Apple and AT&T Sued, Again, Over 3G

Macworld is reporting that Apple and AT&T are being sued, again, for the lack of delivery on their 3G network. This follows a long line of other lawsuits in San Jose, San Diego, Alabama, Florida, Texas, and New York "The lawsuit charges the companies with Negligence, Breach of Express Warranty, Breach of Implied Warranty of Merchantability, Unjust Enrichment, Negligent Misrepresentation, Violation of the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act and Other Similar State Statutes, and Breach of Contract. Dickerson is seeking to force Apple and AT&T to correct its labeling and advertising, as well as to recover compensatory, statutory and punitive damages."

Comments

Yup

[JimboFBX]

The problem with AT&T's 3G is that the connection from your phone to their tower is fast but their tower's connection to the internet is 14k baud dial-up or something. Some towers don't even have internet connectivity, I was on a mountain with 5 bars of 3G, parked, and had no internet connectivity whatsoever. I drove down a small town nearby and it worked fine, except of course for that slow page loading issue.

Re:Yup

[Anonymous Coward]

The iPhone has absolutely destroyed AT&T's network. They were simply never built to support that amount of data traffic, and the large-quota / unlimited data plans they sell with the iPhone have crushed them.

The reason blackberrys are more attractive to networks than the iPhone is because they have compression, on-demand loading and data-chunking abilities. The iPhone has none of these things, and the result is AT&T's network speeds being ripped up.

(Anon because I know too much about this.)

Re:Yup

[bostongraf]

The reason blackberrys are more attractive to networks than the iPhone is because

I'm sorry, but I'm fairly certain that most other networks would be more than happy to get a share of the iPhone market. The customers may not be happy with the resulting performance! But the networks would have no problem adding an iPhone, and accompanying plan, to their offerings...

Re:Yup

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not suggesting that the carriers don't want the iPhone, I'm saying that they're sacrificing their Network in order to do it. AT&T is being sued because their network can't scale up. They'll have to dump a cool billion in order to upgrade.

The marketing and business people see no problem with that, but believe me, it makes the tech's lives difficult. Blackberry's footprint is significantly lower because of how they handle data traffic.

Re:Yup

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason you couldn't get on the internet with 5 bars of 3G is probably because you didn't have an EDGE signal. Try it yourself, turn EDGE off and even with 5 bars of 3G you cannot get on the internet at all. I don't know if it uses EDGE for authentication or something but it's pretty stupid to require both in order to be able to get out to the internet.

Re:Yup

[TreyGeek]

The iPhone has absolutely destroyed AT&T's network.

Except I can go back to 2003-2004 when I was an AT&T wireless customer and their coverage in major cities was terrible. Their coverage and network issues are not because of the iPhone (IMHO), they've been having problems longer than that.

Re:Yup

[dave562]

I'm a fairly long time Blackberry user with AT&T. The network performance and internet browsing from the Blackberry devices was fine up until AT&T rolled out the iPhone. Once the iPhones were on the network, the internet browsing went straight to hell on the Blackberry. Page loads are easily over a minute and in the past they used to be reasonably fast.

Re:Yup

[edalytical]

I don't think that's entirely correct. My iPhone is EDGE only and has trouble connecting to the internet with 5 bars of EDGE.

Re:Yup

[TheMeuge]

They knew that this was going to happen though. AT&T had their hands full with the 2G iPhone, and knew exactly the kind of demand they were going to get when it went 3G.

But instead, they chose to continue charging outrageous fees (and FORCING you to get an overpriced data plan)... without doing much to upgrade their network.

Furthermore, I believe that AT&T is deliberately throttling speeds to 3G iPhones, because I get much higher speeds using the Samsung Blackjack in the same location, both using AT&Ts service. As a matter of fact, most of the time, the Blackjack is 2X faster (400-1000kbps vs. 200-600kbps).

Now I really like my iPhone and it still does work very well, even despite the slower speeds. Within a year or two, the network will probably receive some upgrades... just like it happened when I first got the Blackjack 3 years ago. Then, I would hardly get 3G anywhere, and when I would get it, it'd never go above 400kbps. Before I got the iPhone, I'd easily get 800kbps 3G virtually everywhere, including places where I had trouble getting EDGE a couple of years ago.

Re:Yup

[Bill_the_Engineer]

The reason blackberrys are more attractive to networks than the iPhone is because they have compression, on-demand loading and data-chunking abilities.

I believe the reasons behind blackberry's "network friendly" appearance has more to do with market share than technical achievement. It was the iPhone (not the blackberry) that made wireless data marketable to the tech-savvy consumer (and the rest of the masses).

Re:Yup

[nxtw]

The reason you couldn't get on the internet with 5 bars of 3G is probably because you didn't have an EDGE signal. Try it yourself, turn EDGE off and even with 5 bars of 3G you cannot get on the internet at all. I don't know if it uses EDGE for authentication or something but it's pretty stupid to require both in order to be able to get out to the internet.

EDGE is an extension of GPRS (which is an extension of GSM) that provides higher performance packet data on GSM (in this context, the air interface).

The data traffic - inlcuding authentication - travels over either GSM/EDGE or WCDMA until it is handed off from one to the other.

You do not "need" both GSM and WCDMA coverage at the same time to use data. Many devices can be set to use WCDMA only.

Re:Yup

[frinkster]

The worst part of my iPhone is that it uses AT&T's network.

When I am connected via Wi-Fi, it works great. But here in my office in downtown Chicago, I frequently get "Could not activate cellular data network" errors and have problems with voice calls dropping as well.

Last year I was in rural Indiana, getting 3 bars of EDGE, and I was able to use the maps application to find my way through miles and miles of empty roads with rows of corn as far you could see. In fact, it was a lot more responsive than when I get 5 bars of 3G most times.

Perhaps the key is to be the only person connected to the cell tower.

Re:Yup

[MrMacman2u]

Is there a "-1, Clueless" option for moderators? If not, there should be.

There is no "connection" between EDGE and 3G. Zero. Zilch. Nada. None, at all. Two TOTALLY separate technologies. One does not require the other and vise-versa.

Odds are your wireless device (Not an iPhone I might add because you cannot disable EDGE in the iPhone) was falling back on the EDGE data connection due to saturation or unavailability of the 3G network.

Re:Yup

[LearningHard]

The reason is that the receiver on the tower picks up signal fine. The tower is connected to a local telco endoffice by multiple T1s. If those T1s get saturated then your speeds are going to go in the crapper. ATT's problem is that (obviously) they don't have enough bandwith to their cellsites. Since they don't seem to be able to count on Apple doing a good job of putting some sort of compression on the iphone and I assume their network management is good. All they can really do is throw bandwith at the problem, which of course gets expensive. And since the plans are all unlimited you don't really get the revenue to support it.

Re:Yup

[pete-classic]

Cry me a river.

The [economy] has absolutely destroyed [my checking account]. [My budget was] simply never built to support that amount of [recession], and the [economic downturn] / [unemployment rate] have crushed [it].

So I shouldn't have to hold up my end of the contract, right?

Or maybe they need to figure it out. As long as I'm holding up my end of the contract, they're obliged to hold up theirs.

-Peter

Re:Yup

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it it's too fast, AT&T will have a harder time recording all your activity for the government. Probably why Obama voted to give them immunity when they got caught listening in last time.

Re:Yup

[Bemopolis]

Yeah, too bad they don't have a brand-new revenue stream from a popular exclusive device to finance such an upgrade.

Re:Yup

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonder what the shareholders with short time investment strategies would think of that.

Re:Yup

[EvilBudMan]

--I'm not suggesting that the carriers don't want the iPhone, I'm saying that they're sacrificing their Network in order to do it. AT&T is being sued because their network can't scale up.--

Neither can Verizon's

--They'll have to dump a cool billion in order to upgrade.--

That's where both of these companies should have put the money that taxpayers gave them to run fiber. If they didn't have to do civil engineering (burying cable) they would be fine. More data than ever can be run down old fiber. They never put it there to start with.

Alltel turned the bandwidth down on the tower next to my home after they added more users advertising the same service. They ALL should be sued.

Re:Yup

[EvilBudMan]

Yep they built their network for two users and now have 1000. This is not just the iPhone here. This happens with Verizon too and guess what they don't have it.

Re:Yup

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about you, but I can surely turn off edge on my iphone.

JAILBREAK

-1 CLUELESS 4 YOU TOO EH?

Re:Yup

[donny77]

This is not about iPhone versus Blackberry. This is 1990 ISPs all over again. AT&T wants to sell "unlimited" data plans knowing you'll pay more for unlimited. It works great because people just check their e-mail on it. Why? Cause the Internet sucks on a Blackberry/Windows Mobile device. The problem is, iPhone users ACTUALLY use the Internet/data other than e-mail. Why? Cause it doesn't suck. Result, oversold bandwidth. Same old story.

Re:Yup

[slapout]

"They'll have to dump a cool billion in order to upgrade."

They're making lots of money from all those iPhone users, they can afford to upgrade their network.

Verizon (in my area, at least) seems able to maintain a 3G network.
 

Re:Yup

[pipboy9999]

They're making lots of money from all those iPhone users, they can afford to upgrade their network.

When I worked in the wireless industry (about 9 months ago) the income for the actual company wasn't that great. It took the company I worked for a little over a year to actually start making profit on an average customer. Even when I worked for the industry I tried not to buy their kool-aid, but this figure I actually believed since I worked for a smaller local company who's owners and executives were quite open and, at times, honestly blunt with us.

Re:Yup

[hairyfeet]

And you just hit the nail on the head on why this country is falling apart. Stocks were supposed to be for investing, where you looked at the business's long term game plan and if you supported it bought stock in the company. Now Wall Street is nothing but Las Vegas with nicer clothes. When my parents built their house 29 years ago the ISDN and cable stopped 2 blocks away. Now 30 years later how far is it? Why 2 blocks away, of course!

Nobody has laid any lines or upgraded shit around here in years because it might hurt the short term stock price if they actually spent a dime. Problem is, if a business isn't growing it is dying. I mean I'm sure they could pay out a nice dividend if they burnt the thing to the ground for the insurance but that doesn't make for much of a business plan. Having everything revolve around the short termers and day traders is the same thing, it just takes longer for the business to burn. for business(and the economy) to grow their have to be INVESTMENTS. Investments in the infrastructure to grow, in the lines, in automation to improve efficiency, in customer service, etc. Instead everything has been low balled and left to rot to please the short term mentality on Wall Street. Is it any wonder that it seems everything is falling apart?

Re:Yup

[Hognoxious]

In that case the root of the problem is really the unlimited plans.

Everyone will now chip in with how great their plan is. Others will reply with how crap theirs are. The first lot will tell the second lot to change, and another lot will say that's impossible because where they live there's only one supplier.

Where was I?

People round /. seem to think capped plans are the work of the devil, but as long as the providers are honest and describe it clearly as such, I don't see what the issue is.

Re:Yup

[DrgnDancer]

I think you've hit one something here. AT&T has massively oversubscribed the major metropolitan areas. My wife gets much better 3G here in Huntsville than she does in larger cities. I'm sure that there are more towers in the larger cities, but the ratio of towers to people trying to use the device is much worse. I often find that my older Edge iPhone works better in places where her 3G is having trouble. I'm connecting to a lower subscription tower than she is (Well, we're probably connecting to the same physical tower, but I'm on the lower subscription channel).

Most of the time I'm jealous of her phone, but every so often when we travel I get to be the one who laughs :-)

Re:Yup

[Vancorps]

Given that Blackberry market share is higher than that of the iPhone I wonder where you come up with this statement? Source

The network friendly appearance is due to the fact that it is not new and so RIM has learned a lot of hard lessons over the years that Apple is just now encountering with its partnership with AT&T.

The Blackberry is superior from a technological standpoint. The iPhone is superior from a UI standpoint. It's that simple, at least in my head.

Re:Yup

[Patch86]

Indeed. And bandwidth capping also allows people to tailor their package to their needs. If I want more bandwidth, I can pay my ISP a one off fee of £5 or so and I get it. Even more? Pay some more.

It makes no sense that someone who only uses their internet to check their emails and read a blog or two should be paying the same as a regular DVD-torrenter. The former uses only a fraction of the provider's resources compared to the latter, so they should pay a fraction of the price.

And I say this as someone who is regularly tickling my monthly bandwidth cap.

Re:Yup

[Buelldozer]

You hit the nail so firmly and square on the head that you've driven it right through the board.

Congratulations!

Oh, and since you didn't Trademark "Wall Street is nothing but Las Vegas with nicer clothes." I'm going to start using that line.

