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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."
I would have had the first post, but I'm browsing from my iPhone.
All this time, I thought the iPhone was just an overhyped, overpriced smartphone that explodes. Now I see that, incredibly, it is doing some good: a major cell phone company is actually upgrading its network, after all these years of the US falling behind other parts of the world!
Palm trees and 8
The iPhone users pay an ungodly sum for the privilege. The least AT&T can do is make the network adequate for the purpose.
We get so accustomed to bad customer service and lousy throughput and high prices that it doesn't even dawn on us that the problem isn't the usage patterns of iPhone users but rather the consistently half-assed network implementations by American MOs.
As more and more technology floats up into the Cloud, we are going to need more bandwidth to access it from anywhere. If the MOs can't keep up and implement a network that will support the kind of massive usage that is currently envisioned, there will be a massive breakdown akin to what AT&T is experiencing now.
Don't blame the vehicles for bad roads. Blame it on the DOT.
It's about time AT&T put some money into the network. The coverage and the dropped calls suck. I can't wait for the 2 year contract to be up. Seriously, it was only a few years ago that the US had the best networks around and was on the cutting edge with cell phones. But we are seriously lagging now. AT&T wanted the iPhone but thought they would be able to grab it without infrastructure upgrades Be careful AT&T - no good deed goes unpunished!
This should be a useful exercise just for the sheer entertainment:
1) create SETI-On-iPhone app which constantly fetches/uploads data
2) convince large quantities of people to continually run app
3) crash AT&T network
4) ?????
5) Profit
Corollary: send a mirror copy of all data to fbi.gov. See if we can cause two incidents at the same time.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
If it's all the iPhone's fault why was service with AT&T crap before the iPhone came out? It's easy to point a finger but the truth is the service had needed upgrades for many years. One of the biggest things holding back iPhones IS that AT&T carrier. It's the primary reason I never got an iPhone.
wouldn't it be nice if network operators charged a fair price for Used bandwidth rather than taking $$$ for Jesus-phone "all-inclusive" deals. In suppose all the want is, err, as mucg of our money as they can get, and that's the way they get it. But if their price model would encourage thrifty bandwidth use by iUsers and iAppcoders, that would make it interesting for me, maybe getting a smartphone (more probably G than i) for less than a £35 contract here in the UK.
Ever notice the 3G networks around the other parts of the world haven't needed to bitch and moan about data usage of smartphones?
About time they were prompted into investing some of the profits into the network, not into shareholders' collective pockets.
Maybe if they stopped pricing text at thousands of dollars per megabyte it would free up enough voice traffic that this wouldn't be a problem.
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
Oh no! They're being forced to spend most of their network upgrade budget on upgrading their network! How will they possibly cope?
Wow. I know I'm playing the eurotrash card here, but the high-end contracts on this side of the pond cost EUR 45/month (with JesusPhone). $2000 on average for two years and poor 3G performance... ouch!
This sig is intentionally left blank
Throttle their connection up their asses!!
Not exactly the prettiest or politically correct solution, but that's the most likely solution short term.
I believe I speak for everyone when I say "Boo f'ing hoo." Heaven forbid a cellular company look towards its longterm growth and not short-run returns.
You're right. I can't afford a $900 per month cell phone bill.
Although I make considerably more than $30K.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Do ANY of you really believe that? $18 BILLION? I would trust what ATT says any farther than I can throw them. Their network is crap. Their customer service is crap. I'd be willing to bet even without all the damned iPhones their network would still suck. Wanna know why? Because THEY CAN. They (and every other American carrier) can and will spend as little as possible to make our experiences better because we here in America LET THEM. We don't shove the bastards in Washington out of office who ATT have bought. We don't rise up and smite the sons of bitches every time they jack up our rates and we get nothing in return.
Sadly, we deserve every bit of the shitty service and crappy experiences we get. Obviously not enough of us in America give a big enough crap to change it. So why bother crying about it you lazy bastards?
Pax Vobiscum
I'm happy to hear that AT&T is looking at upgrades. Personally, I have run into almost no issues, but my area is a pretty recent recipient of 3G. Internet browsing got pretty slow midsummer, but AT&T managed through the bulk of tourist season with decent service. Now that most of our state's guests are headed home as the weather starts to cool and school gets back in session, I'm sure the load on the network will decrease.
I'm curious, though. I know very little about Apple's infrastructure on the iPhone, but I know that most of my Internet access on the Blackberry goes through a central server (BES for companies or BIS for individuals) and that data gets compressed en route. The primary reason, of course, is so pages can load more quickly, but it also has a side effect of requiring less data be transferred, therefore less load on the network.
