Slashdot Mirror
iPhone Straining AT&T Network
dangle writes "More than 20 million other smartphone users are on the AT&T network, but other phones do not drain the network the way the nine million iPhone users do. Because the average iPhone owner can use 10 times the network capacity used by the average smartphone user, dropped calls, spotty service, delayed text and voice messages and glacial download speeds are the result as AT&T's cellular network strains to meet the demand. AT&T says that the majority of the nearly $18 billion it will spend this year on its networks will be diverted into upgrades and expansions to meet the surging demands on the 3G network."
check the price of the BB Tour on Verizon. it's more than the iphone per month
I don't get this whole "Dropped Calls" thing - apart from when the network is totally overwhelmed, such as New Year, I've never had a call disconnect for any reason other than lack of signal (Usually moving into an elevator or a tunnel) in the UK.
Heh, i made the mistake of taking my iPhone on roaming mode through Europe. I knew it was going to cost me SOME... but I got an $875 bill for four weeks - and that was making about 10 calls. The rest.... internet usage.
Suggestion to anyone who is travelling overseas with a phone on roaming mode. Turn off ALL internet access. It will save you hundreds!
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
That's because Germany and Poland only need about one Cell-Phone-Tower each to provide coverage to the entire country.
Seriously, Germany is smaller than Montana and has almost 100x the population.
Suggestion to anyone who is travelling overseas with a phone on roaming mode. Turn off ALL internet access. It will save you hundreds!
Just limit yourself to wi-fi access. There have been enough horror stories about huge data roaming bills, but it sounds like the message still hasn't been passed on to everyone.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I'm an AT&T customer in the US, and I don't get it either. I live in a rural area, so I do get the occasional dropped call if I'm driving on a rural road and get out of range of a tower. But that has nothing to do with network load, it means I'd like to see AT&T put in more towers.
I've had a couple of calls fail to complete (I dial the number, the phone pauses trying to get a free line, and I get a "your call cannot be completed" or "call failed" message). I'd say that's happened to me twice in the 9 months I've had my phone. That's probably an indication that my local tower is overwhelmed. But I've never lost a call in progress except drops that can easily be explained by lack of signal coverage.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
You're still quite accurate. Anyone locked with ATT is about to get their chance to jump out, almost any month as long as you realize that clause and take advantage of it.
The thing is we gave the carriers $200B a long time ago for cheap broadband services decades ago so 18B sounds like a drop in the bucket (10% of the money they collectively stole) especially since there aren't that many major carriers anymore - we got 4 now - so they should at least invest $50B not counting the interest on that amount and the overcharging of the promised monthly fees by 3 or 4 times.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
SMS uses space in the signal that was otherwise unused. It is a free bonus that the carriers charge for because they can. Not text messaging is the same as text messaging.
AT&T Roaming Info:
"Data usage pay-per-use rate is $.0195/KB , except in Canada where rate is $.015/KB."
2 cents/KB. That's $20 a MB!! Emails a few times and google maps here and there adds up to a few MB quickly.
As others have noted, there have been plenty of data-roaming horror stories, but I guess it still hasn't occurred to everyone to look this stuff up before traveling. My wife and I went to Scandanavia earlier this year, and we made sure to turn off data roaming and only used wifi when it was available. We also used occasional text messages to communicate with one another, rather than calls. $0.50/text, but still cheaper than calling.
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
Verizon owns Upstate NY, unfortunately. Even in the areas where AT&T works they seem to have capacity and quality issues -- which is strange because they usually have as much (more in some markets) spectrum as Verizon does.
AT&T has also pulled some crap that leaves existing customers high and dry. TDMA customers would go to bed one night with four bars of signal and wake up the next morning in a dead zone without warning. They are even pulling the same crap with their GSM network -- in many markets they've moved GSM services from 850mhz to 1900mhz to free up spectrum for data services. This is fine and dandy in a dense urban environment -- but in a rural environment the longer range/increased penetration of 850mhz matters a lot more. Because of this you might go to bed having a working cell phone in your house and wake up with a paperweight that only works if you go outdoors. Think they'll let you out of your contract when this happens? Fat chance.
I loathe Verizon's customer service and arrogance but they've never pulled anything like this.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
err - believe it, here's Norway. Sweden is not so hot, but still good. Finland is very good, too.
-- Intelligence is soluble in alcohol
You need a Wifi Dish... I carry a OpenWRT 54GL router and a couple of these....
http://www.freeantennas.com/
it's a paper printable parabolic that you can make out of paper and tinfoil or conductive foil tape. work incredibly and in a hotel window I can pick up Open Access points from a good distance. I usually stay in a Motel 6 and borrow the wifi From the Holiday Inn next door.
buddy of mine that is traveling Europe said his is working great in Germany and Italy. Get's him internet access in many hostels that have none.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Please can we stop moderating this up. That was true with GSM, but with more modern networks SMS uses the same data channels as other kinds of data. That has nothing to do with the grandparent's point, which was that if SMS were cheaper then people would use it instead of voice (not sure I agree; people seem more happy to send a text than make a one-minute call, even when they cost the same). Even this is wrong, because voice traffic works out at about 5MB/hour. A couple of accesses to Slashdot uses as much data as an hour of talking on the phone, so you'd need to eliminate a lot of voice calls to free up enough space for Internet use. A single YouTube video is often bigger than my total data usage from phone calls in a typical month.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
T-Mobile is at fault for having useless coverage outside of major metro areas.