Re:Yup

[mmkkbb]

That was most likely AT&T's D-AMPS network, before they were bought by Cingular, and before Cingular was bought up by SBC which became AT&T. The brand names mean nothing in this case.

Re:Yup

[homer_s]

Nobody has laid any lines or upgraded shit around here in years because it might hurt the short term stock price if they actually spent a dime.

To give an example - Fedex and UPS spent hundreds of millions of dollars to place orders for A380s in 2006 (the jet was not even fully designed yet) - just to save money 10-15 years from now. It is nor private business, but politicians who have an incentive to focus on the short term at the expense of the long term - the recent 'stimulus' plan is one illustration of that; the $50 trillion or so of US govt debt is a sadder example.

Uninformed opinions like yours are typically expressed by people who've never run a business in their lives - I'm curious about your business experience.

Re:Yup

[funky49]

"When my parents built their house 29 years ago the ISDN and cable stopped 2 blocks away. Now 30 years later how far is it? Why 2 blocks away, of course!

Nobody has laid any lines or upgraded shit around here in years because it might hurt the short term stock price if they actually spent a dime"

Sorry bro, tell that to my 20/5 FIOS connection at home.

After 30 years, perhaps you should move from your parents home so you can have better internet connectivity? :)

funky49

Re:Yup

[Paradise Pete]

When my parents built their house 29 years ago the ISDN and cable stopped 2 blocks away. Now 30 years later how far is it? Why 2 blocks away, of course!

Does the cable company have a monopoly? If so, then it is the fault of whoever's in charge of regulating that monopoly. If your local government is going to see fit to grant them, then it has to take the responsibility of watching over them. Granting a monopoly is much more than the city council nodding its collective head.

Re:Yup

[Rytr23]

Probably because while there are more BBs in the wild, the iPhone makes up the lions share of traffic from cell phones. source.

He is correct.

Re:Yup

[try_anything]

I agree, but AT&T has always been known for mediocre cell service. If you aren't known for being good at something, there's no point in being better than adequate. Everywhere I go, the AT&T network seems barely adequate (though the data bandwidth can be excellent in off-peak hours.) I wouldn't know, but I assume it takes careful management to achieve such a consistent level of mediocrity. And they know that consistent mediocrity means that any aberration from normal conditions (such as an event that attracts an unusual number of people to one place) results in terrible service or no service at all. I've learned not to rely on my AT&T service. I'm looking forward to switching back to Verizon as soon as I can get a Verizon iPhone or something similar. Verizon has always hung their reputation on the quality of their network, so they have an incentive to keep it from crapping out all the time.

Re:Yup

[try_anything]

I bet the average BlackBerry user consumes far less bandwidth than the average iPhone user. The iPhone is a media device; if you don't want media and web browsing, there's no reason to buy it. Many people with little interest in media and web browsing own Blackberries for purely business reasons. Plus, the iPhone's slick UI means people consume more bandwidth simply because it's more convenient. The lack of friction in the UI means iPhone users will start browsing the web at the drop of the hat, just because they're bored. Most people wouldn't access the web on a Blackberry without a reason -- at least that's true for a lot of older and cheaper Blackberry devices that account for many of RIM's subscribers.

Re:Yup

[yabos]

Verizon happily collected billions of dollars from the tax payers for years and did no such upgrades beyond slowly increasing their internet speeds. Finally after a lot of pressure they're actually upgrading their network.

Re:Yup

[Rytr23]

Just a cool billion?? they (ATT) are dumping 12 Billion into their wireless network

in 2009.. I guess we'll have super 3G!!

Re:Yup

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, ATT announced they are pouring $18 Billion into the 3G network for expansion and upgrades. The NodeB also has T3 backhaul capability that WILL be deployed in the major markets.

As for "you need EGDE/GSM/WCDMA blah blah blah for your data connection...."

The 3G iPhone uses the ATT UMTS network which is WCDMA, which is built upon the GSM Standard. A UMTS "UE" (iPhone for example), can use both UMTS (3G) and GSM/EDGE. Most of the time it will choose UMTS if available, but if you hand into GSM (IRAT) you will not hand back to 3G until you re-originate.

Also, 3G (UMTS) handles ALL TRAFFIC AS DATA and is packet switched. So a voice call is treated the same as a data session with different QoS requirements. Pile up a shitload of voice calls with high QoS requirements (5pm), and HTTP could easily suffer.

Re:Yup

[afidel]

Internet is starting to suck a lot less on the Blackberry as well. OS 4.5 makes the Blackberry browser very useable and Opera mini even more so. Heck on T-mobile I can even stream music just fine over EDGE using Slacker or Flycast. I'm not sure if your typical Blackberry user is as data intensive as I am (I doubt it) but you can certainly use as much bandwidth using a Blackberry as you can an iPhone.

Re:Yup

[afidel]

An iPhone user is not your typical user, the Blackberry plans start at $70/month and go up from there. The phone is subsidized by only a couple hundred dollars and requires a two year lock. The only thing that might make them slightly lower margin is whatever payments AT&T is making to Apple for the exclusive rights. I would expect first year profit to be in the couple hundred dollar per subscriber range and the second year to be very high margin.

Re:Yup

[randyest]

They'll have to dump a cool billion in order to upgrade.

Well, since AT&T grosses $2.1 billion/month off the iphone (30M iphones * $70/month minimum), that's about two week's worth of revenue. Oh woe is them!

Re:Yup

[dgatwood]

No, opinions like that are mostly held by people with business experience who see other businesses being run by (overpaid) complete morons. I've seen many, many businesses involved in short-term thinking that screws long-term profitability. Any time I see a new CEO brought in to "fix" a company, as a general rule, that's when it's time to sell the stock. Well, maybe wait until the new executive's short-term thinking has driven it up a bit, then dump the stock before it crashes. Either way. I've seen this too many times to believe that short-term thinking is unusual. It may not be the rule, but it certainly isn't the exception, either.

Indeed, short-term thinking is to blame for most of the current state of the economy. Betting your pension plans on high-yield, high-risk investments? Short-term thinking. Issuing loans that pay a high interest rate in spite of the risks because you know you're just going to sell the loan to somebody else anyway? Short-term thinking. Driving the stock market down rapidly because of a high number of people shorting the stock? Short-term thinking. And so on.

I tend to agree with the assessment that most companies, particularly those with entrenched monopolies like telecoms, tend to solely value short-term profit because they know they have little real competition, so their long-term profits are pretty much guaranteed in the absence of a significant disruptive technology (cell phones reducing land line use, for example). The only thing that will ever change this is removal of the monopoly---for example, passing laws that mandated cell phone unlocking after the initial contract period....

Re:Yup

[Widowwolf]

Yeah too bad that reports date is 01/03/2008, over 1 year ago..try getting some updated figures then replying

Re:Yup

[Anonymous Coward]

But instead, they chose to continue charging outrageous fees (and FORCING you to get an overpriced data plan)... without doing much to upgrade their network.

That may be true, but in the US, virtually ALL unlimited data plans are the same price: $30 per month, no tethering. This goes for Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint. The only exception was the $20 data plan for the original iPhone EDGE.

Re:Yup

[Bill_the_Engineer]

From your reference:

Apple is expected to sell 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008. Meanwhile, Research In Motion has 12 million subscribers, and its iconic BlackBerry is selling at a clip of about 4 million units a quarter...

Target markets for the iPhone and BlackBerry are starting to overlap as well. The iPhone is a media consumer's dream, playing movies and music with ease. But it's not as finely tuned for the corporate user...

The BlackBerry has long been the staple of corporate users who focused mostly on e-mail and calendar features, but Research In Motion has recently been aiming for high-end consumers who might buy the device for play as much as for work.

So from your source, Apple has more than 10 million media consumer's (a.k.a. High data volume), while RIM has more than 12 million email and calendar consumers (a.k.a. Low data volume). From the same article, RIM has just started aiming for the "high-end consumers".

Again this has more to do with market share (of the targeted demographic), since Apple has a much higher share of the high volume data consumers.

Handling mostly email and calendar data may make the Blackberry more network friendly, but not from any technical innovations ("superior" or otherwise).

Re:Yup

[Anonymous Coward]

Compression? Last I checked, even mobile Safari had support for gzip encoding. On demand loading and data chunking? Like AJAX? It's a shame web developers haven't kept up with standards defined years ago, but don't blame the browser/device.

Also, why is it that carriers overseas can stream TV from their phones and have so for years now but here in the states we get whining from the biggest carrier that it's just too hard?

Cry me a fucking river.

Re:Yup

[Red Flayer]

Indeed, short-term thinking is to blame for most of the current state of the economy. Betting your pension plans on high-yield, high-risk investments? Short-term thinking. Issuing loans that pay a high interest rate in spite of the risks because you know you're just going to sell the loan to somebody else anyway? Short-term thinking. Driving the stock market down rapidly because of a high number of people shorting the stock? Short-term thinking. And so on.

Isn't it ironic... every example you list is NOT an example of the failures of thinking only for the short-term.

Betting your pension plans on high-yield, high-risk investments?

The problem with that investment strategy is that people dismiss the risk. Those 15% annual returns of a few years ago simply outweigh the possiblity of losing it all, in the minds of those investors. Interestingly, a diversified high-risk/high-yield strategy outperforms a low-risk/low-yield strategy in the long term. When you are investing for the short term (i.e., you're close to retirement) is when you should use a low-risk strategy.

Issuing loans that pay a high interest rate in spite of the risks because you know you're just going to sell the loan to somebody else anyway?

That's not short-term thinking. That's smart business. Regardless of how it plays out in the long term, you've maximized your return. The problem is that the buyers of those risky loans underestimated the risk, and overvalued them. It's not a failure of planning for the long term, it's a failure to adequately estimate risk by the *buyers* of those loans.

Driving the stock market down rapidly because of a high number of people shorting the stock?

That's a good investment for the short term. And, once the stock price is unreasonably low, those short sellers can buy in to catch the price increase. This investment strategy is a good one for the investor -- can you really say that the people using this strategy aren't *personally* far better off than if they didn't use it?

A better example would be the American car companies cutting off R&D for production of a low-cost, high-mileage vehicle. Or price fixing that reduces the incentive to increase supply of a scarce good (e.g., electricity in CA).

I think you're right re: short-term thinking, I just think you could have used better examples. What's coming through to me based upon your examples is that many actors in the economy have chosen strategies that benefit them while causing problems for everyone else... related to to the classic Tragedy of the Commons. Those strategies ARE the best strategies for the individual, unless everyone cooperates.

Re:Yup

[omnichad]

If they charge everyone by actual usage, then we'd end up paying rates like T1's and T3's. I'd rather not pay hundreds of $$ per month just to get 1.5 mbps.

Re:Yup

[socz]

heyyyy the inet doesn't suck on a winmo device! I have a touch pro on sprint, and previously a titan (mogul).

They're bad ass and have evdo rev 1 inet on them.

Shoot, i have wifi router and spread the unlimited inet love!

I KNOW you can't do the same on iphone or blackberry, they aren't for people like me, or us.

Take a look at ppc geeks for those of you who have no clue about wimo.

It's not the only one but it's the best baby pah pah (Sublime)

Re:Yup

[sharkey]

When my parents built their house 29 years ago the ISDN and cable stopped 2 blocks away.

I'd be impressed if they had been able to pick a build site then based on ISDN, which is only about 25 years old, IIRC.

Re:Yup

[mdwh2]

Why? Cause the Internet sucks on a Blackberry/Windows Mobile device. The problem is, iPhone users ACTUALLY use the Internet/data other than e-mail. Why? Cause it doesn't suck.

Nice trolling. I check more than just email on my four year old non-smartphone. Can we have a bit more intelligent debate than "iPhone RuLeZ, Windoze suckS" please?

The problem is they claimed unlimited access, and failed to live up to it. Nothing to do with special IphonE powers (you were the one who said "This is not about iPhone versus Blackberry", after all - you're right, it's not).

An obvious recent comparison is broadband ISPs claiming unlimited downloads, then whining when people download too much. Same thing here.

Re:Yup

[mdwh2]

There's more than just the Iphone and Blackberry. If you're bringing in downloading media, then this became hip way back when 3G first appeared (i.e., long before the Iphone), and this was on mid-range phones too, not just smartphones. Using phones for media is commonplace now (although personally I'd rather put media on my phone directly, rather than download it on the phone at more expensive rates). And there are plenty of phones that have decent UIs out there (or at least, at least as good as a device that doesn't do copy/paste, or needs "hacks" to get working as a modem).

Re:Yup

[donny77]

Well, I'm not trolling, it's my opinion. I don't own an iPhone. I have a Cingular 8525. I've done some browsing on it. Pretty much useless unless the site has a special wap stylesheet. I used Opera for a bit, and it was better. I could actually read some pages Internet Explorer couldn't format, but it still sucked.