Opera's mobile browser operates on the same basic idea - the "preview" you get of each web page is loaded as a very small and low-res image, then when you click on a section for details you zoom in on that area and it loads more detail. But the entire web page is not loaded to your phone up front - Opera's server serves up the parts you are looking at right now.
Does Safari do this, or does it load the entire page in full detail up front so you can zoom in on the little bit you want to see? If it loads the whole page, Apple and AT&T might want to discuss some form of "preview load" and only load more detail as it is asked for. It'd probably cut data usage considerably and if the preview loads quickly it would even improve the user experience.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
I thought making supply short for a high demand product was a good business tactic. If I were AT&T I would bitch about needing to increase supply too. But then, I've never been good about screwing over customers for a living.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
....especially Verizon, whose big brother in the UK (Vodaphone) is making them tear up the CDMA network for GSM. In some respects, AT&T is better-positioned today, and the continuing revenue stream from iPhones (something ungodly percentage of their new customers are iPhone customers) will allow them to invest in upgrades.
T-Mobile still doesn't have 3G nearly anywhere, and even the EDGE capability is spotty in places.
Sprint's got a friend-of-Barack, which has allowed them to push forward with their WiMax network faster than Verizon's planned 4G data (VHF analog TV spectrum), but they, too, are going to switch to GSM from CDMA for the Sprint portions of the network. Whatever was Nextel is unchanged.
But none of those providers have any single thing that's generating new customers like AT&T, and some are still bleeding subscribers despite nifty stuff (looking at you, Sprint).
In my experience, AT&T has been at least as reliable for voice. The data hasn't been as reliable as my last provider; but I'd rather have fast data 90% of the time, than unusably slow data 98% of the time.
For ages now, but they keep adding towers to extend their coverage. The problem however is the backhaul, they have not been upgrading those, and while sure everyone will now have perfect tower signal, they still have crappy connections since the traffic is congested on the backhaul.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
AT&T brought this upon themselves. They HAD to have an exclusive contract to carry the iPhone and now it's time to pay the price. I find it very hard to give a flip about their strained network when if the iPhone load had been spread across multiple carriers this wouldn't have become an emergency issue for AT&T.
No, they aren't. I have a Nokia smartphone on AT&T. I pay the same per month for data access as an iPhone user. Yet my phone (by my own usage estimates, and by the NYT article claims) uses 10x less resources than the iPhone. So why am I not paying 10x less for net access?
I still get the added benefit of dropping almost every single goddamned call I have made or received since the iPhone 3G model came out earlier this year - that was the start of my problems with AT&T. Before that I had an occasional drop but now it's a miracle if my wife or I get through a 5 minute conversation without a dropped call. We live in a large metro area, and according to the AT&T service folks we have no less than 4 towers within close range of us. Our service remains unacceptable despite this.
The most painful part is that we dropped landline service 6-7 years ago to get AT&T off our backs. Then they went and bought our wireless carrier. Thanks, AT&T.
Wondering here, now that the NYT has gotten the company to admit that the iPhone is causing so many problems for everyone on the service, how long before a class action suit is filed? I certainly would like to be compensated for the absolute shit service I am currently relieving - it's far less than the service I am actually paying for.
... if they didn't put a clause in their agreement with AT&T that if the consumer base for the product exceeded the capacity of AT&T to service with a certain level of quality, that they would be able to add a second or third carrier to the mix. Perhaps, the only reason that Apple doesn't add Verizon is because the stampede would exceed Apple's ability to provide the phones.
I fully expect to see, at the next iPhone event in June, an announcement that the phone will be available through all carriers that want to provide it.
This is they typical telco story. Be it transatlantic phone calls way back in the satellite era "All outside lines are busy now, please try your call again later, beep!", be it "broadband", or cellular phone service. The telco business model is:
1. Establish a technology
2. Charge an arm and a leg for said technology
3. Oversubscribe said networks until they are practically useless, then blame the customer.
You know, for a company pulling in 12 BILLION dollars a year, AFTER tax, there really is no excuse. It's not like they're going to spend the 18 billion to "upgrade" all at once. And you can BET that the "new" network will allow them to sell even more subscribers and/or charge even more for some new "must have" technology.
