Last year, and the year before, the iPhone launch meant that AT&T activations overloaded the network. New iPhone owners were stuck staring at No Service instead of the AT&T carrier name and "more bars, in more places."

This year is no different, all over the land, iPhones are being shunned by the AT&T network. An iPhone activation is an elusive thing of splendor. AT&T told Will Smith at MaximumPC that they were experiencing massive activations and the bandwidth reserved for this type of traffic was overloaded nationwide.

The Mac|Life and MaximumPC staff aren't immune to the activation woes. But, we think we may have a solution. Since the iPhone 3G S ships with 3G enabled, well you might already see where we are going with this.

We tried this on two iPhone 3G Ss and both activated afterwards. Hopefully, it'll work for everyone else.

Turn off 3G:

Navigate to  Settings > General > Network. There you'll see "Enable 3G" Slide it to OFF.

Hard reset your iPhone:

Hold down both until you see the Apple logo

Hold down the Home button and Top button until the iPhone begins to restart. You'll know it's restarting when you see the Apple logo.

BOOM! Activation!

Both iPhones we tried this on worked. Like we said, your milage may vary, but we hope this helps.

Good luck!

Drop your experience in the comments below.