Why AT&T Should Dump the iPhone's Unlimited Data Plan

Pickens writes "Farhad Manjoo has a provocative story at Slate asserting that while the iPhone has prompted millions of people to join AT&T, it has also hurt the company's image because all of those customers use their phones too much, and AT&T's network is getting crushed by the demand. The typical smartphone customer consumes about 40 to 80 megabytes of wireless capacity a month, while the typical iPhone customer uses 400 MB a month. As more people sign up, local cell towers get more congested, and your own phone performs worse. He says the problem is that a customer who uses 1 MB a month pays the same amount as someone who uses 1,000 MB, and the solution is tiered pricing. 'Of course, users would cry bloody murder at first,' writes Manjoo. 'I'd call on AT&T to create automatic tiers — everyone would start out on the $10/100 MB plan each month, and your price would go up automatically as your usage passes each 100 MB tier.' He says the key to implementing the policy is transparency, and that the iPhone should have an indicator like the battery bar that changes color as you pass each monthly tier. 'Some iPhone fans will argue that metered pricing would kill the magic of Apple's phone — that sense of liberation one feels at being able to access the Internet from anywhere, at any time. The trouble is, for many of us, AT&T's overcrowded network has already killed that sense, and now our usual dealings with Apple's phone are tinged with annoyance.'"

Comments

I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Bobnova]

I will laugh when ATT and the Iphone cease to work entirely.

While they're at it, charge extra for text messaging while moving faster then 10mph, stupid car texting people anyway.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Coren22]

How would you handle the passenger texting then? The driver isn't the only one in the car.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Emperor Tiberius]

And what about people sending texts as a passenger in the vehicle going faster than 10 MPH?

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Anonymous Coward]

What we need is a giant spike in the center of the steering column which is explosively propelled forward when the car detects a cell phone in the vicinity of the driver's seat headrest.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Coren22]

I can agree to that, but my car has bluetooth built in. :)

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[fucket]

Or people texting while riding the bus or train?

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[digitalunity]

People need to think bigger. Much bigger.

Wireless spectrum is given out to the major wireless carriers so that they can individually implement their own technology and let the market sort it out what is best. It doesn't work. All the available technologies are adequate. It's time for a major overhaul in the structure of our wireless industry. Having multiple networks cover the entire country, a sizable region, with towers for CDMA and GSM towers is inefficient and partially responsible for the outrageous rates we all pay for wireless service.

Here's my plan for a radically more efficient, cheaper wireless industry:
1. Feds seize wireless spectrum for GSM and CDMA.
2. FCC mandates all wireless carriers switch to GSM.
2. Congress mandates all wireless telephone carriers in the US establish peering contracts, whereby there is no such thing as roaming anymore.
3. Feds establish rate limits for services. Data access would not be unlimited, but rates should be limited to $.05 per megabyte. Voice access rates should be capped to $15 per 1000 minutes per line.

The effect here is that networks aren't chasing each others tails to have the biggest networks or the best coverage. You never know whose network you're really using. This allows wireless networks to have a joint stake in the overall network access quality as well as any new towers will provide coverage for all GSM phone users, not just a subset of people.

Wireless carriers will still have the ability to use contracts for subsidizing phone purchases, which locks a person into service with that carrier for a period of time. With that, carriers will still have a lot of opportunity to provide profit bearing value-add services beyond the rate caps established by the FCC. This would also place the smallest wireless carriers on equal footing with the largest carriers with respect to access to the newest handset models.

Moving the entire country to GSM over a period of 2 years is quite feasible, since that's the average handset upgrade cycle for Americans. This is just one possible way to radically change the way the wireless industry works and remove the huge inefficiencies in the way the capital investment is spent.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Coren22]

You should write to your congressman, if you are a American at least. You have a great plan, which would take care of most of the problems. Only problem I can see is that if the Gov owns the wireless network, then they are less likely to upgrade it in a timely manner. Maintenance would be done well, but the upgrades wouldn't be as important.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[SuperQ]

It's already getting there with the rollout of LTE on most of the major US networks.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Planesdragon]

3. Feds establish rate limits for services. Data access would not be unlimited, but rates should be limited to $.05 per megabyte. Voice access rates should be capped to $15 per 1000 minutes per line.