Communications is a racket. Is it any wonder that Ma Bell was broken up, and yet her children have mostly eaten each other and are each as big or bigger than she was, in under 30 years? Yet this is the industry that cries poverty and "we can't afford it" when the idea of upgrading to a REAL (I mean Japanese or S Korean style) broadband network is put on the table. Of course not. They don't give a shit about providing service, they just care about their balance sheet and whatever other company they can swallow.
But I for one feel no pity or sorrow for AT&T, and the suckers who sign exclusive multi-year contracts with them.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Its surprising how technically inept reporters are. They say that the amount of time Shazam takes to load is caused by the network. What? No, thats the phone. I have this app, and it boots up, then you record the song, then it uploads it.
Reporter fail.
"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
I always heard this about AT&T/T-Mobile long before the iPhone came out...
Do you have ESP?
Not me... and 900 a month is a home payment! Unless you are extremely finacially secure, 900$ a month on personal phone usage is a waste of income. You could buy an acre of land a month out in the middle of nowhere... then retire to your new kingdom after a few years.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
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.
If they had 18 billion ear marked to spend on their networks what else would they be spending it on besides upgrades and expansions?
You come up with a contract policy that forces a certaini high-end user group into a single, limited resource system and then complain about how this very system collapses ... shouldn't there be legislation against that? I mean if a vendor offers a service that will considerably decrease in quality with the number of people that take up the offer, isn't that some kind of fraud? Sure, NOW they'll update their networks because too many paying customers are complaining about the QoS but why is this possible in the first place.
I see three possibilities. First, AT&T hasn't invested in their network enough. That's a given. Second, iPhone users are just network hogs, I don't think so.
So that leaves us with possibility three: the iPhone is the first phone that isn't an incredible pain to use.
I think that all other smart phones are artificially low in bandwidth usage because they're hard to use. The IE5 based browser on Windows Mobile (I know they recently improved it) in my experience was a total joke and almost unusable. The browser on BlackBerries, in fact the UI as a whole, is not designed to ease of use at all, it's "here's an empty button we can use". That only really leaves non smart phones, and even IF you had a data plan, I'm sure we all know how easy browsing with those things was.
Basically the iPhone is the first device it's possible to easily surf the web without wanting to throw the phone into a wall.
When you give your customers something that actually works and is usable... they use it.
Go figure.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Maybe someone has already said this, but I'm too lazy to read the posts...why not implement some sort of bandwidth limitations? Here at work, we have a 15Mbps connection of which I let the 75 users have 1.2 Mbps each. Before I made the change, we were hitting the ceiling all the time and experiencing slow page loads and what-not. Now, it's smooth sailing all the time because, even though technically if 10 or 12 people start hitting it hard, then we are back at with the original issue, but that never happens. If it does, my monitor catches them and I send them a friendly email. I know AT&T can't mimic this exact scenario, but they could throttle the users back a bit. I get close to 2Mpbs from AT&T here and I don't know why I would ever need that much, unless I'm downloading some crazy big email attachment or tethering (shhhh).
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We have tons of dark fiber in the US. We just need large ISPs to pay to light it up. Remember the work done by Qwest (before they bought US West)?
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Maybe you could rent a corner of your kingdom to AT&T and they could put a tower on it, just for you!
Ocean is land, covered with water.
It does validate some of my suspicions about the issues AT&T has been having. A lot of people seem to think that an Apple switch to Verizon would be some magic fix-all for the iphone, but I think any provider is going to have a lot of trouble meeting the usage demand of millions of iphone users.
Let them. All current customers can quite fairly state "Change in contract terms, AT&T? That's great! No, I don't accept, and it's good that there's this lovely clause about early termination without penalty. Thanks for giving me this lovely iPhone. I'll be sure to get it jailbroken and on a network which isn't a complete pig." Thanks to all those who sacrificed their hard-earned for this to be made possible, though! Disclaimer: I'm English. Written from the perspective of a USian, apologies if I've mis(correctly)spelled some words.
Well you will have to enjoy edge speeds,because at least for Tmobile in the USA, it uses different 3g frequency than AT&T iphones. So it might be cheaper, but Tmobile will definitely be slower than on a 3g AT &T network.
Change to the company that will pay those for you. Data roaming? How much? Meh ;)
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
I'm pretty sure the majority of AT&T customers that are using iPhone do not use more data than the plan they subscribed to. I would say it's AT&T's fault for selling more than they can handle!
ATT's network has sucked since day 1 of the iPhone and before. There weren't 9 million iPhones back then. I was there with an LG phone on 3G. 3G has never been usable to stream video. I never even bother. I only stream video and download apps on WiFi. It won't even let you download apps bigger than a few MB on 3G. 98% of the time I have 3G turned off because it drains the battery too fast. Whoever wrote that article is smoking crack. I use 3G for looking up a fact, or google maps, and I use google maps about once per week, if that. 3G is usable for that.
