Some Nokia Lumia 900 customers have been experiencing a loss of data connectivity—both LTE and 3G—on their new handsets. Nokia has identified the problem and devised a software fix, which will be rolled out on or around April 16th. Customers not wanting to wait can have their phones swapped for updated versions in AT&T stores. The company will also give any AT&T customer buying a Lumia between now and April 21 a $100 credit on their next bill.

With the phone's $99 on-contract price, this means that it's now effectively free for anyone buying in the next ten days.

Reports of connectivity problems afflicting some handsets, but not all, have been swirling around the Internet all day. Many handsets appear unaffected, but others lose connectivity after rebooting, unable to re-establish a data connection until they are hard reset or, in some cases, have some extra settings added.

These problems led to speculation that there was a manufacturing defect in some handsets made in Mexico (though other units, made in South Korea, appear to suffer the same issue), or that there was a problem with AT&T's provisioning process.

However, Nokia is taking the blame, claiming that the issue is a pure software problem, not a hardware defect, caused by a "memory management" issue. The patch on the 16th will remedy the bug, and any new handsets bought from AT&T should avoid the bug in any case.

The swift and generous response by the company underscores the enormous strategic importance of the handset—and compares extremely favorably to Apple's "antennagate" reaction, in which the company did nothing to address the underlying issue, opting only to offer cheap bumpers for a limited time.

The issue, and subsequent fix, raises further questions about AT&T's troublesome attitude towards updates. Indications are that the problem was first reported by AT&T's own staff (rather than any formal testing), and the fix will be authorized by the phone network and deployed within a week.

The internal testing apparently didn't even detect an important connectivity problem, and if the turnaround can be this quick for this update, it makes one wonder why AT&T refuses to authorize the roll-out of the keyboard-disappearance bug that Microsoft fixed in January.