Data is not a commodity, data is a service

When I go and buy a jar of salsa, the manufacturer had to pay a specific amount of $ to manufacture that specific jar. If I do not buy it, he can keep it around and sell that jar to someone else tomorrow.

When I want to park in a parking space for an hour, however, the city does not have to pay someone $ to create an hour in which I could park. If I do not park there, then the city cannot keep around the hour I was going to buy and sell it to someone else.

In fact, if the city had magical parking meters that would safetly and immediately eject the car of any non-paying person immediately as soon as someone with a quarter wanted to park, the city could just let non-payers park there as much as they wanted, with the understanding their car might not be at the same location when they got back.

The city would be foolish not to do this, as the parking meter is just there to make sure that someone going to the store on that street (say, to buy a jar of salsa) can find someplace to park. While magical parking meters don't exist, this IS how bandwidth works on the internet.

Unless your ISP is a drooling moron, they are NOT paying per-kb, per-mb, or any real per-use fee at all. They signed an agreement with backbone providers to get a certain amount of bandwidth for a certain amount of time, and they don't pay any more for bandwidth on an hour when NO ONE uses their network than they do for the busiest hour of their year.

If AT&T really wants to keep bandwidth responsive, they want to decrease the effect that heavy users have on their network. The cheap way is to just lie and charge those heavy users more -- but that's not the right way. The right way would be to set a self-tiering structure, where so much network activity over so long just puts a heavy user's requests at a lower priority than the lighter user who pays the same amount.

Letting heavy users voluntarily pay more to get faster service would be a great revenue model, too. Especially since it wouldn't be in danger of the FCC declaring it unlawful.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[jeff419]

Yes, seize it all and regulate it even more. This will be the key to our salvation.

/sarcasm

On the real though, they should get rid of the assignation of wireless spectrum and allow a truly free market for wireless voice and data service to grow. It's not that hard to make sure one's service doesn't interfere with the next. Rather than giving out monopolies over spectrum let the courts handle disputes where one company is directly interfering with another's.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[trum4n]

ummmm...i like my CDMA rev A devices.... you can buy my new 800$ phone.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Mycroft_VIII]

Doesn't make it any safer, the problem is the conversation with someone you can't see.
      Our brains are geared to use visual clues in conversation and when you can't see the other person the brain over focuses on the audio clues and starts down filtering anything not related to the conversation.
      If anything hands free makes it worse, because you THINK your being safer and not putting any extra effort into your driving.
      On the phone OR on the road, not both.

Mycroft

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[tsm_sf]

You mean there isn't something magic about the distance from the phone to your head? I just assumed, with all the laws, that your brain stopped working when your elbow bent past a certain degree.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[NiceGeek]

"Yes, seize it all and regulate it even more. This will be the key to our salvation. " - go ahead and tell me how well "the free market" is working to fix this problem.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Nitewing98]

And you really think that Verizon will give up the advantage it has right now so that the smaller players are on an even playing field? I don't think so.

No, eventually this will sort itself out, the cell system in still a young industry ( 20 years) and is rapidly becoming the primary phone for most people. Let competition keep going and see where it leads. Where I live, AT&T has decent coverage and so they need to concentrate their improvements in more crowded urban areas.

