Windows Phone 7.5 available to 50 percent of eligible customers starting right now

Well played Microsoft. Not just getting out the update, but have it go so smoothly that you accelerate it. Microsoft has a short blog post as follows:

Hello everyone. Six days ago we started rolling out the Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango” update around the globe. Here’s how it’s going.

Within the first hours of making it available, we saw successful updates in every country, on every carrier, and for nearly every Windows Phone model. (To see which ones are currently getting it, see Where’s My Phone Update?) On behalf of the engineering team, I want pass on a big thank you for updating your phones so quickly, since it helps us gather the data we need to make decisions more rapidly.

In fact, the update success rates we’re seeing look so good we’ve decided to open the spigot ahead of schedule, and make Windows Phone 7.5 available to 50 percent of eligible customers starting right now. (Why not 100 percent? Because we’re still collecting and analyzing installation data from our smaller operators, and need to watch it little bit longer to make sure everything is OK.)

I know some of you have questions about how Windows Phones are selected to receive the update. Put simply, it’s done totally at random, with absolutely no preference for carrier, model, or country. Random sampling is an important engineering technique to accurately measure quality and pinpoint issues early. In some cases, this can have interesting consequences: A family, for example, can have identical Windows Phones, yet only one phone might get an update notification.

Very sweet indeed…