AT&T survives Operation Chokehold

The appointed hour — Friday, from 12 noon to 1 p.m. PST — came and went and AT&T's wireless had not been brought to its knees. "As far as I can tell, there's been no impact at all," wrote Dan Lyons in The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs at 12:19 p.m. "My iPhone is working just the same as ever. "It was Lyons, writing as Fake Steve Jobs, who on Monday had encouraged iPhone owners to overwhelm AT&T's network by turning on a data-intensive app and running it for an hour. Operation Chokehold, as he dubbed it, was intended as a protest against AT&T's threatened imposition of data usage fees. By Wednesday, after the Federal Communications Commission's chief of homeland security issued a stern warning, Lyons began to have second thoughts. But by then the protest had taken on a life of its own. Although there were scattered reports of slowdowns Friday on the Operation Chokehold Facebook page, AT&T's 3G network seemed to be holding up just fine.