They (ATT) need to work toward unlimited calling as well as data, IMO. It seems silly to limit calls and practically give away the data stream.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Nitewing98]

Sorry, I can't agree. When conversing with a passenger, I don't turn my head from the road to watch their face, and I think that's true of most of us. Hands free works fine for me without impairing my driving. But it's a matter of priorities, the driving has to come first and if I'm in a tricky part of town (road construction, stop and go traffic, etc.) I'll often tell the person I'm speaking to that I have to go and they'll understand.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Archfeld]

Which would be just fine if the problem was handling your phone while driving, but it has been proved that the issue is NOT handling the phone, it is the divided attention needed to talk and still herd your car along safely, and most folks DON'T have the needed mental faculties necessary. Note: I am not implying you are one of those people, many can safely perform 2 tasks or properly proritize themselves to give the most important one the needed timeslice.
I was on the phone with a CE from HP and the last thing I heard was OH SHIT...click. He rear-ended a stopped car at somthing approaching 30 MPH, while trying to pass on information I TOLD HIM could wait until he arrived on-site. Luckily he was not too seriously hurt, nor was the driver of the car he plowed into, but for me that was lesson learned, I can only hope it was the same for the CE. As for AT&T, they are getting what they deserve, oversell your network by 100 times and then suddenly discover you can't support the load, GIVE BACK some of the money you took from customers and agree to a plan based in reality. That is NOT the corporate way sadly, oversell your network, and then cut services and terminate customers for compromising the network stability by using what was advertised as available and what you actually signed up for is more the AT&T way.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Nitewing98]

That makes sense - people can't seem to eat or drink and drive either. LOL

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[FlightTest]

You'd think that, but I highly suspect you'd be wrong.

I fly small airplanes regularly, which means it's just me, I don't have a copilot to handle the radios. I do the most communicating with air traffic control during the most critical aspects of flight, which is takeoff and landing. While approaching the airport, I not only have to listen for radio calls for me, but also for aircraft around me to maintain situational awareness and ensure the controller hasn't just cleared someone onto the runway I'm about to land on. Often I'm not cleared to land until I'm on short final and starting the power and pitch adjustments to flare. I must acknowledge that clearance with a radio transmission. I'll often receive basic taxi instructions (asking where I'm going on the airport, giving me a ground control frequency) during rollout.

Pilots every day talk to ATC at the same time they are performing critical tasks in the airplane. "Dropping the airplane to fly the radio" is rarely cited as a contributing factor to a crash. Not to say it never is, but it is rare. Pilots receive NO training on how to split their attention between the airplane and the radio ... while we are admonished to always fly the airplane first, failure to acknowledge a landing clearance has the potential to have the FAA start enforcement action against you, so it's not optional.

I don't think the big danger in driving while holding a cell phone is because you're talking, I think it's because you've just taken a hand away from controlling the vehicle. Or you've got your neck in some weird position trying to hold it between your ear and shoulder. Sure, it takes some brain cells to carry on a conversation, and that DOES reduce safety somewhat, same as singing along with the radio or carrying on a conversation with a passenger. But I can walk and chew gum at the same time, I can land an airplane and talk to ATC at the same time, and I can drive and talk to someone at the same time, regardless if they're sitting next to me or I have a bluetooth in my ear.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Racing_Turtles]

"Wireless carriers will still have the ability to use contracts for subsidizing phone purchases" Perhaps, but I don't see the slightest attempt to validate your assumption with math. Do you know how long it currently takes the carriers to recoup equipment subsidies and turn profits on a per subscriber basis? The real cost of equipment subsidies? Profit per wireless subscriber? Cost of supporting a single subscriber per month (based on cost of goods sold, sales commissions, customer care, billing, network utilization, and so on?) The ratio of revenue to profit? The amount of profit used for capital expenditures such as network improvements? How much these costs would be reduced by your plan? In the absence of that, it sounds like a nice idea, but ...

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Shane dot H]

If driving a car carried the same level of requirements as flying an airplane, I'd agree. But frankly, pilots need a lot more training and have to obey a lot more rules than drivers do. If getting a drivers license involved as many regulatory hurdles as getting a pilot's license does, then I'm certain we'd have much safer highways.

But it would come with costs that the public is probably unwilling to pay.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[R3d M3rcury]

One thing I'd note, however, is that everything you mention is in regards to one thing: Flying and landing the airplane.

You're right in that it takes lots of concentration in order to do this well. As you say, you need to communicate with ATC as well as listen to other radio calls. You're doing all these tasks simultaneously.

