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MMS Arrives For the iPhone — Will It Crash AT&T's Network?
itwbennett writes "AT&T has said it is already seeing 'record traffic during peak hours of the night' with just the users selected for testing, and so it is 'very nervous' about the spike in traffic that it expects will occur after it launched MMS service for iPhones on Friday. Of course, setting records for MMS traffic isn't that great a feat considering that 'the service in question has been out for years on other handsets and hasn't exactly taken the mobile world by storm. In 2008, MMS made up just 2.5 percent of all messages sent from phones worldwide, meaning about 97.5 percent were SMS text messages, according to ABI Research. ABI expects the MMS share to grow to just 4.5 percent by 2014.' However, the carrier's fears in one respect may have been justified, says ABI analyst Dan Shey: 'Interoperability between carriers has always been an issue, and that's why MMS usage hasn't really taken off.'"
Kudos once again to Slashdot for being so on top of things. MMS was launched nearly 24 hours ago, if it was going to crash AT&T's network it would have (notice the use of past-tense), not will it. This is an interesting topic, but don't post an article speculating about some future event some 24 hours after it happened.
Anyhow, for the matter at hand, did it crash AT&T's network? No, but it got close. Where I am 3G was damn near unusable all Friday afternoon, and even EDGE was slow. I'm told by the silly people that actually pay AT&T's exorbitant fees for their it's-not-quite-data services (SMS/MMS) that SMS and especially MMS have been unreliable today. People are able to send, but not necessarily receive. Some of this I'm sure goes back to network issues, while other parts are probably just AT&T's SMS/MMS servers being overwhelmed.
Although to be fair to AT&T, I doubt anyone could have done significant better. Certainly there's room for improvement, but iPhones are data-hogs. Anyone else (e.g. Verizon) would be facing similar network issues if they suddenly flipped a switch that let nearly 10 million hogs suddenly consume even more bandwidth.