If you ask me, 3G is getting crushed by other phones that don't have WiFi, like the Vu with ATT's TV service. Every now and then I look up stuff on the internet and turn on 3g but simple web browsing isn't going to crush their network. It's never been usable for anything that's heavily data intensive to begin with.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Thats buying into what the cell providers want: they offer a unique service _they're_ the end all be all.
Big picture: they're a commodity carrier, a pipe. The sooner they get treated as such the better.
Yet my phone (by my own usage estimates, and by the NYT article claims) uses 10x less resources than the iPhone. So why am I not paying 10x less for net access?
Because you signed up for the wrong contract. It's not like the iPhone has a 'use more data' button. The iPhone uses the same amount of data as other phones when doing the same thing, it's just that its users make more use of it. If you use less data then don't sign up for the most expensive data plan.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
iPhone is the first phone on which Internet is actually usable, and (gasp) AT&T did not foresee that people would be using their browsers. Who woulda thunk it? Personally, I hope Apple will ease their pain in a year or so by also starting selling iPhone through Verizon, Sprint and TMobile.
Where are you finding an acre of land for $900 per acre? Around here it is closer to $9000 per acre.
Obligatory techcrunch reference: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/28/can-att-handle-the-iphone/#comment-2886015
AT&T: You want answers?
TechCrunch: We think we're entitled to them.
AT&T: You want answers?!
TechCrunch: We want Google Voice on our iPhones.
AT&T: You can't handle the iPhone with Google Voice!
Son, we operate on network that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by carriers with restrictions. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Verizon Wireless? We have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Google Voice and you curse AT&T. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what we know: That pulling Google Voice, while tragic, probably saved the network. And our existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves the network.
You don't want the Google Voice on your iPhone. Because deep down, in places you don't talk about at TechCrunch50, you want us protecting the network. You need us protecting that network. We use words like rate limiting, application approval and restrictions...we use these words as the backbone to a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline.
We have neither the time nor the inclination to explain ourselves to a blog who writes and profits under the blanket of the very network that we provide, then questions the manner in which we provide it. We'd prefer you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, we suggest you pick up a router and build your own network. Either way, We don't give a damn what you think you're entitled to.
TechCrunch: Did you order Google Voice taken down?
AT&T: We did the job you sent us to do.
TechCrunch: Did you order Google Voice taken down?
AT&T: You're goddamn right we did.
SELECT * FROM USERS WHERE A_WINNER = "YUO";
The iPhone excuse is such BS. Here in Sweden we've seen a order of a magnitude of growth in data usage thanks to everyone and their cousin getting HSDPA data cards for their laptops, and our networks are still stable. And this is in the proud home of The Pirate Bay. And don't come with the "the US is bigger" excuse - sweden actually has a _lower_ population density. We're a country the size of California with a population [read: maximum subscriber base] smaller than the greater Los Angeles. And these is split up among 4 carriers.)
Thank you for launching the bandwidth consuming iPhone. We appreciate how it requires massive bandwidth and how users would rather stream music than use an ancient device called A Radio. While the economy has slowed down many other IT companies, your constant sales and increase in bandwidth consuming features have enabled us to increase sales considerably in the Service Provider space.
Due to this generosity by you towards our bottom line, we will now allow our employees to use macbooks while at work. Additionally, we are considering renaming our products' firmware from IOS to iOS in your honor.
Your friend,
The Very Big Router Company.
No problems using data and voice at the same time on my treo on the sprint network, sounds like a BB issue rather than a sprint/CDMA issue.
Wow, you have an amazing phone that breaks the documented CDMA standard! Please share how you did that! :)
In all seriousness, you likely misunderstood the posters statement. When using CDMA, you can't have a CDMA carry data at the same time you are talking. This doesn't mean your Treo can't do data over wifi while using voice on CDMA.
Huh?
AT&T was only too eager to work with Apple, they must have been blinded by all those prospective new contracts. So blinded, apparently, that they ignored their network engineers' advice.
AT&T knew (or should have known) exactly what they were getting into with the iPhone, and they knew their data network wouldn't support an infinite number of iPhone users.
I have no sympathy for AT&T on this one. If they didn't make a huge profit on all those 2-year iPhone contracts, they have no one but themselves to blame. A prudent carrier would have allocated some of those profits to network upgrades. Working with Apple to minimize the amount of data needing to be transferred for "overhead apps", like visual voicemail, would have been another prudent move.