I have helped several people set up their iPhones and the browsing did not come close to sucking. Pages format EXACTLY like they would on my PC. Zooming, scrolling all intuitive.

Yes Blackberry and Windows mobile are "catching up." I haven't used the newer devices but I am on WM6, the last release for the 8525. When I look at how I've used my phone and what an iPhone can do versus other smart phones, my plan is to upgrade to an iPhone this summer after I know if they are releasing upgraded hardware or not.

One thing is for sure. The iPhone changed the rules. Would Blackberry and WM be improving the browsing experience if it wasn't for the iPhone? And this is compounding AT&T's problem, and it will soon be all cell carriers problem. As people start using their "unlimited" data, the wireless companies will be screwed. How do you provide a fat pipe to mobile users and scale it as people switch towers constantly?

Re:Yup

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually try 1.5M. All cell cites have 1 to 4 T1's for each tower.

Re:Yup

[RodgerDodger]

I'm actually impressed that in 1979, the ISDN lines stopped 2 blocks from your parent's house.

2 block and 9 years, that is - ISDN wasn't codified as a standard until 1988, with the early recommendations out in 1984.

Re:Yup

[Miamicanes]

> It was the iPhone (not the blackberry) that made wireless data marketable to the tech-savvy consumer

Um, no. It might have made data marketable to the NON-tech-savvy unwashed masses, but tech-savvy consumers were running WinMo on Sprint & Verizon YEARS before the first IPhone was sold. I'd personally put the American dawn of wireless data around the time the HTC Apache/PPC6700/XV6700 arrived. It was utterly dysfunctional as a device for making voice telephone calls, but made up for it by being a decent pocket laptop with perpetual internet access, and the thirdparty apps that eventually appeared fixed the worst and most intolerable of its deficiencies as a device for making phone calls.

American 3GSM sucks goatse.cx balls, but CDMA EV-DO from Sprint & Verizon was delivering cheap high-speed wireless data back when the rest of the world (besides maybe urban areas in Scandinavia) still thought EDGE was "fast".

Re:Yup

[DJRumpy]

I actually get better 3G speeds than WiFi speeds. I get typically over 2000kbps over 3g where I get 1000-1500 over wifi using the Speed Test app. I live in a major metropolitan area though. I agree the page loading is much to slow given the link speed. I've never understood that.

Makes me wonder if they open up the pipe for these bandwidth apps while throttling everything else.

Re:Yup

[hairyfeet]

I apologize if I got the tech wrong. It was whatever was decent on the telecom side 29 years ago...damned if I know what it was. Their house on dialup is a totally worthless 32k on a good day and 14k usual. My mom can literally throw a rock off her back porch and hit both the end of the cable and the DSL. You can see it pretty as you please, maybe two blocks.

In the 90s a bunch of us got together(and as for the earlier poster, I don't live there, I have a nice aprt downtown next to my shop) and since there were plenty of businessmen living there and I had just gotten a good check we all got together and tried to pay for it ourselves. We found out from a friend that worked as a lineman that the line to run it down that road would cost around 12k. So we offered them 15k plus having all 28 houses sign up to a 3 year maximum services plan, the full package. We figured that in total they would have made close to 250k off us in that three years. Do you know what they said? They wanted 75K PLUS the cost of the line PLUS the cost of the labor PLUS a FIVE year contract, because anything else just wasn't worth the effort.

To me this is a perfect example of how monopolies breed short term thinking. Instead of getting 250k over the 3 years their greed instead got them nothing. And for those that think the "free market" will fix it? dream on pal. We've had two different free markets attempts to service the area, one done by a friend of mine. He talked his boss into paying for a T3 run out there and then rented lines off it, kinda a mini ISP. The big teleco got wind when their $50 a month screw-u dialup plan starting dropping customers and then came up with some bullshit "number of connected nodes" crap and raised the price 400%+. Now the line rots in a field. And just year before last year we had a WISP set up trying to cover the entire county. Their prices went from $30 for 1.2Mb to $75 for 756k to now it is $125 with a $150 connect fee for a lousy 756k. When I asked why they are screwing themselves right out of the market they said the big teleco is putting the squeeze on them through the backbone for "playing in their sandbox". And just like my friend their lawyer told them it would cost 5-10 years and hundreds of thousands of $$$ to fight them in court.

So as much as I am all for little government, the simple fact is if we want nationwide broadband We, The People, will have to pay for the lines. The big telecos have their little fiefdoms and have no intention of giving them up or expanding service. They know they have their customers by the short hairs and simply don't give a fuck. As for the above poster and Fedex? They have UPS and USPS to compete with. Most of these telecos can say "suck it down or enjoy dialup" because they know their is NO competition. So my mom will have to get screwed with $50 14k dialup if she wants Ineternet service. There is simply no way she can give up two homes when she owes less than 25k for the pair. And unless We, The People run the lines all she and countless other Americans are going to get from the telecos is the finger. And I don't know about you, but I for one would like to have many choices for broadband instead of bending over and taking it like I have to do now. Most of us just can't give up our homes and livelihoods to escape the screwing.

Oh, and for the one that wanted it? I hereby release "Wall Street is just Las Vegas with nicer clothes" under the BSD license. Enjoy.

Re:Yup

[Just because I'm an]

To give an example - Fedex and UPS spent hundreds of millions of dollars to place orders for A380s in 2006

... and then withdrew them in 2007

Re:Yup

[dgatwood]

Even as an individual investor setting up a retirement account, betting an entire investment portfolio on any one type of stock is probably not the best judgment call, IMHO. That said, I was referring to institutional pension plans, not iRAs---talking about companies with pension plans that must remain financially solvent in the long-term while still being able to make payments in the short term choosing to back them with risky growth stocks or put large percentages of their money in certain types of funds like real estate because they are growing more rapidly at the time---looking at the short-term profits in certain areas and saying "let's put everything in that" instead of properly diversifying their portfolios to maximize their ability to ride out problems.

On the loan issue, it's only a smart business decision if you don't look at the bigger economic picture. Banks are hurting now, including banks that never held onto any of those loans. A weaker economy means people save less money. Less money in savings accounts means less interest for banks on those dollars. It means higher interest rates for the banks when they issue new loans, which means they can't issue as many loans and are forced to get less income off the sale of those loans. And so on. Everything a bank does that affects the economy ends up coming back and affecting them if enough banks do it. The only way it is a smart business decision is if you are the only bank engaging in such a practice (or nearly so). Your tragedy of the commons comment very much speaks to this example.

Short selling also has the disadvantage of causing such ripple effects. Again, it's one of those where if you look at it in isolation, it seems like a really smart business decision, but if it drives the economy as a whole down and other stocks that you are holding lose lots of their value, the difference can more than cancel out any gains from the shorting.

Like you said, it's the tragedy of the commons, which is all about looking at the short-term gains for you without considering the long-term damage to the environment in which you must survive.

Re:Yup

[try_anything]

You're wrong about the user interface. Remember how everyone complained, "I don't mind the iPhone as a product, but I can't stand how people who own them are constantly taking them out and playing with them just to show them off?" That's what I thought, too, until I got one and started pulling it out to read news on the web every time I had to wait in line for a few seconds. It was a completely new experience after years of button and stylus phones. Other devices made it possible many years ago, but the iPhone was the first device that made it pleasant enough that large numbers of people actually bothered.

Anecdotal evidence: I had a Nokia n800, which I thought was a really neat device, but it never seemed worth the hassle. I carried it on and off for several weeks, and then it started gathering dust. I didn't use any mobile device's browser (neither the n800 nor the ones in my various phones) more than once a month until I got my iPhone, then suddenly I was browsing the web away from home several times a day. The difference was usability (especially one-handed usability) and the slim form factor.

By now some slick, usable Blackberries are on the market, but I bet they account for a small percentage of RIM's subscribers. You have a point about tethering, but there's a difference between a handful of traveling businessmen tethering when they don't have any other option and a bunch of young people watching YouTube all day and not even bothering to look for wifi.

Re:Yup

[boarder2k7]

They'll have to dump a cool billion in order to upgrade.

Maybe Obama can bail out the AT&T network too! I mean, I don't really NEED that money anyway, so it might as well fix a network I don't use...

Re:Yup

[Rakarra]

I agree, but AT&T has always been known for mediocre cell service.

Have they? Back when it was Cingular around here in the Bay Area, they had the best network around. I've always gotten excellent Cingular, even AT&T coverage everywhere but deep in a national park. iPhone service though... that's just plain shoddy. Edge or 3G.

Re:Yup

[Rakarra]

You're wrong about the user interface. Remember how everyone complained, "I don't mind the iPhone as a product, but I can't stand how people who own them are constantly taking them out and playing with them just to show them off?" That's what I thought, too, until I got one and started pulling it out to read news on the web every time I had to wait in line for a few seconds. It was a completely new experience after years of button and stylus phones.

After I got my iPhone I started to do that too. The only problem is that by the time nearly any web site loads on my iPhone, I'm already a good ways through the line. Around here, AT&T's network is so congested that we measure web page loading time in minutes, not seconds.

Re:Yup

[Anonymous Coward]

ALL cell site radios are connected to a CO by some number of T1s and/or a microwave hop(determined by necessity and traffic throughput). The cell site's connection to the internet is through these T1s to the switch or NOC and then onward. Any problem anywhere along this path will limit function.
The problem with the iPhone is that while each T1 to the cabinet (on the cell site) is segmented into time slots, and most phones use only one time slot for any function, the iPhone uses 2 times slots for everything, necessitating double the hardware and bandwidth, or else choking the existing infrastructure.

Re:Yup

[perryizgr8]

Internet is starting to suck a lot less on the Blackberry as well. OS 4.5 makes the Blackberry browser very useable and Opera mini even more so. Heck on T-mobile I can even stream music just fine over EDGE using Slacker or Flycast. I'm not sure if your typical Blackberry user is as data intensive as I am (I doubt it) but you can certainly use as much bandwidth using a Blackberry as you can an iPhone.

that would be 64kbps mono crap i suppose. edge just does not have the data rate to stream bearable audio.

Re:Yup

[JimboFBX]

Yesterday got a speed app and was able to reduce the issue to the time it takes to connect to a source (often times 4 seconds). Once it connects it is fast but a typical webpage, for example, will have a lot of different sources to connect to in order to display the page. The web browser doesn't try connecting to them all at once, it only seems to connect one at a time. So you got the web page, then the images, then the flash (even though it doesnt know how to display it), then sub webpages, etc. The more domain names in the webpage the worse.

Slashdot is especially slow to connect to. I think typical time for the main page was like 1 1/2 minutes until recently slashdot trimmed the number of entries showing on the main page, so its now more like 45 seconds. Too bad there is no ad-block for the iphone that would speed things up a bit.

Re:Yup

[mcvos]

I'm not suggesting that the carriers don't want the iPhone, I'm saying that they're sacrificing their Network in order to do it. AT&T is being sued because their network can't scale up. They'll have to dump a cool billion in order to upgrade.

They already have a 3G network, right? How the hell did they possible get a 3G network that's unable to handle real 3G data?

How is it possible that AT&T's network has so much less bandwidth than European 3G networks? (My problem is coverage, especially inside supermarkters, for some reason. But when I have signal, I have bandwidth, and plenty of it.)

It really sounds like AT&T wanted this new tech, but tried to save a few cents by crippling the network. A really bad case of penny wise, pound foolish.

Re:Yup

[mcvos]

I apologize if I got the tech wrong. It was whatever was decent on the telecom side 29 years ago...damned if I know what it was.

A 300 baud modem on a normal phone line.

Re:Yup

[DJRumpy]

Somewhat off topic, and my apologies for that, but why would slashdot of all web pages NOT have a mobile version? I can download a slashdot "app", but all it does is open the full web page when you click on 'read more'. You would think /. of all pages would be more mobile tech friendly?

I love reading slashdot on the go, but it's painful with an iPhone as well.

Re:Yup

[Red Flayer]

Like you said, it's the tragedy of the commons, which is all about looking at the short-term gains for you without considering the long-term damage to the environment in which you must survive.

In a tragedy of the commons situation, the best strategy for each actor IS the one for short-term gain; acting for long-term sustainability is a poor strategy unless all actors are bound to act that way. This is one of the big justifications for regulation of financial activities. So even if an institution acts in a way that will sustain the golden goose, other actors can still kill the goose... meaning that sustainable strategy was a bad move.

Re:Yup

[tyanazai]

As the Ferengi rules of Acquisition states : "Expand, or die!"