Now lets add in a conversation with your sweetheart about dinner plans on a different radio channel. And let's also include trying to find a music radio station that isn't playing an advertisement.

You certainly wouldn't be trying to do all these other things while trying to land an airplane, would you?

There's the difference. In the case of landing an airplane, all of these things going on improve your ability to accomplish your task so your brain is remaining focused on the task. In the case of a car, all these things going on are a distraction to what you are trying to accomplish--namely maneuvering a couple thousand pounds of vehicle.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Shane dot H]

GSM is garbage - the standard is old and outdated, which is why most US carriers, including the CDMA guys, are moving forward to LTE anyways. And they don't need government mandating anything - the industry is moving towards this on its own.

The rest of your post sounds reasonable, although I highly doubt your proposals are politically feasible. I do really like the "no roaming" bit, although I wonder if it will look like utility deregulation, where the benefits to the public never materialize.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[h4rm0ny]

Not meaning to be argumentative, but I think it's important to bear in mind two things that may affect how well your parallel with flying aircraft works for driving whilst talking on a hands free phone. The first is that pilots are, well, pilots. You go through a lot of training to become a pilot, especially a professional one. I'm sure there are better and worse pilots, but they're all pretty qualified people. I'm not sure you can translate that to the general mass of car drivers. Pilots have had the bottom quartile removed in a way that motorists haven't. Secondly, in a similar sort of way, flying a plane is, well, flying a plane. You know you're in a serious situation and you're concentrating on what you're doing. A car driver should be doing that but typically, let's face it, is not in the same headspace as a pilot landing a plane. And the conversation that a pilot is having is about what you're doing as well. You're not talking about work or sex or plans for the night (I hope), you're listening for information that will tell you whether it's time to pull up or lower the landing gear or whatever. Your attention, even if monitoring different sources of information, is on the task.

I mean, you're the pilot, so correct me if I'm wrong, but these are things that occur to me. And don't base it on whether you can "walk and chew gum" at the same time, base it on whether you know anyone who can't - I think most of us do!

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[I'm just joshin]

Fascinating how your sig refers to liberty yet you propose to take away the liberty of those who don't do things how you want them to do it.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[aztracker1]

Well, the same can be said for having someone next to you in the car... so let's just eliminate multi-passenger vehicles while we're at it.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[GNU(slash)Nickname]

This is similar to the situation for law enforcement, emergency responders, taxi drivers, etc.

Your radio conversation is directly related to the activity at hand, and therefore does not impair your situational awareness. In other words, you are still only doing one thing at a time - flying - while using the radio as a tool to perform that task.

Car drivers on cell phones who are generally talking about something completely unrelated to driving, such as where to meet their mistresses for lunch, are trying to do two unrelated tasks at once. This splits their attention and results in impaired situational awareness, just as the GP states.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[FlightTest]

Well, while they are all related to landing the airplane, you are doing a lot of tasks.

On a typical VFR approach your concentration is outside the airplane. However, there are gear to be lowered, flaps to be lowered (in steps, not all at once), mixtures and propeller controls to be moved, throttles to be adjusted, and you ought to recheck all that once or twice before landing to make sure you haven't forgot something (like the landing gear!).

I don't think ATC telling me to make the first turn off "if able" is helping me land the airplane, neither actually, is them telling me I'm cleared to land, after all I don't need nor receive a clearance to land at a non-towered airport. It's a systematic safety check, so while it helps ensure I own the runway for the next couple of minutes, it doesn't really help me land the airplane.

True, all the things I'm doing are concentrated on flying the airplane, but it's splitting my attention several ways none the less.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Anonymous Coward]

Football without referees is usually called a riot. Although if it's that American thing they call football and you take away the refs, well, you get soccer.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[FlightTest]

First, I'm NOT a "professional" pilot, by which I mean I do not get money for flying airplanes. I have commercial, instrument, and multi-engine ratings, I do not hold and do not want an instructor certificate.

