If you’ve got an AT&T-locked iPhone and have plugged it into iTunes anytime in the past few hours, you may have noticed a dialog box pop up with the following:
“An update to the carrier settings for your iPhone is available. Would you like to download it now?”
.. And that’s it. No patch notes, no sign of what said update would actually do. Always inquisitive, we went ahead and pulled the trigger – then got to sleuthing.
After splaying open the update package and looking too hard at a whole bunch of stuff that appeared to be exactly the same as it had always been, we finally spotted them sitting in plain sight: “Default_CARRIER_ATT M-Cell.PNG” and “FSO_CARRIER_ATT M-Cell.PNG”. What might these mystery images contain? A map to Atlantis, perhaps?
Sadly, no. It was just this: 
Two images, both saying just “AT&T M-Cell”, one in a light font, the other dark. They’re just carrier logo replacements for AT&T’s upcoming cell-tower-in-your-living-room MicroCell – when you’re connected to the MicroCell (or M-Cell, apparently), it’ll show these logos up at the top instead of the default AT&T ones.
Pint-sized mystery solved!
There’s some world-class sleuthing, right there. I salute you, sir!
Woww, such a “BIG” and “NECESSARY” update… We could pass without this for a while
Guess that means my gen one iPhone EDGE suckage will continue. I’ve never had a phone before where network connectivity seemed to get worse over time. At this rate, it’ll turn into an iPod Touch in a few months. Just in time for Palm Pre on Sprint.
Their MicroCell tower is great, but I’d rather see them do something so that I can get my phone calls over IP if I’m on a wifi network. There are a lot of situations where I’ll be in a building where I won’t get a cell phone reception at all, but there is wifi throughout the building, and so if I could run off of the wifi, that would be a definite advantage for me.
Unfortunately, it’s probably not large enough of an issue to be worth bothering.
I agree with you. I am constantly out of service areas, but do have access to wifi.
It would be great if they would just make the phone work that way rather than needing to buy one of their MicroCell things…
skype app is coming soon to the iphone.
Here’s my issue – I don’t want an “app”. My overall goal is to be able to make phone calls anywhere I am, and receive them. Right now, I can almost do this “anywhere” except inside some buildings because I don’t get a signal.
Skype will be able to send calls and probably receive them when the application is open, but what if it isn’t open? I want a seamless transition – I walk into the building, iPhone connects to wifi (already does this), and I continue to send and receive phone calls with the same number and no changes.
Sprint has had a product called the AIRave for over four months now, which does exactly what the MicroCell does. Why is AT&T so far behind a struggling company like Sprint?
Just wanted to say that Mobily has added an ad strip on their main page confirming that they’ve came to an agreement with apple to bring the iPhone to Saudi by the end of this month!
It’s about time the iPhone’s available in your part of the world!
I hope Mobily’s quality of service is better than ATT’s!
At least the update only took 30 seconds, but i was really hoping for something more… ;)
I just switched from Sprint to AT&T cause my coverage sucked in my house and work etc. AT&T isn’t much better..But i got my iPhone and the way Sprint bills you is just ridiculous.
With a name like Cisco, this M-Cell gateway will be expensive. I heard Cisco wanted to charge $2k, probably, off of a subsidized subscription. Let’s hope greed applied to the margins doesn’t make this ridiculously expensive.
Once the update is installed, where are those new .PNG files located? I have looked in the AT&T Carrier bundles and can’t seem to find them.
Thanks!
It does more than that-it is a BASEBAND UPDATE!
It changes the modem firmware version (aka-baseband) from .28 to .30 which RELOCKS your unlocked iphone3g! This is nothing more than a clever trick to relock all the 3g’s back to ATT. Word on the street was don’t update your iphone with the new firmware it relocks it, so, they did a “carrier update” and nailed us.
I need an ATT femtocell if I am going to purchase the new anticipated iPhone in June. I’m hoping the rollout is being timed to coincide with it.
I have T-mo’s hotspot@home and it works great for me. I don’t think T-mo got the word out properly though, as none of my no signal neighbors have ever heard of it.
If Apple and ATT do a proper campaign, this could sell a lot more iPhones.
After I loaded the “carrier update” I have had nothing but problems with my iphone 3Gs….so I had to restore the phone without the “carrier update” and I am running with out problems….