Re:Yup

[Uberbah]

It is nor private business, but politicians who have an incentive to focus on the short term at the expense of the long term - the recent 'stimulus' plan is one illustration of that; the $50 trillion or so of US govt debt is a sadder example.

Utter nonsense - have you been in a coma for the last year? As collapsing bank after collapsing firm have proven, if given a choice between long term health of a company and short term astronomical profits, executives have gone for the latter.

Uninformed opinions like yours are typically expressed by people who've never run a business in their lives - I'm curious about your business experience.

And what business do you run, so I can tell my family, friends, and random strangers on the street not to patronize it?

Re:Yup

[anarkhos]

This is surprising...how?

Next you'll shock me that civil servants aren't prompt and courteous.

The reason Wall St. is a casino is because you have no better place to put your worthless pieces of paper we're all forced to use that isn't taxed to kingdom come. It's a racket!

WTF?

[jaavaaguru]

If you don't like the service, don't use it. It's that simple. Nobody's forcing you to choose Apple/AT&T.

Re:WTF?

[AvitarX]

Well they are forcing you to stick with them.

Re:WTF?

[iamflimflam1]

I have to agree. If the phone doesn't work take it back get a refund and cancel the contract.

Re:WTF?

[TheRealMindChild]

You see the bit in the summary/article "Breach of Express Warranty, Breach of Implied Warranty of Merchantability, Unjust Enrichment, Negligent Misrepresentation..."? This isn't about whining that it sucks. It is about them misleading you about how bad it sucks. By then, you are already nailed to a contract. If you think this is "ok", I have some free time and an ice pick handy...

Re:WTF?

[geekoid]

Except they are.
They claim it does all this wonderful stuff, you buy it and it doesn't work as promised*.

You cant switch providers or get your money back.

In that enviroment suing is the only avenue a consumer has.

Re:WTF?

[IthnkImParanoid]

Sure, but a) they are a business advertising a product and have a legal obligation to ensure their advertisements do not misrepresent their products' features and b) they are a party to a contract and have an obligation to uphold their end of that contract.

Nobody's forcing you to choose Apple/AT&T, but nobody's forcing Apple/AT&T to advertise and agree to terms they can't meet.

Re:WTF?

[Sigmon]

Um.. yes, AT&T _IS_ forcing one to use their service. You remember that little thing called a contract?

Granted, nobody forced me to *choose* them, but once they are chosen - I'm locked in for two years!

But what happens when after 6 months or 1 year my service begins to suck? Have I no recourse?

I have no idea if this lawsuit has merit or not, but an attitude of 'don't like it, don't use it' is likely an oversimplification of the situation.

Re:WTF?

[VV Cephei]

Er, regardless of whether they lock you into a contract, if they promise you one thing and deliver another, they are answerable in court.

You may have had no way of knowing their adverts were lies until _after_ you signed the contract.

This is the sort of thing we have governments for.

Re:WTF?

[peragrin]

Pull your head out of your ass about cell companies screwing American's. AT&T is GSM, verizon is Cdma of one type, sprint is CDMA of another incompatible type. This isn't Europe where everyone uses GSM. In order to switch GSM carriers in the USA you have a chploice of at&t or tmobile in some cities. Tmobile for me is as useful as using posion ivy leaves for toliet paper.

You need a whole other phone if you want to use verizon or sprint.

Re:WTF?

[Jawn98685]

If you don't like the service, don't use it. It's that simple. Nobody's forcing you to choose Apple/AT&T.

sigh..., RTFA.
This is not about "shopping". The suit is (in essence) for breach of contract. AT&T and Apple (as their agent) promised to deliver something and have failed to do so. A contract is a legal instrument that binds two or more parties. The plaintiffs' argument is that it is not reasonable for ATT/Apple to promise something like "Oh, sure. You'll have marvelous 3G bandwidth anywhere on this map...", when, in fact, the actual performance and availability is nowhere near that. Just as unreasonable is your implied contention that consumers would be able to determine the veracity of the vendors' claims prior to committing to the contract.

Re:WTF?

[troll8901]

I'm sure he meant "pay a cancellation fee and cancel the contract".

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes sense if you can see his sig.

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure he meant "pay a cancellation fee and cancel the contract".

Now why isn't anyone suing about this kind of thing? Why should you have to pay a cancellation fee to get rid of something that doesn't work?

Re:WTF?

[causality]

You see the bit in the summary/article "Breach of Express Warranty, Breach of Implied Warranty of Merchantability, Unjust Enrichment, Negligent Misrepresentation..."? This isn't about whining that it sucks. It is about them misleading you about how bad it sucks. By then, you are already nailed to a contract. If you think this is "ok", I have some free time and an ice pick handy...

Thanks for correcting how shortsighted the GP was (if you think that's unfair, feel free to tell me why). You'll find that anytime any large organization does something that's clearly and obviously wrong, people will come out of the woodwork to defend it. Additionally, the larger and more powerful the organization, the more true this seems to be; therefore these apologists are defending entities which are well able to defend themselves. The really strange thing is that most of them have no financial ties or anything like that which would make it merely selfish. The real nature of this is a bit more mysterious.

Conformists are looking for security and they may be looking for identity. Of course, this is a position of extreme weakness because a complete person does not derive important things like security and identity from externals. Those things are found from within; the external type makes a mockery of the real article and it always has strings attached. No one offers what you should provide for yourself without also wanting to make you dependent on them. Governments and marketers understand this. So, what I think is going on is that most people are such conformists that they identify with whoever or whatever is prominent, or successful, or mainstream, or well-established, or powerful in the hopes that some of those traits will transfer to them.

The actual nature of the entity, be it a peer group or a company or a government, doesn't seem to matter. What does seem to matter is how large the entity is and how much of a public presence it has, how identifiable it is. This process of conformity is not a conscious choice, because if the person realized that there is a choice in the matter they would never go along with this process. It's more like their failure to find their own security and their own identity creates an inner vacuum that the external world rushes in to fill.

From their point of view, they find themselves expressing feelings that have no rational basis. They often get upset when you question them about it, which should be a dead giveaway that something's not right. It's a hard truth that most human beings operate under this system. No one who really believes in what they say has a reason to get upset when you question them, or disagree with them, or reject what they advocate. They may discuss their belief or they may debate you but there's nothing to get upset about.

Re:WTF?

[nolife]

If you don't like this article, don't read and reply to it. It is that simple. Nobody's forcing you to participate in the this discussion.

Re:WTF?

[cornercuttin]

You'll find that anytime any large organization does something that's clearly and obviously wrong, people will come out of the woodwork to defend it. Additionally, the larger and more powerful the organization, the more true this seems to be; therefore these apologists are defending entities which are well able to defend themselves.

that quote gives me a hard-on. nothing better could describe Apple and its defenders.

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. No one mentioned CDMA. You CANNOT switch between *GSM* carriers without hacking the phone.

That is without even considering WHY most of the carriers continue using old incompatible protocols.

Re:WTF?

[PickPacket]

You can cancel your contract. You'll pay a nice penalty, but you can cancel. They are not forcing you to use their service.

Re:WTF?

[yada21]

they are a business advertising a product and have a legal obligation to ensure their advertisements do not misrepresent their products' features

More govenment interence in the market's. When will all the red tape end?

Re:WTF?

[causality]

You'll find that anytime any large organization does something that's clearly and obviously wrong, people will come out of the woodwork to defend it. Additionally, the larger and more powerful the organization, the more true this seems to be; therefore these apologists are defending entities which are well able to defend themselves.

that quote gives me a hard-on. nothing better could describe Apple and its defenders.

Or Microsoft and its defenders. Or government when people buy into the lie that safety is more important than freedom. It applies equally to any of these. These apologists become what Lenin referred to as "useful idiots." The fanboys who unconditionally defend the decisions of i.e. Microsoft do so because they like Microsoft and Microsoft made the decision, not because the decision was sound and well-founded. That's why they defend the good and the bad with no regard for whether it's actually defensible. That's also why it's a form of mindlessness.

It's almost a form of worship, though it's a pathological one. This false loyalty is actively encouraged in our society; not by advocacy (in fact it's rarely discussed) but by example. You see it with sports teams, celebrities, institutions, and religions. It's a shame because no one can participate in it without first learning how to lie to themselves. If you ever wonder why so many people are weak, timid, easily distracted, undisciplined, and easily deceived, this is where much of it begins.

It never seems to occur to them that a correct idea can stand on its own merits and does not need a choir to sing its virtues. What I just said there is the very antithesis of the concept of "marketing" and shows how easy it is to find the glaring flaw in it. It's just another form of mindlessness; like all forms of mindlessness, its purpose is to control or at least to influence on the basis of something other than self-evident truth.

An interesting effect is that the more people engage in this sort of maladaptive conformity, the harder it's going to hit them when they later realize that it was wrong. It's a form of inertia. Right or wrong, the more heavily invested you are in an idea the more you are going to resist changing it even when every objective viewpoint shows that you should. It reminds me of that saying, "no matter how far down the wrong path you have travelled, turn back."

Re:WTF?

[taskiss]

"nobody forced me to *choose* them"

Once you realized that, how can you continue to delude yourself that you're being forced?

You don't really have a valid argument once the premise is proven illogical, and buddy, yours is illogical.

Re:WTF?

[tepples]

You can cancel your contract. You'll pay a nice penalty, but you can cancel.

Why should I pay a penalty if the other party didn't uphold its end of the agreement?

Re:WTF?

[try_anything]

Actually, this mentality comes from disenchantment with the legal system that is carefully cultivated by businesses to give themselves a legal leg up on consumers. If you convince people that the legal system is unable to decide consumer complaints justly according to their merits, then logically, there are only two choices: trust the corporations' word on everything or allow them to be torn apart by jealous parasites.

So, if you make people cynical about lawsuits by individuals, people see every consumer complaint as a threat to the production of all the food, services, and cool stuff that we currently enjoy. That is, a threat to capitalism and all we know as good.

Companies are happy to rely the legal system to regulate relations among themselves when they can't get along, of course. Then they gang up on consumers to exclude them from the system because they don't have to rely on lawsuits to hold consumers to their word -- that's what credit reporting services are for.

Frankly, I'd love to see our ridiculous liability system restored to some kind of sanity and credibility. Then corporations will have to face more public responsibility. These days, when a company gets walloped in court for blatant fraud and dishonesty, people don't take it very seriously because business interests make sure there's a steady stream of ridiculous personal injury lawsuits in the news. I have to admit they have a point, but they don't invest billions in cultivating our cynicism just as a public service.

Re:WTF?

[causality]

Actually, this mentality comes from disenchantment with the legal system that is carefully cultivated by businesses to give themselves a legal leg up on consumers. If you convince people that the legal system is unable to decide consumer complaints justly according to their merits, then logically, there are only two choices: trust the corporations' word on everything or allow them to be torn apart by jealous parasites.

So, if you make people cynical about lawsuits by individuals, people see every consumer complaint as a threat to the production of all the food, services, and cool stuff that we currently enjoy. That is, a threat to capitalism and all we know as good.

Companies are happy to rely the legal system to regulate relations among themselves when they can't get along, of course. Then they gang up on consumers to exclude them from the system because they don't have to rely on lawsuits to hold consumers to their word -- that's what credit reporting services are for.

Frankly, I'd love to see our ridiculous liability system restored to some kind of sanity and credibility. Then corporations will have to face more public responsibility. These days, when a company gets walloped in court for blatant fraud and dishonesty, people don't take it very seriously because business interests make sure there's a steady stream of ridiculous personal injury lawsuits in the news. I have to admit they have a point, but they don't invest billions in cultivating our cynicism just as a public service.

I believe you missed my point. Corporations have such powers as you describe because of this sort of conformity. Like most other potential adversaries, they have no power over you except for what you give to them. The demoralization you describe is part of that power. The mindlessness I described is why we, as a society, have given them so much power. They in turn use that power to exercise undue influence over the legal system and our politicians. If they first tried to do that without the allegiance of the useful idiots, then people would call it by its proper name, a power grab, and would refuse to go along with it.

Those useful idiots are conformists with no real selfhood, no real identity of their own. Their choice is to either embrace this falsehood wholeheartedly or to face the very painful truth of how empty their lives have become. The second choice is the beginning of wisdom but it is not for the faint of heart.

What I was getting at was a general process behind a common way that human beings become compromised. By "compromised" I refer to the fact that most human beings have ideas and beliefs, including strong ones, that are not the result of careful and deliberate evaluation which means that they can only be the result of indoctrination and undue influence. Thus, they are not themselves and they advocate, even passionately, ideas that are not their own because someone else put them there. While they do so, they actually believe that they have made a free choice. There is a saying, "no one is more hopelessly imprisoned than he who falsely believes that he is free."