The air carrier guys get almost constant recurrent training, or at least a part 121 ride every 6 months, but they also have two crew members up there so they can divy up the roles. The air carriers operate under the same rules I do, PLUS a bunch more. Not so private pilots. We merely have to pass a flight review given by a certificated instructor every two years. While this is more than your average driver's license renewal, the minimum is 1 hour of ground instruction and 1 hour in the air. Rarely does a flight review go beyond that.

I honestly think almost anyone can become a private pilot. An instrument rating, maybe not, because it's a TON more work, though even that is being reduced as GPS becomes commonplace.

I just don't see that having a conversation on bluetooth regarding your dinner plans tonight as being any different than having that same conversation with the person sitting next to you. At least when you're on bluetooth, you're not tempted to look over at the person you're talking to.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[FlightTest]

I'd love to see actual research that backs up this claim. The claim may be correct, and I may be unique, but I don't feel any less distracted dealing with ATC when flying then I do when I'm talking on bluetooth while driving. Having seen no research one way or the other, it's difficult to say who's right here.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[GNU(slash)Nickname]

I'd love to see actual research that backs up this claim. The claim may be correct, and I may be unique, but I don't feel any less distracted dealing with ATC when flying then I do when I'm talking on bluetooth while driving. Having seen no research one way or the other, it's difficult to say who's right here.

I'm not aware of any studies comparing general cell phone usage with task specific radio usage. In that respect, I'm just an asshole with an opinion. There has been a fair bit of research into the distraction effect of handsfree cell phone use though. Here's one http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/01/030129080944.htm to start with.

One thing to think about - if you *felt* distracted, it wouldn't be (as) dangerous, because you would tend to compensate for the risk in some way.

I think it's similar to the self-perception distortion associated with drunk driving. I know I personally have to give away my keys before the third drink, because somewhat tipsy me doesn't recognize that he's a danger behind the wheel the same way sober me would. Interestingly though, completely slaughtered me wouldn't try to drive even if he did have the keys.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Anonymous Coward]

deregulation works well when companies are allowed to fail

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[shoemilk]

Ah, I see where you've gone off now. You don't seem to understand the concept of Nonverbal Communication. This is why the person being in the car is completely different to bluetooth. You know when you go around a curve too fast and someone grabs the "Oh Shit!" handle? Or the sensation you get when someone tenses up beside you because some moron ran the red light and is about to slam into you? These are clues that cut the conversation short with a live person. On bluetooth, they just keep talking through your crash.

As to where your flight analogy fails is that the tower is watching you. They are looking at you, giving you clearance (telling you that they've looked around and it's ok) for you to land. The person on the other end of your bluetooth isn't looking at you telling you that no one is trying to speed through that red light.

Another instance where your analogy fails is that (you've admitted) the hardest part of flying is take off and landing (despite this, you yourself admit that people still crash because of wireless communication). You know it's hard and you know you have to concentrate. Driving through and intersection is the most dangerous (as in where most accidents occur) part of driving, but I guarantee that no one pays any more attention then.

Try this, next time you go flying, when you're landing, start hitting on the control tower while you try to land.

Handsfree is not safe. Your protests sound like the protests of people who were against seat-belts "They're more a danger than anything. I can brace myself on the dash." or people against DUI "I drive better drunk/ stoned because I have to pay more attention."

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Quothz]

You'd think that, but I highly suspect you'd be wrong.

You'd think that, but I highly suspect you have little idea what you're talking about.

This Wikipedia article cites numerous studies with different methodologies which disagree with you. One study found lower risks with hands-free phones, but still an increased risk from driving with your mind on the road. Check out the "Handsfree device" section cites in particular. Conversing with a passenger is (probably) safer, but the difference between holding a cell and calling hands-free is at best minor, at worst zero.