What we have now, is a clear example of what happens when a company places short term profits ahead of long term facilities development...in other words, the "suits" beat the "nerds" again.
I don't have an iPhone, but when I read
"Because the average iPhone owner can use 10 times the network capacity used by the average smartphone user"
my first thought was "sounds like iPhone is designed to actually be used". Maybe in the future we'll get phones that are less and less locked down in terms of apps and restrictions, more like mini-PCs - that would be nice.
Ha ha!
What?
I went to a sporting event (sportscar race) in Central Florida. There was not even 3G and my phone was basically dead weight (except for apps I can use that don't use the network). Of course 50K people were at the event and maybe that had something to to do with it (duh) but damn, there was a Cell Tower within 1 mile of the race track! Maybe it was Verizon who owned the tower but I could not understand why AT&T did'nt roll out some portable cell towers prior to the event.
Just googled buying land, found a bunch of great looking places for sale: http://www.landandfarm.com/lf/asp/search_results.asp?landstateid=24
Most on that page are between $1000-2000 an acre. If a quick google can turn that up, i'm sure you can find 900$ land or negotiate down to that.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
My wife and I both got 3GS units in early July. In early August, we bought a house on 5 acres in the country ( of course, since this is Oklahoma, most everything IS country! ). AT&T actually has DSL, but not U-Verse, in our area, so we ordered it to come up when we moved.
Being AT&T, and unaware of right hand / left hand, the DSL took a week to get provisioned AFTER we moved. So, our only link with the world was our iPhones. We had no issues handling e-mail, surfing the net, and so on. 5 bars, all the time. There IS a cell tower about 1.5 miles west of us, so maybe we were lucky.
Still, this does concern me as we travel a bit and are definitely spoiled. If the phones turn into bricks whilst traveling, we'll be unhappy campers. We use the hell out of UrbanSpoon and Yellow Pages for instance, and would NEED them someplace we're not familiar with.
Hopefully, AT&T will get their infrastructure act together and alleviate some of this.
I am my own gestalt.
There service sucks in places with only 1900mhz service (like northeast ohio). When I travel 200 miles south my iPhone works great no dropped calls 3G and all inside or outside of buildings. Just so happens thats right about the cutoff where they have 850mhz service. In northeast ohio where I live, its only 1900mhz. No service in any basement ever, and service inside houses and buildings is hit or miss. Driving down a tree-lined road? Expect to drop a call. 1900mhz just doesn't have the penetration that 850 does. And you wonder why everyone here has verizon? (Who happens to own all the 850mhz spectrum here....)
Everyone forgets that it was originally Cingular that agreed to Apple's terms for the iPhone, none of the other carriers did. Unfortunately for AT&T (or fortunately?), they were in the process of buying Cingular at the time, and the impending introduction of the iPhone made them accelerate the timeline for the Cingular acquisition.
I wonder what would've happened if AT&T hadn't bought Cingular?
What, me worry?
I'd be happy to switch carriers.
AT&T just sucks? Lots of Verizon users have Moto Q, or the wireless USB modem for computers. I refuse to believe that the iPhone uses any more bandwidth than those devices, unless it is just really inefficient. Either way, AT&T sucks.
This is not a self-referential sig.
This is American style management at its worst - and we are exporting this management trash to other countries. Hopefully other countries will see these management clowns for what they are.
Look at every failing or failed industry in the US, and you can point to the MBA managers that sucked the life out of the company, wrote big checks to the executives and shareholders and left a carcass behind for the employees and customers.
Autos, telecoms, steel, and soon to be IT services, and pharma. These industries are being squeezed for short-term profits and dividends and the expense of the future. Crap service and bail-out nation are the baby boomers' parting gifts to us.
Hopefully the rest of the world will figure out that smart, talented engineers can also make good managers and finance guys. The future success of their companies depend on it.
Boards of companies like AT&T and GM need to kick out the Harvard MBAs and move some engineers into those positions. They may even be able to save some money on executive payroll to do it.
-ted
"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."
As opposed to what? Hookers and Blow?
Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
AT&T has no room to complain. They signed up for this when they demanded to be the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the US. All of us bandwidth-slurping iPhone users have no choice but to crowd AT&T's network, because we aren't allowed to be anywhere else. If the iPhone was available with other carriers, you'd no doubt see the load shared, as iPhone users would be allowed to choose their carrier based on something in addition to device availability. I'm sure AT&T saw iPhone exclusivity as a huge cash cow, and it's dismaying (though not necessarily surprising) if they didn't consider what it would take to support the first mobile phone that actually has a decent web browser.