Lawsuits and the legal system is just one domain to which it applies. What you describe is correct on its level. It's just a departure from how simple the underlying principles really are because you are focusing on effects and not ultimate causes.

I will add one more thing that you may be missing because I sense that you still look at this in terms of victor and victim. The people who run our society and its corporations, who appear to perpetrate this system on everyone else, are even more compromised than those they try to control. Many of them are what you may call "lost" or "too far gone". On some level they are aware of this system and realize that it offers only two choices: take advantage or be taken advantage of. Because they are not strong enough or virtuous enough to correctly deal with this, they decide that "take advantage" is the m

Re:WTF?

[shutdown -p now]

He is being forced to continue using their service while they do not uphold their part of the deal (that of providing working 3G connectivity). The reason why he made his choice of going with them was because there would be 3G. Now, some time later, there's no 3G. Why shouldn't he sue?

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

But you can switch. You can cancel your service in the first thirty days with no penalty. If you don't take the time to test out your new equipment in that time then it's really on your head. You have to have the sense to know that despite the random protestations of the customer service rep who insists things are fine or going to get better soon, that the rep likely has no idea and your phone is going to work the same (poorly, if you're looking to cancel) for the forseeable future.

Yes the adverts say the iPhone is amazing and ultra fast. Do you expect any different? Were you looking for "New: iPhone 3G. It's pretty good... in most places."?

Re:WTF?

[NoobixCube]

I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that you're either studying or have studied in University psychology with a major in social studies. If you haven't, then you probably should :P

Re:WTF?

[mdwh2]

Heaven forbid that Apple has to play by the same fraud laws that everyone else does.

Although yes, I fully agree that people shouldn't use it. Which is why it's important to publicise these issues, so that it isn't drowned out by the "Now you can copy and paste, isn't that Revolutionary?" stories.

Re:WTF?

[try_anything]

I think you missed the fact that I was disagreeing with you in the explanation of people's behavior. People have little imagination, and for most people, almost any impulse takes them in the direction of conformity. They can find group identity and ready-made identities on the right or on the left, through worship of corporations or enmity to them. (But you know that already.)

What the corporations are doing is slightly more subtle than just offering an opportunity for conformism. Their reasoning even allows people who distrust corporations to believe that trusting corporations over consumers is the least bad option.

Re:WTF?

[glitch23]

Why should I pay a penalty if the other party didn't uphold its end of the agreement?

In my own little world, if the other party didn't hold up their end of the agreement then the contract is already broken and I don't owe a thing. I know, I know, try convincing the carrier of that.

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. You are welcome to file a lawsuit against the other party to uphold their end of the contract. Oh wait...

Re:WTF?

[perryizgr8]

Now why isn't anyone suing about this kind of thing? Why should you have to pay a cancellation fee to get rid of something that doesn't work?

that's exactly what all this suing is about.

Re:WTF?

[causality]

I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that you're either studying or have studied in University psychology with a major in social studies. If you haven't, then you probably should :P

I'm not a doctor or a psychologist or any other sort of medical practitioner, so you may consider what follows to be my personal opinion.

Several years ago I would have agreed with you. However, I did not need to study psychology for very long to realize that it's incapable of providing the deep meaning and truly satisfying answers that I was after at the time. The medical model is it's most recognizable flaw, because under that model all conditions of mind are divided into the desirable and the undesirable. It naturally follows that the latter category is to be treated or medicated away rather than appreciated and thoroughly understood. If that medical model were the path to true health, then the number of people who take some kind of psychological medication would be decreasing. Instead, it is increasing and at a rate which should make it obvious that we are missing something fundamental. Rather than acknowledge this, the practitioners continue to treat and medicate what they really do not understand. If they did understand, they would know how to cure and prevent. If they had true enlightenment, they would give us a few childishly simple principles instead of many complex explanations.

Likewise while it is not a "hard" science, psychology is limited to those things to which the scientific method can be applied, meaning it necessarily comes from a materialistic bias. What comes with that materialism is scientific positivism, so the dominant mentality is "if we can't describe it with mathematics, it does not exist." Thus, psychology has no choice but to deny the nonphysical and spiritual nature of human beings. Effectively this means that only a small fraction of what a human being actually is could be addressed under its system.

Evidence of what I am saying can be found in the swiftness with which a materialist would dismiss this objection instead of addressing it, and in many cases, the anger or indignation with which they would do so. It's not unlike how the more narrow-minded and insecure religious people respond when you question their doctrine. Science is supposed to be different, except that materialism is one of its few assumptions; like all assumptions, it's a matter of faith. Once faith is invested in the system, only then can objective evidence be gathered under it and conclusions drawn from within it, in accordance with Aristotelian logic and other rules of the system. It's important then to recognize the limitations of that system. Only external physical things which can be subjected to experimentation and logic can be addressed by science. With human beings, that means behavior.

Due to this, psychology's only real use is in manipulating or engineering behavior and at providing elaborate yet superficial explanations for why its manipulations are effective. This is an inventory of knowledge and its pragmatic application, not true understanding. That is also why it leads to more complexity and not to simplicity. Psychologists know in terms of probability the behavioral tendencies of the average person. They have rigorous descriptions of disorders and dis-ease states. They know which effect a given adjustment or pharmaceutical can cause and from experience, they know how to apply them. They know that if you make this adjustment here or apply this pharmaceutical there, you can obtain something closer to the desired outcome. That is what I mean by an inventory of knowledge. Hopefully you can see how external and superficial this really is. It's a shame that the difference between cleverness and true wisdom is not more widely understood.

When psychologists with good intentions attempt to help others, what you end up with is the blind leading the blind. I like to say that if you want to throw someo

Re:WTF?

[causality]

I think you missed the fact that I was disagreeing with you in the explanation of people's behavior. People have little imagination, and for most people, almost any impulse takes them in the direction of conformity. They can find group identity and ready-made identities on the right or on the left, through worship of corporations or enmity to them. (But you know that already.)

What the corporations are doing is slightly more subtle than just offering an opportunity for conformism. Their reasoning even allows people who distrust corporations to believe that trusting corporations over consumers is the least bad option.

Almost everything is "slightly more sublte" than its outward manifestation. The political results (trusting the untrustworthy) occur on a more mundane level than what I intended to address. They are also effects. The fact that most people are broken and incomplete (conformity being one answer to this problem, or more accurately, a way to hide from it) and therefore derive important parts of their being from external things is the cause. It is, in fact, the cause of causes for every last one of these problems. Complete human beings with enlightenment and wisdom would never find the reasoning you mention to be convincing or tempting. Because they are complete, they would not be suckered into this type of false dichotomy. They would have none of the personal vulnerabilities on which the deception of false ideas is built.

I should explain that a bit more because unfortunately you will not find this in modern education. At one time, various clergy may have understood this (albeit within their terminology) but they have long since abandoned wisdom for the sake of piety and doctrine. That's why they resent, why they don't forgive, why they care about political power, why they don't love other people, why many of their congregation are divorced, etc. At any rate, like other constructs, deception must be built on a foundation. That foundation is made of weaknesses and personal shortcomings that people excuse and dismiss instead of recognizing and correctly addressing.

Most people are completely at the mercy of their thoughts and feelings and thus, their impulses. This means that they are reactive and undisciplined and will respond to various forms of pressure because they are externally motivated. Thus, if they were engines you would say that stress is their fuel. That makes them putty in the hands of masterful manipulators such as modern marketing and public relations practitioners.

The manipulators know how to control those who look to external things for their motivation because they know that this is an accurate definition of suggestibility. It's simple, really. They make a suggestion which creates a thought. The thought creates an emotion which in turn creates an impulse. The impulse leads to an action and that action was the desired outcome all along. The nature of the desired outcome determines the nature of the initial suggestion.

The initial suggestion might be sex, violence, humor, or any number of emotionally charged things commonly seen in advertising. It might be small children so that instinctive maternalistic/paternalistic thoughts and feelings can be exploited to make the associated impulse seem more natural. Nothing is sacred to these people -- hopefully you see how diabolical this really is. The audience believes that their thoughts and emotions were natural reactions to what was presented rather than carefully engineered responses. This denial allows them to believe that the action to which they were led was their own decision. To weak people who gauge the truth of a thing according to its palatability, belief in this mockery of free will is far less frightening than the realization that they are little more than slaves. Thus, the bars of this prison cell are made of fear.

Re:WTF?

[NoobixCube]

I once considered studying psychology, since everyone always came to me for insight and understanding. I decided against it for reasons similar to what you've discussed in your post, though condensed to one sentence: a textbook about 'average' humans won't help me understand anyone on a personal level (though your post goes into greater depth, of course, about psychology in general. My reasons were more self-centred). I don't have any questions, really, but I would like to say it's nice to read someone else's longwinded post for a change (I try to refrain from making longwinded posts, because the response is usually "tl,dr"). I have a mind that tends to wander a bit, but when I seize on a single idea, I can talk about it for hours. Plus the related topics that it brushes on. A very useful skill for writing essays, when it can be focused.

I'd just like to say, I did read your whole post, and I thank you for explaining yourself so well. The writing is commendable. I even looked up "namaste", since I'd only heard it once before. At the time, I wasn't near a computer, so I couldn't look it up. By context I figured it was a simple greeting. I don't know if there's an appropriate response to it, so I'll just close by saying

Namaste

Re:WTF?

[causality]

I once considered studying psychology, since everyone always came to me for insight and understanding.

Let's say that there is a reason for that and that I can sense when I am dealing with such a person. Whether they are in the room with me, on the telephone, or on a Web site and potentially thousands of miles away is no obstacle. True insight and understanding are not the product of a deductive or inductive process, though these lower-level processes can help you to put them into words for the benefit of others. The real insight comes from connecting to the source of inspiration and it is a Divine thing, to be honored and respected by means of correct use. Connected to that source, difficult things become easy and complex things become simple and intuitive. It gives human beings the ability to perceive the true nature of things and to know the truth when they hear it. That brightness in you that others have recognized is a true gift.

I'd just like to say, I did read your whole post, and I thank you for explaining yourself so well. The writing is commendable.

Like all good things that are done for the right reason, authoring that post was its own reward. You could, in fact, reject every last part of it and insult me for writing it and this would have no power whatsoever to remove the joy I found in it. That is the contrast to what I meant by "externally motivated." Trying to upset me (especially without cause) would injure your joy and well-being, however, so it's a delight to know that you feel no such temptation. I'm not suggesting you would really be malicious, of course; I just wanted to give you a better idea of where this comes from.

When people derive important parts of their being from externals and not from the True Source, they become leaves in the wind and their joy is subject to events and outcomes which are largely beyond their control. Even their "joy" makes a mockery of joy because it is not pure; it is dependent on outcome. This is the only mode of being that psychology recognizes. The number one external with which people make this mistake is the approval and praise of other people. If you suffer without a person's approval, then you are that person's slave. This is the single biggest mistake that men make with women: they think they can have a healthy relationship at the same time that they need that woman for anything. It is a little-known fact that you can bully with phony kindness even more easily than you can bully with cruelty. When men make this mistake, they bring out the worst in a woman, the ruthlessly clever ability to manipulate, and quickly become its prey.

Subscribing to this system and its equivalents which are found in business and politics is the reason why genuine people who interact with no ulterior motives are so rare. Most of them are ignorant, operating on a sort of autopilot, and would be horrified if they could see just how fake they really are. A few of them are aware of it and enjoy the mindgames and the feeling of power; those people are very far gone. The antidote to this is quite simple: there are few things I know of which are more powerful than a truly pure motive.

I even looked up "namaste", since I'd only heard it once before. At the time, I wasn't near a computer, so I couldn't look it up.

You may find several meanings of "namaste." The one I like best is "that which is Divine within me salutes that which is Divine with you." It is a reminder of our true nature.

Re:WTF?

[try_anything]

Complete human beings with enlightenment and wisdom would never find the reasoning you mention to be convincing or tempting. Because they are complete, they would not be suckered into this type of false dichotomy. They would have none of the personal vulnerabilities on which the deception of false ideas is built.

False ideas don't require personal vulnerabilities. Any attempt to engage with the world produces false ideas, because we are ignorant and fallible beings.

Personal wisdom and enlightenment can reduce one's vulnerability to manipulation, but it does not answer political questions. It can tell me why I'm scared, but if my fear is based on the prospect of an undesirable outcome, spiritual wisdom cannot tell me whether the outcome is plausible or likely. Even if you reject fear as a basis for thought and action, you will still find yourself agreeing with it quite often. For instance, assuming you have not yet achieved perfect enlightenment, you are probably scared of injecting heroin. You were manipulated into this fear by information and media provided by people who want you to be scared of injecting heroin. Spiritual wisdom allows you to realize that you are scared and manipulated, but it does not answer the question of whether or not it is a good idea to inject heroin.

