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iPhone Doesn't Surf Fast Enough for Jobs
ElvaWSJ writes with a link to a Wall Street Journal interview with Steve Jobs and AT&T's CEO Randall Stephenson. As you can imagine, they're pretty enthusiastic. Just the same, they address the possibility that the iPhone will slow internet access on Ma Bell's cell network. "Mr. Jobs acknowledged that the company's new iPhone won't surf the Internet as fast as he would like on the network, called "Edge," but added that the device's ability to connect to Wi-Fi hotspots would give consumers a speedier alternative for Web browsing. For his part, Mr. Stephenson said the iPhone represents a broader push by AT&T into Wi-Fi services, including, potentially, mobile Internet calling. The two men also discussed the iPod's "halo effect" and reflected on the origins of their corporate partnership."
Since AT&T was supposedly the only provider who would agree to Apple's list of detailed demands, it's likely they had little choice but to accept their network. It's not like other providers were lining up for a chance at it.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Simply put: it ain't 3G. That's going to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks for iPhone. It's one of the reasons why I won't be buying one, despite the fact that I drooled over the iPhone initially.
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But 640kbps ought to be enough for anyone?
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I was afraid we wouldn't see a single iPhone advertisement...I mean article today...my fears have been relived...
AT&T has an HSDPA (3G) network, but there are two issues with it. (1) It's not widely deployed (a few dozen cities, compared to EDGE, which is everywhere that AT&T offers cell service). (2) Although the network is quite fast, the chipsets that support it presently consume too much power. Apple apparently wants a lower power chipset so that battery life of the iPhone isn't adversely affected.
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Those had been shelved by Xerox and it was the deal Apple made with Xerox that allowed them to create a product. They DID bring it to 'US'. 'US' being the consumer.
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"I love the smell of Wi-Fi in the morning. Smells like....bandwith."
I'm amazed AT&T or any cell company would allow a cell to enter their market that has built in wifi. Won't this cut into their profits? Since anyone can go to McD's and check their email instead of having to pay their provider for the online minutes.
Why did not apple buck the whole system and offere the iPhone as a unlocked device only.
that way you could get your choice of service, your phone is not held hostage by unscrupulous Service providers, and it would have forced a change in the way cellular companies abuse their customers.
a win,win,win situation.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What is up with Jobs selling nonexistent features?
Ringtone business gets a tease:
Mr. Jobs: One might imagine a lot of things down the road.
Mr. Jobs: There's a lot of things you can imagine down the road.
But you can forget 3G in revision one:
Mr. Jobs: No, we just don't comment on future stuff.
I also got a kick out of this:
Mr. Jobs: There's often times a Wi-Fi network that you can join whether you're sitting in a coffee shop or even walking along the street piggybacking on somebody's home Wi-Fi network.
Theft of service, it's the Apple way!
With all the hype over people getting sued and arrested for using someones open AP, I wonder if the iPhone autoconnects without user intervention or if it requires some manual selection. If auto this could cause legal problems as the user would be according to recent suits "stealing bandwith and computer fraud by illegally accessing an another persons network" I dont agree with it, but that appears to be the direction we're going.
> If I were running an AT&T competitor right now I would be wondering why Jobs didn't approach me with this opportunity and what I could do to earn his approval. I wouldn't want to be left behind
z on-iphone_x.htm
Unless, of course, you're Verizon who had the balls to stand up to Apple. Right decision in the end or not, at least they stood up for their business.
If someone came to you and said:
1) We want you to agree to sell our product, sight unseen.
2) You have to cut all of your partners out of it.
3) We will tell you whether the phone can be replaced if a customer has a problem.
4) We want a percentage of service revenue.
- does that sound like a good business decision to you? You're going to alienate all of your other partners (i.e. Best buy, Walmart, etc..) You're going to alienate your customers (Sorry, we'd love to replace your handset Mr. Big-Important-VIP-Customer, but Apple said no. Can't help you.), and worst of all, you open the door for *EVERYONE* to take a piece of your service revenue - why wouldn't Motorola/LG/Samsung/etc. ask for the same deal? (You did it for Apple - either split revenue with us, or no RAZR2 for you.)
I agree - I think it would've kicked butt if VZW had the iPhone. A real 3G network (EV-DO) would complement iPhone wonderfully, as would a real voice network (GSM quality is crap. CDMA not only covers more area per tower, but it has a better vocoder as well.)
But can you blame them for turning it down? I would have, given the way Apple approached them.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2007-01-28-veri
Seems that there are credible reports coming in that in the last 24 hours AT+T have increased EDGE speeds to >200 k bits/s. This should be good news to all AT+T EDGE users:
r s-seeing-sudden-boost-in-edge-speeds/
http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/28/atandt-custome
As we know, increased means they probably removed some artificial cap....
I wonder how many days will go by until the drop the speed again? I guess there will be a halo effect of new iPhone buyers showing their friends - "hey look at this I can browse the web" - just for the sake of it....
Here, let me correct "it's" to the possessive "its."
It will surf teh interweb, answer email, make calls, play MP3's, wash your car, clean your house, spank you off. FINELINE PRINT: Product may not work as advertised. In order to benefit from our huge technologically advanced vertically intergrated technologically advanced technology, users must first purchase an advanced proactive neurally intergrated vertically horizontal network card from our vertically implemented horizontally vectored service provider.
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So Jobs should have appended, "...except, of course, for the Xerox Star. We all remember the Xerox Star right?"
There were several little incubator projects or outright commercial failures for GUI's in the early 80's. Macintosh was the one that brought it to the world. They are the ones that got it right. That gives them some pretty significant bragging rights.
