Apple does test their phones in real-world circumstances! Unfortunately, the new phones tend to get lost, stolen, forgotten in a bar in Redwood City and then put up on Gizmodo, that sort of thing. So, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple has cut down on real-world testing, which would be unfortunate, as extensive real-world testing is one of the hallmarks that Apple is known for: it's part of their "secret sauce" that makes their products easy to use and appealing to the mass market consumer.

The iPhone *did* have a feature to accomplish this, along with many more other useful tools. It replaced the signal bar icon with a numeric dB readout. Google for "iphone field test mode". Unfortunately, Apple revoked this feature as of iOS 4! The old code no longer works, and nobody has yet leaked a new code.

Those corporations, the lucky owners of the grandfathered "Class A" address space, realize their value. They're holding out, as the price can only go up over time, as demand pressure increases. The auctions, in a few years, should provide considerable income. When IANA finally announces they're completely out of IPv4 addresses, you know which stocks to buy!

Better yet, why not just repurpose some of those useless "Class D" and "Class E" allocations?

Multicast is from 224 to 239.

According to http://www.iana.org/assignments/multicast-addresses/ only these have been allocated: 224, 232, 233, 239

This leaves 12 unused /8 networks: 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238

Add that to the 16 "future use" networks of Class E, to get a total of 28 /8 networks that are ripe for the taking. That's more address space than in your entire list above!

There's some stellar examples of AT&T employees (formerly SBC, formerly Pacific Bell) at the dslreports.com site. The "SBC Direct" forum is for bypassing tech support and speaking directly to somebody who knows what they are doing.

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/sbcdirect

Also, for Comcast, there's "comcastcares" on Twitter. There was a recent article written about this person recently.

http://twitter.com/comcastcares

http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/jan2009/ca20090113_373506.htm

Very nice! Both of these have saved me a lot of time, trying to fight my way through a large corporation, trying to reach a person who had both the knowledge and the power to fix the situations I found myself in.