In general, there's no way to dodge the necessity of examining everything on its merits, and no way to get out of the catch-22 that all the information you consume is produced, directly or indirectly, by people who care about what you do and believe. Rejecting all self-interested manipulation would mean rejecting almost all human interaction. It would certainly make it impossible to learn anything about politics. As for fear, you can reject fear, but you can't simply say, "Fear is on one side of the issue, so I must be on the other." The presence of fear is informative, but it is not that informative.

To go back to the example at hand, wisdom cannot advise me to ignore the issue, nor can it resolve the issue one way or the other. After all, the bogeyman prospect is a story of how the current legal system is vulnerable to exploitation and how that will affect American business. Wisdom helps, but not the kind of wisdom you're talking about. The issue must be approached by seeking information, reading opposing viewpoints, and discussing it.

3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[Andy Dodd]

Sounds from the comments on that article that the iPhone's CPU just isn't fast enough to take advantage of 3G data rates even with a 3G radio present.

Based on those that commented on the linked article that their laptop data card was fast and my own experience with an AT&T Tilt in 3G coverage areas, it's *not* the network. The only time I have 3G speed problems is when I'm in a fringe area with only one bar of signal strength.

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[Anonymous Coward]

But it handles WiFi data just fine which is in most cases faster than 3G. I doubt the phone itself is the issue.

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[Anonymous Cowbell]

Listen, new guy, a word of advice: don't be so quick to jump to a corporate giant's defense here on Slashdot. You'll thank me later. Just toss out a "lame" and be done with it.

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[novitk]

WiFi works well, so it's not the CPU on the phone. At least here in NYC the problem is not even the slow speed, as much as the the network is so oversubscribed that the phone can't get any response and the browser just times out.

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[UnknowingFool]

According to Macworld:

"Filed in the United States District Court, District of New Jersey, Damone Dickerson claims that Apple misrepresented the speed, strength and performance of the 3G network."

There was no link to the actual suit, but it makes it sounds like the guy is blaming both Apple and AT&T because the 3G connection on his iPhone is slow. How much really is it because of the iPhone and how much is it due to the network itself. If the problem is with the network, how much of it on Apple to fix AT&T's network?

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[Volante3192]

I dunno, AT&T's 3G network seems to not be that great all around. I've got an LG CU400 that 'supports' 3G, but every time the phone connected with 3G, it'd stop working. I'd have to powercycle it and use it in the brief period between when EDGE connected and when 3G took over.

I ended up having to find the maintenance code to get into the hardware config and explicitly turn off 3G.

Phone's worked flawlessly ever since.

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[shawnce]

Page rendering is rather fast on the iPhone when supplied by WiFi which easily exceeds 3G data rates in all but the rarest of situations. It isn't a CPU issue. Now it could be a 3G chip set issue... however I bet it is primarily latency that is killing fast rendering when using 3G. 3G latency is bad in general and given how "native" the Mobile Safari accesses websites it feels the full effects of this latency (unless a pre-fetching proxy, etc. is assisting the phone pipeline things... which is what BB does IIRC).

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[Anonymous Coward]

WiFi works well, so it's not the CPU on the phone. At least here in NYC the problem is not even the slow speed, as much as the the network is so oversubscribed that the phone can't get any response and the browser just times out.

"Well" is relative. On wifi my HTC Diamond loads /. in half the time of my wife's iPhone. That could be browser efficiency, though, since I'm using Opera

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[shamborfosi]

I have a 3G laptop card and an iPhone. The laptop card works great in less dense areas. When I even get near downtown Chicago I have full bars of signal strength and really slow page loading. This same thing happens with the iPhone. My point is that it isn't the devices that are the problem; it's the network. Anecdotally, I started to notice the degradation on my laptop card in the Summer of '08.

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, your phone doesn't work when connected to the 3G network, and you blame the network?

I doubt AT&T is that incompetent to make a completely inoperable 3G network, there might just be some fault with the phone.

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[nxtw]

on my iPhone, going to Slashdot locks up the browser temporarily while it renders. It also sometimes fails to render properly.

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[Michael.LTN]

I use the iPhone on Rogers in Ontario, Canada and have had nothing but great success with 3G. There are even times I've disabled the WiFi I use at a University because peak traffic makes it slower than 3G. As much as I dislike Rogers as a company, I have to admit that the service I've had with them has been outstanding. I feel bad for anyone south of the border who is getting shite service from AT&T.

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[jabithew]

What would really sort out this is if someone on O2 would chip in with their USD0.02. O2 seem to be more responsive to consumer demand and a better-run company than AT&T.

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[philipgar]

Just because wifi works fine does not mean the CPU is not the bottleneck. I do not own an iphone, and don't know how the implementation of the radio stack on it, but it is entirely possible that stages of the data reception/transmission are handled by the CPU (or possibly a separate DSP) on the iPhone. In this case, if this CPU is not powerful enough, the iPhone can't max out the 3G bandwidth. Just because a different protocol that uses an entirely different radio stack that requires different processing power works fine does not mean all radio stacks do.

phil

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[NeoSkandranon]

That happens to some of us when we look at slash on PCs...

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[Andy Dodd]

Yup. I don't know about the iPhone's architecture, but the Qualcomm MSM7200 used in the AT&T Tilt uses a separate ARM core to handle radio functions. (Leading to a misconception that it was "dual core" even though the second core is best thought of as a "radio coprocessor" and is not only a different speed from the main applications core but I believe a slightly different architecture - there are multiple slight variants of the ARM architecture).

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[shipofgold]

I can't speak for iPhone but I have AT&T 3G service, using an 8525 (HTC something or other). I similarly think the rendering in the phone sucks. It is painful if I try to use the Windows Mobile 5 with the phone's built-in MSIE. However, if I tether the my laptop to my phone via USB, I am delighted with the 3G speeds. I connect to a corporate network via VPN and speeds seem almost as fast as my DSL at home. I've used it for hours this way. WWW pages that take minutes to load on the phone are pretty swift on the laptop. Same quantities of data.

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[Brandee07]

What's really happening is similar to what's happened at the last few Macworld and WWDC gatherings- a huge mass of iPhones focused around a few towers can bring the whole network to its knees.

We're just seeing that strain all the time in metro areas, instead of at a few specific gatherings.

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[tepples]

on my iPhone, going to Slashdot locks up the browser temporarily while it renders.

It's not just the iPhone. I've seen Slashdot lock the browser for several seconds on an eight-year-old Dell PC running Firefox 3 on Windows and an Asus Eee PC 900 running Firefox 3 on Ubuntu. It's even worse in Opera on Wii. And Slashdot is pretty much the only site that I visit regularly where that happens.

It also sometimes fails to render properly.

The iPhone web browser is based on the same engine used in Safari and Google Chrome. Does it also fail to render in Safari on a full-size PC?

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[nxtw]

Never tried Safari. I use Opera on Windows and OS X and Slashdot renders quickly & without issues.. except on the last Opera 10 build I tried.

Digg comment threads used to result in very high CPU consumption in in Opera, however.

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[x102output]

iPhone uses deperate chip for radio. It's an Infineon PMB8878 chip.

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[x102output]

d'oh. "seperate"

was too click-happy.

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like someone is working on reformatting slashdot for the iPhone.

http://pixelcity.com/slashdot/

http://pixelcity.com/s

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[bemymonkey]

Turning off Slashdot 2.0 seems to help... The Classic discussion system flies...

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[thynk]

I don't know, I too have a Tilt and have noticed a significant drop in speed when in the closest 3G area to my house (600k avg to 200k).

I'm hopeful that AT&T will expand 3G to where I live in the next year, they have done a pretty good job of rolling it out in CO on time. And compared to the other services (Verizon, CMDA), get the best coverage in this area.

I think they may have oversold their bandwidth a touch.

Re:3G iPhone not all it's cracked up to be?

[beelsebob]

1) WiFi works just fine at 54Mb/s
2) The iPhone has a 645Mhz ARM in it that plays competes well (read is lots faster than) even the PSP's.

The iPhone CPU is not super fast by phone standards any more (it was about 2-3 times more powerful than anything when it was released), but it's perfectly capable of dealing with 3G.

good

[pak9rabid]

Good...it's high time somebody smack them around in court for their bullshit data service. Although the connection to the tower is fine, it's slow as balls from the tower out. I mean christ, I experience lag when typing via an ssh session, something I haven't experienced since the dark ages of dialup.

Re:good

[jargon82]

ssh lag is a really bad example. 3g has reasonable bandwidth but rather high latency. Stuff like ssh will always visibly lag, and this is not at all specific to AT&T.

Re:good

[Anonymous Coward]

"Although the connection to the tower is fine"

How is this Apple's fault then, unless you count the fact that you can get iPhones in their Apple stores?

Re:good

[pak9rabid]

How is this Apple's fault then, unless you count the fact that you can get iPhones in their Apple stores?

It's not Apple's fault technically, but I could see them getting the blame for false advertising.

Sue-Happy

[writerjosh]

These guys are just sue-happy. They see a profitable buisiness (Apple) and want a piece of their pie. Every company that ever existed on the face of the earth has said theirs is the "best". Maybe 3G isn't that fast. Maybe they did hype it a bit, but sue them over it? Jeeze, if every consumer that was dissatisfied with their purchase were to sue, we'd all be in court for a lifetime. Get over it.

Re:Sue-Happy

[geekoid]

It doesn't even come close to the promised performance, or so they claim.

With lock in contracts, and the current no refund policy most places have, what other recourse does someone who has been lied to have?

If I buy a DVD player and it doesn't work, I can take it back and get my money back. So suing is clearly not needed. Unless it explodes and burns my house down.

Re:Sue-Happy

[Aladrin]

If they weren't locked into a contract, they wouldn't have to sue over it.

Most purchases can be returned when the product doesn't work as advertised. Usually this is because the store has a return policy to keep their customers happy, but some of the time it's the law.

In this case, there not only isn't a policy like that, there's a contract guaranteeing that you have to -continue- paying for it.

Re:Sue-Happy

[Samschnooks]

Jeeze, if every consumer that was dissatisfied with their purchase were to sue, we'd all be in court for a lifetime. Get over it.

Or, how about businesses represent their products truthfully? For example, unlimited actually meaning unlimited - no bullshit mice type with "conditions". The same goes for Apple. And maybe, just maybe, if there were more lawsuits, business would stop BSing people and tell the truth about their product. I have to wonder, how many people paid all that money for Apple's phone because they expected the performance advertised. I think Apple hyped the product to justify their outlandish price.

Re:Sue-Happy

[The End Of Days]

I believe you have thirty days to return the phone and cancel the contract without the early termination charges, which brings this back firmly into the land of whiny bitch.

From AT&T's website:

Cancellations/Early Termination Fee: An Early Termination Fee of $175 may be assessed against you in the event that you terminate your Wireless Service Agreement and/or selected plan before the expiration of its term. For Service activated on or after May 25, 2008, the Early Termination Fee will be reduced by $5.00 for each full month toward your minimum term that you complete. You may cancel your service, for any reason and without incurring the Early Termination Fee, within thirty (30) days of signing your Wireless Service Agreement, PROVIDED, however, that if you cancel service you will remain responsible for any service fees and charges incurred. If you cancel within three (3) days of signing your Wireless Service Agreement, you will be entitled to a refund of your activation fee, if any. If you exercise this option, you may be required to return devices and associated accessories purchased in connection with your Wireless Service Agreement.

Re:Sue-Happy

[ink]

What if you want to cancel the service a year later, after the network clogs up due to hordes of iPhone users? The answer is a lawsuit, and bringing one does not a whiny bitch make. I've noticed that these 2 and 3-year contracts are now seeping into cable and satellite service. It's despicable, anti-competitive, free-market destroying corporatism at its finest. They only get away with it because their insular oligarchies make them de-facto mopolies.

Bring on the lawsuits, I say. This crap has to end at some point -- or we'll eventually be signing 5-year contracts for grocery store loyalty.

Re:Sue-Happy

[holmstar]

So what if they gave priority to accounts that have been active less than a month? Your first month of service would be great, and suddenly it starts to suck after 30 days. Too bad for you, you have to pay now if you want to quit.

Re:Sue-Happy

[The End Of Days]

As soon as you're forced to purchase a cell phone, or cable service, or satellite service, then I'll agree it's despicable. Since absolutely no one is forced to do so, however, I'm sticking with whiny bitch.

I won't bother to address the slippery slope grocery store bullshit aside from this derision. Consider your opinion sneered at.