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
More bullshit from AT&T:
e ct-lightspeed-and-the-jedi-mind-trick/
Mr. Stephenson: If you think about wireless broadband networks, EDGE is the only ubiquitous nationwide broadband network deployed today. It's a 300-plus kilobit type service. We're selling in the tens of thousands every single month of smart phones that operate on nothing but EDGE. The service experience is really, really good and what you're going to see with the iPhone is the caching technology that Steve and the Apple guys have developed here makes the EDGE experience even better. Between the Wi-Fi and the EDGE coverage, this is a really good experience.
High latency, low bandwidth broadband. Huzzah!
Sprint's EVDO network is deployed as widely as AT&T's EDGE network (not even all of AT&T's GSM network is EDGE). Worse, Sprint's EVDO revA network is deployed in most metropolitan areas, nearly all interstate highways, and nearly all tourist areas.
For AT&T, Edge is "all the speed you need", up until they deploy HSDPA, in which case that will be, "all the speed you need". Just like this: http://www.nyquistcapital.com/2006/03/30/att-proj
Mr.Stephenson said that AT&T's field tests have shown 'no discernable difference' between AT&T's 1.5 Mbps service and Comcast's 6 Mbps because the problem is not in the last mile but in the backbone.
Ridiculous
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
EVDO is 3G, and it's available across the US. And my EVDO phone's battery lasts a lot longer than 45 minutes.
The US is 3G ready - it's Cingular/AT&T and T-Mobile who aren't.
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Yeah, because you could buy a Xerox Star in 1984. No, wait, you couldn't, Apple actually did bring you those ideas.
What part of "revolutionary user interface" did you not understand? He isn't even talking about the "touchscreen capabilitites" or "playing music" or "viewing the web." He's talking about how the touchscreen is used, how your play music, and how you view the web.
Yeah, my P990i does have a touchscreen, does view the web, does play music. That doesn't mean the iPhone's UI isn't revolutionary.
Oh noes!! Please don't withhold the RAZR2 from us!! Our customers will die -- all three of them!!
Well OK, the RAZR sold more than three units. I assume. Anyway, the curent economic model between the cellphone manufacturers and service providers sucks. It leads to stupid shit like feature-blocking. I want my cellphone provider to provide service. And usable information about that service. My cable company didn't sell me a TV. My ISV didn't sell me my computer (and if they did I'll bet it wouldn't be one that I wanted.) Sure, I wish the iPhone was usable with all carriers, but it isn't. Yet. One step at a time.
Oh, and P.S. When the RAZR came out it cost $500 as well WITH a service agreement; $800 without. Just saying.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
You're confusing 3G with W-CDMA. EDGE is a GSM "upgrade". A significant portion of US cell users are on CDMA networks (Verizon/Sprint/...). For 3G those users are using EVDO, which "degrades" to 1x. You can think of EDGE and 1xRTT as 2.5G, at least relative to data transfer rate.
So the progression is something like this:
2G -> 2.5G -> 3G -> 3.5G -> 4G
GSM -> Edge -> W-CDMA(UMTS) -> HSPA -> LTE
cdmaOne -> 1xRTT -> EVDO -> EVDO Rev A -> UMB/OFDMA/WiMAX
Sprint has already rolled out EVDO Rev. A in some locations, which is "bitchin fast" for both download and upload.
I've had an EVDO Rev. 0 card in my laptop for a few years, and while I wouldn't say it is quite as fast as WiFi, it is really great and I get 5 hours of battery life.
In conclusion, your statement that the country is "EDGE ready, not 3G" is inaccurate in several ways. Not meaning to flame.
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
A ridiculous and obsolete state law. It's unfortunate that a few people will get caught up in this before the appropriate precedents and inevitable consensus is built. Here it is: Unsecured = Access is OK. State legislators, go fix your laws.
Nice spin. I wish I had Wi-Fi networks wherever I roamed. My HTC Wizard has EDGE+WiFi, but I've never heard anyone claim "Whadda you want 3G for, you have Wi-Fi!"
Blah.
On the other hand, Verizon Wireless has horrible customer service, cripples their phones (to the extent that, for instance, you can't even get your pictures off of them and onto your computer without using some proprietary service), doesn't use GSM...
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Not having Flash is a feature.
Apple yanked all of the Flash from its corporate website and redid it all in standard Ajax using scriptilicious and other plane jane tools, demonstrating that anyone can. It's even more interactive and functional (check out Apple.com search) and no proprietary plugin for Flash required.
Adobe isn't happy about it, but do we really need to convert the web from open HTML into closed FLA? Apple even convinced Google to start putting all of its FLA On2 videos on YouTube into standard H.264. That makes is much easier to deliver standards-based hardware acceleration for mobile devices that optimizes YouTube type sites.
With this kind of progress, the web is headed back into open territory after a long captivity in proprietary hell. That's good for Linux users, DIY site builders, and levels the playing field in hardware.
The web shouldn't be hostage to anyone's plugin just to render pages, particularly a plugin tied to a proprietary and industrially uncommon video codec that doesn't appear to have any hardware acceleration features. Anyone can license H.264 or get cheap dedicated processors.
Internet Explorer on the desktop PC doesn't make any attempt to support CSS3, and doesn't even try hard to do 2005-era CSS. The Pocket version is even further away from being remotely useful for the modern web.
It's not really the bandwidth, it's the latency. T-Mobile's EDGE runs about 700-1000ms ping times for me. Sometimes better, sometimes worse. I generally get 60-80kbps, which isn't horrific. Hell, I've even watched YouTube videos on the EDGE network. Not something I'd do a lot, but it is doable.
If they could get the latency down, EDGE would be a lot less annoying.
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