Um... that's their business model. They are a smaller company in the USA than Verizon, AT&T, and so forth, and so rather than try to compete toe to toe with the big guys, they target city-based youth with lower-priced plans and features like Android. Don't get angry at them just because they don't make the products you want... if you aren't their target market, you don't buy their products, plain and simple. However, plenty of people do want what they have to offer, which is why they are still around in the United States.
Verizon, Sprint, Alltel, etc. are at fault for continuing to push CDMA2000 shit rather than using the world standard of GSM, thus limiting themselves to the ghetto of the phone universe, just so they can fuck around with firmware to lock out features the phone would otherwise have.
MHz for MHz, CDMA (used in CDMA2000) is superior to TDMA (used in GSM and such) from the provider's perspective. CDMA supports more individual connections per cell tower, increasing network capacity. Also, for early adopters, CDMA had the advantage of having a wider evolutionary path than GSM. Even previous GSM networks are moving to the WCDMA (wideband-CDMA) standard for UMTS, meaning that CDMA's early adopters dodged a bullet of costly upgrades down the line.
The FCC is at fault for not working to align our mobile phone frequencies with the rest of the world and allowing T-Mobile to deploy their 3G on a different band than even AT&T, meaning that most "world" 3G phones are still not compatible, locking any of those users to AT&T only in the US.
Given what I just talked about above, I'm kind of glad that the FCC didn't see fit to stick their noses in and force companies to adopt an inferior technology, or one that conflicted with their business models.
If you want a phone that hasn't been fucked with by a carrier AND decent rural coverage, AT&T is the only game in the country here.
Having recently purchased two phones from Verizon, I know that most of their models, both high-end and low-end, have multiple radios in the phone so that you can use CDMA here in the 'States, or switch to GSM/UMTS for roaming abroad if you choose. Roaming sucks, but it does under pretty much any carrier these days. The phone is still there, though, if you need to make the call.
I hate giving any arm of AT&T my money, but I don't have a choice for now.
Look around. Options abound.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
You guys do realize that a sim can cause your dropped call issues as well right? If you've ever pulled one out you'd see why. They are pretty much printed on cardboard. When the contacts get corrosion, or the sim warps, it causes the same symptom. Take it to AT&T and make them replace it. It should be free of charge.
At festivals, where there are thousands of people jammed together (like Jazz-Fest, Satchmo Fest, Shrimp and Petrol Fest, Strawberry Fest, Satsuma Fest, Fest Fest, Mardi Gras (don't even get me started on mardi gras), etc.) My phone might as well be a brick. No incoming, no outgoing, no texts, no service. AT&T obviously ran the numbers and installed EXACTLY the capacity they would need for day-to-day operations and not a single bit/sec more. As soon as people start globbing together, AT&T's network falls to its knees and pleads for mercy.
I experience this whenever I go to a festival or street fair in the Chicago area. The 3G network gets so borked I can't even send and recieve text messages. However -- The solution is pretty simple. When the iPhone is dead on 3G, just go to the network settings and select "EDGE" and it will work just fine then. You should be able to make calls and get data on 3G. Web Browsing will be slower than normal 3G but it's better than nothing at all.
What would be nice is if the iPhone automatically detected when 3G was oversubscribed / unusable and automagically failover to EDGE without user intervention. However, as long as it sees a 3G signal, it will stay on 3G even if the 3G network is oversaturated and unuseable.
"Verizon owns Upstate NY"
Not exactly true.. Buffalo and Rochester tend to have better tower access via leased sites that at&t uses, vs Verizon..
Between Buffalo and Niagara Falls for instance, Verizon Wireless (local tower owners dba vzw) have been using most of
their upgrade budgets to add more Canada facing equipment to help get international roamers..
(from a current NOC operator that works for the dba in this area)
Verizon can't even get their act together to get FiOS run to the major towns around Buffalo properly..
(6-7 more years before fiber is put down to a town 4 miles away from the city is crazy, even by 2000 standards, with the
tech from back then..) And no, there are no local laws/etc that they need to follow for it - it's just their schedule..
Speaking as a former network engineer for att/cingular (before the second back-forth name switch back to at&t) I remember
a few years back when they got pissed off at Alltel because they raised the leasing rates for tower access to att/cingular in the
FL and AZ markets - two weeks later, att/cingular killed the lease agreement, and all access overnight was terminated to all
att/cingular customers in the northern FL and all of AZ markets - I was one of the people "hitting the switch" to turn off access - The
customer service call centers were then told to tell customers "We're sorry, but the carrier in your area that owns the towers has
disabled access. Should you decide to cancel your service (their phones ALL went to "pay by credit card, or collect" roaming menus)
you will be charged your early termination fee, as it clearly states in your contract that we do not guarantee service"
Welcome to the reason why I quit a 90k position a week later. My actual center I worked at was the first floor of a call center in
Harrisburg, PA (part of first floor was network ops, part of second, all of third was customer care) - The center manager even said
in one of our ops meetings that there would be lots of pissed off customers, but that would just mean the company was going to
make a ton of money with early term fees.. (his actual words) - When business is run with no morals, bad things happen...