Re:Sue-Happy

[jargon82]

Even this isn't quite sufficient in some cases. The network might be fine for 30 days, but if it falls on it's face halfway through the first year and you have to keep paying anyway, that's rather annoying.

Re:Sue-Happy

[nolife]

I believe you have thirty days to return the phone and cancel the contract without the early termination charges, which brings this back firmly into the land of whiny bitch.

I was given a TMobile BB for work purpose in the month of November a few years ago. Not the best signal at my house but it worked until April when the deciduous tress started filling in. In theory, I would have to keep paying the monthly fee or pay a cancellation charge for a now useless product.

Re:Sue-Happy

[betterunixthanunix]

This is not a frivolous lawsuit. It is not a matter of hyping the product up "a bit" -- the product does not approach what they claimed it is capable of. They are charging and locking consumers into contracts for service that they are not providing, which is illegal. Why shouldn't a consumer who was lied to and then locked in to paying for service that they did not receive sue the company that lied to them?

Re:Sue-Happy

[ink]

I attacked your whiny bitch argument from a free-market perspective, not from hierarchy of needs stand. It doesn't matter if a consumer is "forced" to buy it, that is beside the point. Free markets work when there is choice, whether its for food or cell phones. The current American system is fucked up; in order to buy your preferred phone (market choice), one must also add a bunch of contract and infrastructure commitments for an arbitrary length of time which may or may not continue a reasonable level of service (not a market choice). The reverse is also true; some excellent carriers may not "support" a phone that satisfies the consumer's needs. It's like having your television picked out by your content service, and then being bitch slapped with an industry-wide two-year contract and told to sit down and shut up when it doesn't work very well twelve months in.

Fortunately, neither your nor my opinions matter. The legal system will deal with it in a fair, non whiny-bitch-hyperbolic manner.

Re:Sue-Happy

[MarcoG42]

I'm assuming you live in a house you built with your own two hands without a telephone, cable, satellite, electricity, running water or any of those other luxuries we have in these modern times? Since you're posting here, I doubt it. So, while we may not be forced into signing into these contracts, the case is more often starting to be that if you're lucky enough to have a choice of provider they force you to stick with them, regardless of whether they can provide you the service they promised through bullshit contracts.

It appears that you're completely missing the point in order to call people whiny bitches. Consider your opinion refuted.

Re:Sue-Happy

[Anonymous Coward]

Well to say that AT&T successfully sold a lie to you is like admitting you were tricked by the Grinch.

Re:Sue-Happy

[writerjosh]

Whoever flagged me as a "Troll" can you please identify yourself and tell me why you marked me as a "Troll?" I'd really like to know.

Re:Sue-Happy

[The End Of Days]

I would consider my opinion refuted, but you didn't actually pull it off. You just whined and bitched more. I now consider my opinion reinforced.

can you hear me now?

[get quad]

Gooood. If you can do without the iphone, go Verizon for 3G and don't look back.

Re:can you hear me now?

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah the mobile internet would really come in handy since if i got a unlimited data plan with verizon i couldn't afford to live in a house anymore

Heck I'd settle for 1 G...

[DaSpudMan]

You people on the coasts are so spoiled. Up here in ND, I'd settle for a choice of cell phone companies that provide coverage in most of the state. IPhones are an unkown commodity up here.

Time to break out the Bag Phone or a Brick.

Re:Heck I'd settle for 1 G...

[oldhack]

You people on the coasts are so spoiled. Up here in ND, I'd settle for a choice of cell phone companies that provide coverage in most of the state. IPhones are an unkown commodity up here.

This don't concern you, we talking American stuff here.

Re:Heck I'd settle for 1 G...

[GoodNicksAreTaken]

North Dakota isn't part of Canada... yet.

Re:Heck I'd settle for 1 G...

[holmstar]

Go back to school. ND = North Dakota, which is definitely in the US. Besides, if you want to get technical, pretty much the entire western hemisphere is "America"... North America, South America, and Central America.

Re:Heck I'd settle for 1 G...

[Duradin]

Being in the same country as California is still marginally (as in if there could be a non-zero number that was equal to 1 - .9... it would be that number) better than being in the same country as Quebec.

Re:Heck I'd settle for 1 G...

[roc97007]

"3G? We had cans and a string. And sometimes we didn't even have the string. Data service? We had to shout each byte value to a neighbor, who'd shout it to another neighbor, until it got to someone who had dial-up service, who had to enter it by hand. With wooden keys."

Seriously, I loved my bag phone back in the nineties. It had 5 genuine watts of transmitting power, not the paltry .3 or .1 watts or whatever you get now. And they were better watts too! I could make a high quality call in places where them-there fancy flipper phones would crackle and drop calls. I did a lot of traveling at the time, and reception along I5 was still a bit sketchy.

In all seriousness (did I say that already?) my measure of the usefulness of wireless service is exemplified by this little test: Say you and a friend are having dinner. You decide to see a movie. On the count of three, he looks up the local movie listings on a cell phone of his choice, and you go outside and buy a newspaper. The first one with access wins. I always choose the newspaper, and the only times I don't win is if there's local wifi, *and* said friend is already connected to it.

Let's face it; browsing over cellular services is still a novelty. Yes, if I'm *extremely* patient, I can check my bank balance from my cell phone, but it's a lot easier to arrange my life so that I don't have to do it in the first place.

Re:Heck I'd settle for 1 G...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure North Dakota is a part of USA. What, North Dakota residents are not American enough?

Re:Heck I'd settle for 1 G...

[ben0207]

"A non-zero number equal to 1-.9"

0.1????

Re:Heck I'd settle for 1 G...

[Hognoxious]

Go back to school. ND = North Dakota, which is definitely in the US.

Yeah, as any fule kno, it's NM that isn't.

Re:Heck I'd settle for 1 G...

[Anonymous Coward]

+1, Arithmetic

Re:Heck I'd settle for 1 G...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure?. Doesn't quite look like it

Anon

Re:Heck I'd settle for 1 G...

[kchrist]

Wait a minute... There's a new Mexico?

golden chariot with lame horse

[192939495969798999]

"Your chariot may be made of gold my friend, but your horse has a lame leg. My wooden cart and donkey aren't much to look at, but I get where I need to go every time", said the old man.

Re:golden chariot with lame horse

[necro81]

A chariot made of gold? No wonder the horse is lame! Do you have any idea how heavy that thing would be?

Re:golden chariot with lame horse

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean? An African or European chariot?

Re:Fags and Jews

[PitaBred]

Trolls in collusion with someone who comments well enough to get mod points, it seems.

Another Red Dwarf reference:

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like the plaintiff needs a free iPhone and one of these:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=306881030&mt=8

You can add Los Angeles to that list

[carbona]

3G coverage is spotty at best, and as others have mentioned, sometimes full 3G bars doesn't even provide data.

Problem has gotten so bad that I have turned off 3G altogether when I'm at home as call reliability is improved and I can just use my Wi-Fi connection for data. I could have just kept my 1st gen iPhone and lived without GPS.

Mod parent down

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds from the comments on that article that the iPhone's CPU just isn't fast enough to take advantage of 3G data rates even with a 3G radio present.

Ridiculous. The iPhone 3G is just a newer implementation of some very old tech. None of the original 3G phones had anything close to its CPU power.

Sprint

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's hoping the iPhone never shows up on Sprint's network. I have a crappy Q9c but the data speed is awesome, and my entire package (1400 min plus unlimited data (with tethering), text, etc.) is only $49/mo. I use it via BT tether on my laptop or my Nokia N810 all the time with spectacular speed. So, yeah, I guess I'm plugging Sprint.

The AT&T Network

[rwwyatt]

The problem is network dimensioning and issues of the backhaul connection between the NodeB and the RNC. There are multiple configuration of the NodeB which provides for different Data Rates. There is 384 kbs, 1.8 mbps, 3.6 mbps and 7.2 mbps. AT&T was not interested in 7.2 Mbps until late 2007. In order to support these data rates, there must be a significant connection to the backhaul based for the most part on a number of T1 Lines. AT&T is attempting to dimension their networks based on current data usage so they will always be behind. This is due to cost and many other reasons. There is no reason to equip Nut New Mexico with a 7.2 Mb capable cells. Even on the device side, It is cheaper toi buy a device based on HSDPA only rather than HSUPA/HSDPA.

Commercials

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we sue Apple for making commercials where the iPhone somehow loads apps and websites with 10X the speed it really does?

I have to laugh when I watch the commercial, and Safari pops up instantly, then they switch to Maps, contacts, etc and it all just instantly flips right over, no annoying spinner or lag time.

That must be a little embarrassing for Apple, that they can't just use a real iPhone 3G doing what it does, they have to make a fake slideshow for the commercial!

Contract

[Ender77]

AT&T should be sued, forcing people into a two year contract with a company should be against the law. Especially if that company does not provide the service that was promised for that contract.

Re:Contract

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm no one put a gun to anyone's head and made them sign a contract. That actually IS against the law. In fact, contracts signed under duress are unenforceable. AT&T simply says here, you want this product from us, you must sign a contract. No force there, you are perfectly free to not purchase the product.

Re:Contract

[yodleboy]

no one forced you to sign anything. you want the phone, you sign. if the contract is so abhorrent to you, then walk away or chose another phone. this is no different than any other U.S. cell carrier. In other countries, it may be more common to switch carriers regularly to save money, i don't know. In the U.S. however, coverage, performance and price are all so similar and so pathetic, that it's not worth the effort. Yeah if I had a generic phone i could switch-aroo each month and maybe save $50 a year. wow.

Re:Contract

[Hognoxious]

True. But once it's signed it should bind both sides, not just the smaller one.

Deserving

[Nom du Keyboard]

Couldn't happen to a more deserving pair for the way they've handled this whole iPhone rollout.

Re:Yup FASCINATING +2

[Nom du Keyboard]

Furthermore, I believe that AT&T is deliberately throttling speeds to 3G iPhones, because I get much higher speeds using the Samsung Blackjack in the same location, both using AT&Ts service. As a matter of fact, most of the time, the Blackjack is 2X faster (400-1000kbps vs. 200-600kbps).

I'd mod this FASCINATING +2 if I only had that modding ability.

Unlocked?

[antdude]

Can't you get an unlocked iPhone to use on other providers like with old Palm Treos and others?

Re:Unlocked?

[transwarp]

in the USA you have a chploice of at&t or tmobile in some cities

Can't you get an unlocked iPhone to use on other providers like with old Palm Treos and others?

What other providers? The iPhone here is locked to AT&T, and if you have an unlocked one you have a choice of using it with AT&T or T-Mobile.

Re:Unlocked?

[antdude]

What's wrong with T-Mobile compared to AT&T? Isn't T-Mobile better?

Re:Unlocked?

[Anonymous Coward]

The iPhone is a GSM phone. Therefore Verizon and Sprint's CDMA networks will never work on it unless Apple adds hardware to connect.

It is true that it can be unlocked to use other GSM providers. In the US that means Tmobile.

Beware of anecdotes bearing claims

[slimjim8094]

There's a lot of bitching about how much AT&T's network sucks. I'm not an apologist (though I have an iPhone) so let's keep objectivity in mind.

The iPhone has limited ram and a slower CPU. Websites will take a long time to render regardless of connection speed. Therefore, test a file transfer. You should get around 1.5MBps if you're on HSDPA (I think all ATT 3g is HSDPA)

I'm not arguing for a second that someplace like NYC will probably be oversubscribed. I doubt that's the problem in general (nothing like a 14.4kbps dialup for a backhaul... jeez) but it's possible if you're experiencing genuinely slow speeds.

Remember packet-radio tech will always involve latency. Over EDGE it's around 500ms, over a (good) 3g, it's about 150ms. That's something you'd be seeing if you see slow web speeds - many webpages have 50 requests, that latency adds up.

As for this lawsuit, AT&T makes no secret that 3G isn't available everywhere. It is exactly 3 obvious clicks from the homepage. If this guy expected 3g... tough. They're rolling it out pretty quick. If he didn't, or if the service is slow... perhaps he can call and tell them that he didn't contract for this level of service?

Basically, website 'speed' is not all about AT&T's oversubscription/crappyness. It's at least composed of latency, rendering speed, the page itself, and finally the speed of the network (which will fluctuate with users). Do a bulk file transfer and then talk.

And this guy probably needs to chill out. Probably

Re:Beware of anecdotes bearing claims

[danomac]

Websites will take a long time to render regardless of connection speed.

I don't know about that. I have an iPhone and I use it regularly with my local wifi and regularly get page loads very quickly, most times < 1 second, unless there's a lot of scripts (3-4 seconds.) I'm not on the AT&T network either (on Rogers, and even browsing through Rogers is slow) but I always try to use wifi for browsing--it's just faster.

