Apple and AT&T Carrier suspends iPhone 4 sales because of huge demand

Apple and AT&T Carrier suspends iPhone 4 sales because of huge demand. Apple Inc. and partner AT&T Inc. were so slammed with orders that they were temporarily suspending sales to make sure they didn't sell more units than they could make.

Apple said it sold 600,000 phones Tuesday, the day it began taking orders online. That amounted to 10 times more advance orders than it had received for the previous version last year. The new phone hits Apple and partner stores June 24.

AT&T's trouble handling the demand for new phones was reminiscent of its issues supporting the heavy load on its wireless networks, which it says are handling 50 times as much data as they were three years ago.

AT&T has remained confident in its ability to handle the ever-increasing load in its networks. The company says that over the last two years it has spent upward of $19 billion expanding and enhancing its 3G networks, and that it drops only about 1% of its calls on a nationwide basis.

Loaded down with all that traffic, AT&T has earned a reputation for spotty cellular coverage, slow loading time for Web pages and dropped calls. In January, Consumer Reports released a survey of 54,000 consumers in which AT&T was ranked last among wireless providers in 19 of the 26 major cities included in the study.