per day for pennies. Either AT&T didn't buy the 5 friging computers it would take to handle this traffic load, or their data management is so horrendous that a whole room full of computers couldn't look up the data for 600,000 to 2,000,000 people without crying to mama. Either way that's a massive FAIL.

f

How about you do some fact checking first....

"
AT&T said orders of the iPhone 4 on Tuesday -- the first day of online preorders -- were 10 times higher than for the iPhone 3GS last year.

It said it chalked up more than 13 million visits to its website on Tuesday, including customers checking to see if they were eligible to upgrade to a new phone. It said that the number of eligibility checks was three times higher than its previous record for a single day.

"


http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Apple...9uZTQ-?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=3&asset=&ccode=
 
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