If you're the only restaurant in town that serves french fries, you might want to invest in some ketchup.
New moderation option needed: "+1 Brilliant Idea."
Recently, I went to Europe for a week with my iPhone and I needed to use the internet frequently while I was there to stay in touch with people back in the States. So after having done a bit of research, I decided to purchase the $60 Global Data Add-on, which gave me 50MB I could use while in Europe. Using that and Wifi, I was able to have internet whenever I needed it during that week, and by the end, I had used just under the limit. Because of that, I really ended up paying only $1.2 / MB, or $60 per week, which I thought was pretty reasonable. Also note that you can monitor how much bandwidth you've used through the phone's statistics (which you can reset when you depart for your trip).
All in all, it worked out pretty well.
Translation: "Now we have to actually spend money to satisfy our customers." Cry me a river.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Wouldn't your reception be different because of different frequencies but not your throughput? It might all equal out, as AT&T may have more swaths of frequency but it's brought to it's knees by all the users thereby T-mobile being actually faster in the long run. Disclaimer: I'm a T-Mobile customer, and have had no problems with their data speeds. Rather pay less for slower speeds than get raped by AT&T for shitty service.
So AT&T is actually going to spend money to upgrade its network! Wow, I am genuinely impressed. I figured they would go the Comcast way and just employ bandwidth caps and throttling. Not to mention a usurious overage charge.
How about this: Cell phone companies are no longer permitted to own cell phone towers. Instead, we have
(1) Stores selling cell phones.
(2) Service companies offering cell phone contracts.
(3) Cellular Service Providers (CSPs) that provide cellular service to phones, by billing the service companies (2)
So I go to Wal-Mart (1) and buy a phone. I activate it with AT&T (2). My phone finds a nearby tower that speaks a compatible protocol, that is owned and operated by a CSP (3). The CSP then tracks my usage and bills my service company (2), who then bills me.
This basically takes the internet approach, and applies it to the cellular network.
Advantages:
- No more tying of cell phones (1) to service companies (2)
- No more long complex service contracts, because it removes barriers of entry into that business, and because it is easy for cellular users to switch.
- Increased incentive to move toward a single standard. No more CDMA because: who would want to finance a tower that isn't going to work for new phones and customers?
- No concept of "roaming" charges since cell towers are no longer tied to a specific provider.
- More efficient coverage since there are no longer redundant towers. Ex: Today, T-Mobile and AT&T may both build a tower in the same place, to service their own respective customers. In this system, one tower would suffice.
- More incentive to build towers where it is profitable, regardless of whose customers they are. Ex: Verizon builds towers in places where they have customers. But they won't build where they do not have customers.
Except that directly contradicts the "oh, it's the population density" myth.
For the most part, AT&T is ok in San Diego. I use gig's a month, so I can attest to the articles citing of huge data loads by iPhones. It's hard for me to believe it, but I see it everymonth on my bill. I stream Pandora and videos a lot. I don't get many dropped calls, although I got an email from them saying a new cell tower went up by my house recently. I had 6 dropped calls in one conversation wtih my mom last weekend...that's more than I've had the 2 years I've been with AT&T. I plan on switching, but we'll see. I suspect the slowness issues are more the phone. I've maxed my 16gigs on my iPhone 3G and have about 7 "pages" of apps. I think it's more the phone because it changes with software updates.
There's a pay-per-use or an unlimited plan. There isn't an in-between. I use enough that the pay-per-use plan makes no sense, economically. But if you're arguing that I am using the wrong plan, then by the NYT article's position there are 20 million AT&T smartphone users who are also on the wrong plan. And we're still using 10x less resources than the 9 million people on iPhones. This is supposed to be my fault how?
I paid AT&T for phone service, with data as a bonus. Thanks to network congestion primarily attributable to iPhone users, I can't even rely on my phone service, let alone data. If this is not an actionable issue I would love to have a lawyer explain to me why: AT&T clearly sold data plans for more phones than their bandwidth could accommodate, and this has negatively impacted the voice phone service millions of people signed up for.
My wife has an iPhone, I have the piece-of-junk Sony-Ericsson they were giving away last year. Both of them routinely drop calls, to the point where whenever it happens, I answer the repeat call with:
AT&T sucks! Hello...
