AT&T Notes Brief EDGE Network Outage

AT&T Inc. acknowledged a "very brief" outage of its EDGE network Tuesday, which was blamed on routine router maintenance.

EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) is the wide area wireless network that services iPhones and many other devices, providing data service but also carrying voice traffic over the GSM protocol. More than 62 million subscribers use the network at various times and over various portions, although AT&T also deploys networks running on other standards.

The EDGE network was also down on July 2 for about six hours. Some speculated the relatively new iPhone caused the early July outage, but AT&T denied that iPhone was related.

A blogger at consumerist.com noted the outage Tuesday afternoon. The blogger said service might be restored in one or two hours.

AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel said he did not know when the outage started or ended, but called it "a very brief outage" to EDGE. The source of the problem was routine maintenance on a router, so crews "undid" the maintenance procedure and service was restored immediately, Siegel said.