On Rogers the page loads are very, very slow compared to wifi (sometimes 10 seconds or more to the same sites.)

Re:Beware of anecdotes bearing claims

[slimjim8094]

Probably latency. Each image, stylesheet, and JS takes about 4x as long to even request as it does on wifi.

Even low-quality 3g is still well within broadband. I got an embarassing 700kbps earlier; about as fast as my first DSL...

2 yr. ATT wireless experience

[ElitistWhiner]

Yup! iPhone on ATT sucked sooo baad I could no longer understand the voice traffic over thier network on the thing. Locked into contract, they had the gall to change my contract date when I opted-out of iPhone service so I'm bound longer than I would have, had I stuck it out with the iPhone contract. In San Diego, I live next to the I-5 corridor so network availability is testable. Never,ever does ATT fail to provide ringtone. QoS degrades during calls and commute time is predictably sketchy. Dropped calls follow a QoS degradation and occur with bars showing on the handset.

Call quality ranges from iffy to " pin drop" clarity. The majority of calls exhibit a kind of compression algorythm artifact that clips dead air, trips leading enunciation of words and drops portions of words. There is a difference between QoS between brands of phones. QoS is relative in this matrix of phone, network, time of day mixture. Best call clarity has twice yielded "pin drop" clarity one long distance and one local call. Both "pin drop" calls occurred well after midnight. So the network is capable of delivering incredible service.

I am a longtime mobile user from 1982-present. I have little issues with data service technically. The iPhone UI is a level above the competition in terms of richness of experience.

I have a Blackberry and consider it to be a more business reliable provider of communications than the iPhone which has nothing to say about ATT and everything about iPhone's version of "push" email service.

Uh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Verizon and Sprint use iS-2000 with iS-95 fallback (Nextel - a Sprint brand - still uses iDEN, which may be the source of your confusion). Verizon and Sprint, however, block access at the tower, only allowing phones they have sold to use their services.

AT&T and T-Mobile implement the lock in the phone itself, which isn't all that much less offensive, but can at least be countered by buying your own unlocked GSM/WCDMA phone.

AT&T is waiting for bailout money

[debrain]

The Economist had an interesting article last year that predicted that the US telecom companies were waiting for bailout money to invest in infrastructure. With this new stimulus package on the horizon, I'm sure some evidence to support their argument (i.e. irate iPhone users) that it's necessary would go a long way. AT&T has every incentive to get taxpayers to foot the bill, and they'd effectively be punished if they spent their own money on it (it's not like they'll get reimbursed).

Re:AT&T is waiting for bailout money

[coaxial]

Of course if they do that, I'd want (but have learned not to expect) that the infrastructure would be carrier neutral, so that any carrier could use it, maintained by a public-private partnership.

Of course this wouldn't happen. Taxpayers are chumps who only exist to funnel money from the plebeians to oligarchs with no say at all in how the money is spent. Afterall, this capitalism at it's best, where buying something lets you say how it's used.

Re:AT&T is waiting for bailout money

[Douglas Goodall]

There is no hope in expecting bailout money to improve the network. They have been spending our tax money for years to run fiber, but my neighborhood doesn't have fiber yet and may not until the next millenium. The best DSL I can get in my home is 1.5 and Verizon still wants 38 dollars a month for that. I live in a city but still can not get fast internet except from my cable provider COMCAST, and there are known problems with using cable based Internet, especially when the neighbors are torrenting their asses off.

Re: It IS possible to disable EDGE

[Anonymous Coward]

It's done via SBSettings or BossPrefs -- you must install these via Cydia (via a jailbreak).

Is there a "-1, Reactionary Know-it-all" ?

Suck it Trebek, suck it long, and suck it hard.

For some reason has very fast 3G speeds....

[Anonymous Coward]

I just for the first time used 3G on my iPhone last weekend while my wife and I were on vacation.

By us (Upper Peninsula of Michigan) 3G isn't available and we only get about 90kb/s down on the EDGE network, but we vacationed to Milwaukee/Gurnee/Chicago and the whole time were in a 3G area (the network switched from EDGE to 3G about twenty miles North of Milwaukee, and we stayed on 3G until we headed North for home) our internet access on the iPhone was as fast as our cablemodem connection being shared to the phone via Wifi. According to bandwidth tests we had the most bandwidth on 3G in Gurnee (6,000kb/s down) and the least in Chicago (4,500kb/s down) but I would think that even 4,500kb/s, on a device without a wire running to it, is pretty fast and isn't something to complain about.

I mean sure, Chicago isn't as populated as LA or NY, but I'm sure it's still a pretty saturated with users area and I had lots of bandwidth.

Either that or AT&T are incompetent

[yabos]

I'm on Rogers in Ontario and their 3G network did slow down a little at first when the 3G iPhone came out here. But now I can get >2 Mbps regularly. Yes we have fewer overall users but iPhone adoption here is pretty big. If AT&T can't support the traffic then I think it's their own fault

hey Yup - more bars!

[wiredpasture]

At SXSW no one could use their iPhones until AT&T rushed in a fix. Then the Fire Dept couldn't communicate. AT&T says it was unrelated but they sent their software people to the Fire Dept to help solve the problem. I'm so glad AT&T doesn't waste its money on infrastructure. It's better they spend it on marketing and hype and fighting net neutrality.

You need high speed on both ends

[tepples]

After 30 years, perhaps you should move from your parents home so you can have better internet connectivity? :)

You have to have high speed at both last miles in order to have a high-speed connection. Even the fastest Internet connection hairyfeet can buy won't help him communicate with his parents any faster.

Sweden rocks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, I'm happy to live in a country that actually has decent infrastructure.
In cities I get around 2MBit/sec from my iPhone in 3G mode and even here, out in the outback, I get a decent 180kBit/sec in EDGE mode.
And soon there are 3 carriers to choose from.
All that in a country with less people than the Chicago metro area and in place 192 in "densest countries in the world" (yup, we have a lot of space).

Re:Sweden rocks!

[CompMD]

Yet another trolling Swede. What is with you people?

I have a four year old EVDO phone from Sprint that will pull down 2Mbit/sec in places so devoid of people you can't even imagine it. Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota, I'll just leave it at that.

Wait for Android

[Krneki]

Wait and see what happens with Android and a torrent client. :)

Let me in...

[ryanw]

I want in on this lawsuit. Normally I'm a strong proponent of "you got yourself in it, get yourself out of it." But the iPhone's exclusivity on AT&T combined with AT&T requiring me to buy a 3G contract is totally anti consumer friendly.

I don't ever use the 3G network even though my phone has the capabilities. I leave it on the EDGE network because the 3G network drops too many calls.

I'd deserve to just be paying for the EDGE speeds instead of 3G speeds and be compensated for all the forced expenses of having to have a 3G premium. There's no way I would have known "going into the contact" that 3G would drop more calls.

You might be ENTIRELY wrong with your post.

[Anonymous Coward]

1) UMTS (3G successor to GSM) IS in fact a CDMA protocol. Just not the one Verizon and Sprint use (WCDMA vs IS-2000). And SIM-dependent, due to the involvement of the original 3GPP consortium.

2) And this is why we stop buying phones tied to carriers. (Yes, they exist. Look harder.)

3) Legacy support and reliability. UMTS is only really 'mature' in Japan and maybe South Korea, and there's still hundreds of millions of phones which only run GSM and/or IS-95.

Frikkin Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

well one more nail in the coffin of Apple and their over priced under performing crap tis a name only just like crappy German cars name only tecnical abilities == a big fat 0 zero 0

Re:WTF? Mod Parent Clueless

[aristotle-dude]

--You need a whole other phone if you want to use verizon or sprint.--

Complete BS. They want to keep it that way, charging us double for a tenth of the bandwidth you can get over there too.

Do us all a bloody favor and google CDMA and GSM. They are incompatible technologies. GSM use SIM cards while CDMA phones (in North America) are programmed for a network. The technologies are not compatible with each other.

I love my iPhone

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in an area of Alabama not served by 3G. I must say to all of you: I fucking love my iPhone. Love it.

Growing up, I dreamed of having a Dick Tracy style watch radio and a tricorder. I now have all that plus the entire knowledge of the known universe hanging right on a nerdy looking holster hanging off of my belt.

I want 3G, too, but I remember from whence I came.

Re: voicemail

[Douglas Goodall]

AT&T does claim they had to change their voicemail system to accomodate the iPhone and that is probably true, but I think other networks would be willing to change for a piece of the action. The iPhone will become much more successful of the allow it to be used widely instead of locking it down with AT&T.

AT&T has really let down the iPhone users

[Douglas Goodall]

Despite their promises to be the best 3G network, my 3G performance map shows full speed here in Santa Maria, but I haven't seen it. My iPhone spends a lot of time spinning the little icon and I wait dozens of minutes for simple things like finishing the download of an email message. The iPhone does work, but the $30 a month data package is a sham. I am still impressed with the iPhone from a software perspective, but the reality of the device as rolled out is plagued with other problems such as the unreasonable control Apple keeps over software developed for the iPhone, and the lack of a tethering application.

After buying an iPhone and paying for the data package, there is no money left in my budget for another $60 a month to pay for a dongle that has to compete for data rate at the cell towers. AT&T needs to get it together and decide to give us some real service at a reasonable rate. If they did that, they would become seriously competitive.

The End of Days mods his own posts up

[Anonymous Coward]

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1147437&cid=27056793

All this jerk The End of Days does here, is post under multiple accounts (to mod his posts as The End of Days up) and he admitted to it in the url above.

Re:WTF? Mod Parent Clueless

[EvilBudMan]

That' I what I was saying. I was agreeing, but the BS comment appeared pointed to the message in front of me. I didn't mean for it to be taken that way. I was just agreeing and pointing that it is BS for the carriers not to agree on a single standard or be forced to by the government. Read the stuff after that. A'int I agreeing? Mistype one ffsdga character to get this. For those with AS, the las bit was supposed to be funny.

we need to bring back the public sector

[Uberbah]

And unless We, The People run the lines all she and countless other Americans are going to get from the telecos is the finger. And I don't know about you, but I for one would like to have many choices for broadband instead of bending over and taking it like I have to do now. Most of us just can't give up our homes and livelihoods to escape the screwing.

The "government is bad & inefficient" mantra is nothing more than a means for shoveling money from the public into (a very few) private hands. We should start treating the Internet like other public utilities and interstate infrastructure. Then we might start getting 50 Mbps full duplex connections like the Asians and Europeans.

There's an article that sums up the point that we need to get back to public investment at Salon:

Barack Obama's bold, ambitious budget plan proves that he is the true heir of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Consider Obama's Rooseveltian energy plan. In 1939, President Roosevelt decided to mobilize Americans to create a new source of energy: atomic power. Although he was urged to focus on government-funded R&D, FDR chose a different route. He wisely encouraged private capital to invest in atomic energy research by a variety of tax incentives. To make atomic power investment more palatable to private capital, FDR boldly chose to make all other forms of energy in the U.S. uneconomical, by slapping high taxes on kerosene and coal. With the money from the new federal Kerosene Cap and Trade system, President Roosevelt and Congress funded a small-scale federal research program, in the hope of attracting much greater private investment ...

Wait. What's that you say? FDR didn't do that? He poured federal money into the all-public Manhattan Project and created the first atomic bomb in a couple of years? He didn't tax kerosene to make it uneconomical and to encourage private investment in atomic power?

Oh. OK. Never mind.

But what about Social Security? In 1935, FDR signed the historic Social Security Act. It created a complex "retirement mandate" system, forcing all elderly Americans to buy expensive annuities from private insurance companies, without, however, imposing price controls on the insurance companies ...

What? FDR didn't force the elderly to subsidize private annuity brokers? He imposed a single, simple, efficient tax to pay for a single, simple, efficient public system of retirement benefits?

All right, then, forget FDR. He was a socialist, anyway. Let Dwight Eisenhower serve as a model for the Obama administration. President Eisenhower authorized the biggest infrastructure program in American history, when he signed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956. The interstate highway act created an elaborate system of private tax incentives and public-private partnerships (PPPs) to encourage private corporations to build national highways. To begin with, all U.S. highways were leased to domestic and foreign corporations for a period of decades. Second, all U.S. highways were set up with toll booths, so that American drivers would be forced to repay the corporate owners of the national highways every few dozen miles. Finally, a system of high-speed lanes with higher tolls was created, so that the rich could whiz down the road while middle-class and poor Americans were stuck in traffic jams ...

ZH75

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I recalled a cell PHONE was meant to call people on. I understand that you have to pay more for data, but honestly you still get data; just not as fast and it seems like a pretty stupid reason to bitch just because it's not as fast as you'd like.