The contract that got us the iPhone 3G expires next July, and with any luck there will be a shiny new Verizon 4G option available.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I just got an e-mail from apple announcing the launch of a turn by turn GPS navigation app for 9.99/month. Won't think add even more load to the already strained network?
As a customer, I would *love* to buy AT&T Femtocell devices to have in my home and my office. The value proposition here seems excellent for all parties. AT&T gets load off their cell network so they can save much of that $18 billion upgrade cost they're facing. As a customer, I spend a small one-time cost (the price of a month or two of cell phone service, say), and in return, my cell phone can actually make calls reliably, for a change. When are they going to get these out of beta and let people start really using them?
Why invest in infrastructure that will attract $40/month customers when you can build infrastructure that will attract customers willing to pay almost anything monthly for the latest technofashion device.
Every iPhone thread. There's always someone who thinks they have to share the oh-so-perceptive insight that the iPhone is largely a fashion accessory.
Meanwhile, back in reality, the reason AT&T is apparently having these problems? They brought onboard a device with a featureset which (despite apparent inferiority to half a dozen other devices I'm sure you can find slashdotters to tell you about) has essentially resulted in a huge explosion of actual mobile data usage.
AT&T's problems have nothing to do with the fashionability of the phone. They have everything to do with its features and the typical telco avoidance of actually building out service whenever they can get away with it.
Tweet, tweet.
It would do to remember, also, that Apples previous foray into the phone market, the Motorola "ROKR", was an absolute FLOPR. Granted, that was nothing like the iPhone... it was just a phone that could play iTunes DRM... but AT&T really was taking a chance. Nobody really KNEW that the iPhone would dominate.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
The first I heard that the iPhone can only be used with ATT network I didn't like that. Now Apple/ATT are going to suffer consequences for those silly decisions. My wife is still on the ATTnetwork and she doesn't have an iPhone and she recently had problems connecting or maintaining a connection.
I wish that Apple would make the iPhone work on other carriers.
When you put one of the most net friendly gadgets on the weakest major cell network in the U.S.
The iPhone would have been so much better on Verizon. AT&T was still on EDGE when Verizon & Sprint had been using EvDO for years.
Telstra here in Australia built out a UMTS network running on 850MHz/2100MHz and (with the right phone) you can get service in some pretty remote places (I got family on a sheep station out near Broken Hill and they got NextG service even way out there with an external antenna and/or standing in exactly the right place)
The best way to relieve the AT&T network congestion is to end AT&T exclusive iPhone contract. Once that is gone, I bet at least a million of those iPhone subscribers will disappear very quickly.
Are we supposed to have pity on them? After all, they wanted this, they wanted to be the exclusive carrier, to ramp up their business. They didn't update their network when everyone else was, yet they got the exclusive deal. Screws AT&T and all the wireless carriers until they ditch vendor lockin on the phones, and they stop disabling features of a phone to sell back to you as a service.
at&t is such a joke. verizon sucks too but at least i get service.
"They confiscated everything, even the stuff we didn't steal!"
Yes that really is a myth. Australia has better 3G coverage through out any populated area then the US has in most cities. It's nowhere near as good as a European network let alone that of Japan or HK but it's far better then the US. Australia has a far lower pop density then the US, we also have far more effective telecommunications regulations which prevent them from gouging us.
The quality of US mobile networks would increase almost overnight if the US government would actually punish these companies for their abuses.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
It really is about time that AT&T had motivation to actually upgrade their network so that it is usable. Considering the disparity between our infrastructure, and most of the rest of the world, I think this is progress that is along time coming.
I also think that it is very similar to the responses that AT&T had when DSL became a reality. Here in the Midwest, Southwestern Bell sat on DSL for YEARS before actually building it into their network. And they made close to the same excuse that AT&T is making about this.
Not amazed, not amused, just waiting...
Oh yeah, an Android phone would help to AT&T...
The quality of US mobile networks would increase almost overnight if the US government would actually punish these companies for their abuses.
What would be nice is if Obama would bring in the heads of the major telecos, and have a nice little meeting the chair of the FCC and FTC. Tell them that they have two choices:
1. 50 Mpbs a second broadband to 90% of U.S. households by 2016
2. Have their companies broken up, subjected to far stronger regulation, and executives would be prosecuted for fraud.
The latter being for taking $200 billion in tax breaks and subsidies to upgrade their networks and pocketing the money instead. But that would require Obama to have some balls.
This is exactly the sort of nonsense California implemented when they introduced a "deregulation" of electricity.
This is what allowed Enron to screw a good part of the country, created rolling blackouts during the height of the tech boom, and created a f-ing mess that lingers on today.
