This morning, AT&T customers in the Northeastern U.S. were unable to use the carrier's EDGE and 3G networks. However, the issue has been fixed at around noon. The outage began before 6 a.m., allegedly from a routing problem. The network issue did not affect phone calls, text messages or mobile e-mail from devices such as Research In Motion's BlackBerry, but it affected all iPhone customers which rely entirely on Internet access through either EDGE or 3G.

The problems occurred in many states, including Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Washington, D.C., and Virginia. Apparently, hurricane Gustav had nothing to do with AT&T's network problems.

It's already well known that AT&T's 3G network is substandard. This was especially obvious with the iPhone, which hangs up calls frequently to switch back and forth between 3G and 2G networks. It appears to be a combined problem: AT&T's network appears unreliable and provides insufficient coverage, while Apple apparently is not yet very good and making phones you can talk on (but hey, they are great as minicomputers).