By Alex Nunez on December 28, 2009 in
By now, you've likely read that AT&T removed the Apple iPhone from the list of cellphones its customers in New York City and some area suburbs could order from its website. Broken on Sunday by The Consumerist, the story immediately tore through social media outlets like Twitter and went national soon thereafter, being picked up by the usual roster of news and wire services.
It began when a Consumerist reader tipped off the blog, saying he couldn't order an iPhone online using his Brooklyn address, but could if he tried ZIPs from other major metropolitan areas. Laura Northrop at Consumerist not only confirmed this herself, she managed to get a juicy quote out of an online customer service rep, who told them, "New York is not ready for the iPhone," basically implying that AT&T's mobile network in America's biggest city is unable to handle the wildly popular handheld, whose owners are very likely to use it to surf the web. (In March, TechCrunch reported that half of all mobile internet traffic in the U.S. was attributable to iPhone users.) From there, the story just took off.
Fast forward to earlier today. Consumerist, which has stayed pretty much on top of things since getting the ball rolling yesterday, noted that AT&T's official reason for the iPhone's unavailability online changed from a "readiness" issue to concerns related to fraud. Consumerist's Marc Perton jumped on a CSR webchat and got the updated company line, which he posted to the blog. Skeptical of the reason given, Perton goes on to make a case for why he doesn't believe fraud had anything to do with the curious policy change regarding the iPhone's online sales in New York.
Now, as of late Monday afternoon, it would seem that AT&T has elected to avert any additional bad PR stemming from the change: The Consumerist now reports, in updates posted to its two main stories on the topic, that the iPhone is once again available online to NYC residents. We went to ATT.com and punched in the ZIP code for our office here in Manhattan, and sure enough, the phone is indeed available.
It'll be interesting to see if any more background info about the kerfuffle leaks out in the coming days. As big as the story became, it wasn't as if New Yorkers couldn't get their hands on an iPhone -- sales at AT&T and Apple stores were never halted during any of this. Nevertheless, it was surely embarrassing for AT&T, which obviously didn't expect to have a national spotlight shined on its policy change. And we can only begin to imagine the Verizon Wireless TV commercial this would have spawned if AT&T hadn't changed course...