Read more at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010212/wasserman
If AT+T's network sucks, go for somebody else. Personally, I'll never have financial intercourse with Ma Bell again, because that is one diseased ho. But I digress.
Incorrect. The California deregulation was something entirely different. Just because they slapped the word "deregulation" onto that monstrosity does not mean that all cases of monopoly-breaking are suddenly bad.
Allow me to explain. But first of all:
If AT+T's network sucks, go for somebody else.
The entire point of this discussion is that people cannot do that. They are stuck with the provider who is tied to their phone, forced into a multi-year contract, and even if they get out of it, they are limited to the carriers who provide decent service in their area.
Now, a history lesson:
This is exactly the sort of nonsense California implemented when they introduced a "deregulation" of electricity.
Before I go into this, let me explain that many states have done this pseudo-deregulation successfully. The California problem had nothing to do with deregulation, and the term deregulation is thrown around to mean 100 different things.
The problem in California was two-fold.
1) During their pseudo-deregulation, the California legislature decided that electricity prices would be fixed. This is true irony here: a government created a regulation overriding the market price, and called it "deregulation". That is definitely --NOT-- deregulation. During this transitional time period, the rules of supply and demand could not function.
California is hot, and during this transitional period, summer came - and air conditioners use lots of power. Under normal market forces, prices would go up when demand went up, and people who respond by conserving electricity. Instead, demand went up and price remained the same, so people kept using electricity at an increasing rate -- until the state ran out of capacity.
2) Electricity is not deregulated. It is heavily hugely highly regulated. Even with price fixing, the market has another solution: Building new power plants. Imagine if there was a shortage of green beans. Farmers would start growing more of them, since there is now money to be made. But that doesn't work with power, because there is so much regulation that you can't just buy a plot of land and build a power plant. The most efficient form of power we have is so heavily regulated it is basically illegal to build them at all. (Nuclear).
Read more at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010212/wasserman [thenation.com]
It's a good article, and it says essentially the same thing I am saying:
Most important was their assumption that there would always be a surplus of cheap wholesale electricity. So they sold off too much of their generating capacity and had too little of their own supply at a time when rates were still frozen.
aving dismantled key efficiency programs, the utilities now realized that their customers, buying power at fixed costs, had little incentive to conserve.
Wow, it is even worse than I thought:
A bill, AB 1890...Some consumer and environmental groups were furious about a wide range of issues, most notably the reactor bailouts, which they worried (correctly) would prolong the operating life of deteriorating nukes
OMG! Bailouts! I didn't know that. Ha! See: this is what they call "de-regulation" -- how is bailing out a failing company with a product that can't survive part of de-regulation? De-regulation would be letting them go out of business.
This is what allowed Enron to screw a good part of the country
Enron is irrelevant to this discussion. Equating financial oversight to electricity regulations is apples to oranges. This is another case of associating deregulation==bad in all cases.
Way to go flying off the handle, right past the point.
Summary for the galactically dense:
Separating the distribution function from the sales (profit generation) creates more corporate mouths to feed, and therefore more costs.
At the same time, the distribution function gets "pinched" for money, and network upgrades and maintenance is actually delayed.
So it's exactly the wrong choice - you get increased costs, plus decreased service and reliability, as proven in CA.
As to people's contracts, the problems with AT+T's mobile data technology were well known before the iPhone came out. If you FREELY CHOSE to sign a contract to get a technology item that was in no way a necessity, assuming (I guess) that a poor data distribution solution would make a full-featured browser sing, then fuck you. I feel no pity for willful fools.
my question is, given that you cannot roll out additional wireless capacity in such a short time, for a reasonable amount of investment, and users getting upset over the unreliability (many people say that as soon as it expires they'll leave AT&T), why do they not put in a traffic prioritization scheme? I.e. prioritize:
1. voice (lots of dissatisfaction if lag, dropped calls)
2. text messages (dissatisfaction if text does not even get sent)
3. then email (low bandwidth use)
4. html (sometimes need to find important information)
5. finally streaming media (this is a luxury)
They say "unlimited" but surely we all acknowledge there is some limit -- whether it's going to be set by AT&T in terms of raw usage, prioritized, or finally, by the user's frustration and willingness to wait...
I would just think it's natural to do this given people's rising complaints.
I have yet to use more than 300 MB of transfer on my 6GB per month Fido account in Canada. This unlimited business is what is causing people to be stupid with their 3G data dragging everyone else down on the cell towers with them.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.