I don't think the big danger in driving while holding a cell phone is because you're talking, I think it's because you've just taken a hand away from controlling the vehicle

There you're close: The big danger is dialing. If you must yammer while blithely careening down the road, threatening the lives and limbs of innocent children, at least respect others enough to use voice-dialing. Better yet, realize that your conversations aren't more important than the lives of others, turn the damn phone off, and keep your entire attention where it should be: On the stereo controls.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[supremebob]

Apple could fix this "problem" on their own... develop a CDMA version of the iPhone to be used with the Verizon and Sprint networks, and watch millions of frustrated iPhone users flock to those networks when their 2 year AT&T contracts run out. Bingo... you just load balanced all of the iPhone traffic over several cellular networks, "fixing" the problem free market style.

Hell... Apple could offer their existing GSM iPhone on TMobile even faster to "fix" this problem... all they need to do is get rid of that horrid exclusivity contract, and work with TMobile to get visual voicemail working with their network.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[njfuzzy]

It's hell of a lot easier to kill someone else while driving a car, than to kill someone else while flying a single-passenger airplane.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Anonymous Coward]

Not everyone believes that property equates to liberty.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[digitalunity]

Public utility deregulation worked out perfectly fine, unless you live in the Southwestern united states.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[digitalunity]

Wireless spectrum isn't property. Denying ownership of spectrum isn't taking away their liberty.

The EM spectrum is a finite resource and is a natural monopoly. The system we have now is so inefficient that Americans unhappily pay extraordinary rates for wireless services but there is no incentive for any company to reduce the price of their services because there is no real competition. Consumers frequently hop from network to network in search of the least evil company with the best handset. The system sucks balls right now. "Free market" capitalism isn't fixing the problem either.

Corporate profit isn't liberty.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[digitalunity]

There are a lot of definitions of liberty. None of them revolve around guarantees for corporations to make a profit, or to gouge their customers to whatever extent they choose.

Liberty is freedom from oppression and the right to choose your own destiny. I'm not saying we need to remove the wireless carriers. Just saying that a radical change in the structure of ownership and control in the wireless EM spectrum and wireless towers. What I propose to do to the wireless industry isn't far different from what the lending servicer industry has done voluntarily.

Now, loan services receive fees for administering loans that they don't own. What I'm proposing is that the feds directly own the towers and the spectrum. Wireless carriers use contracts and handset subsidies to act as servicers for a national wireless network. The existing companies make a profit, and indeed see a dramatic reduction in the complexity of their operations. They still have an opportunity to deliver branded handsets to consumers jam packed with "value-add" services(the permanently installed shit handsets come preloaded with).

FYI, you can't really label me a socialist. If you knew me at all, you'd know I'm quite moderate on a whole host of issues. I'm not on the left, the right, the red, the blue, the in, the out, whatever political labels you can think of-I'm not in that group.

If you're really interested, here's a rundown of my stance on hot-button political topics.
I support gay marriage.
I support personal gun ownership rights.
I support federalization of natural monopolies for industries unable to operate fairly.
I support drug legalization.
I support abortion.
I support an immediate withdrawal of all troops from Iraq.
I support the war in Afghanistan.
I support a complete ban on line item vetoes, signing statements, bill riders, or bills that cannot be written in plain language.
I support the repeal of immunity to telecom companies involved in illegal spying on americans.
I support the complete exposure and criminal investigation of all those who colluded with the government, including those government operatives who initiated the program to spy on american communications.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[biryokumaru]

Or the Northeastern United States.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[I'm just joshin]

The thing is, I wasn't referring only to the exclusive leasing of the spectrum. Every aspect of your plan reduces liberty.

I'm old enough to remember when it was an expensive treat to call long distance. Today you can get unlimited long distance for pennies.

That's what happens when you get the government out of the way. Regulation prevents competition. If the (fed, state, & local) government's only involvement was to enforce laws against collusion and unfair practices, the cell phone industry would be in far better shape.

We don't have "free market" capitalism with current levels of governmental involvement.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[FlightTest]

You misrepresent what I said. I did NOT say talking on the radio caused crashes, I said it is rarely listed as a contributing factor. I have never seen it listed as a primary factor.

And, it's been proven to me time and time again, that no, the tower is NOT looking at me, and may not be looking at the runway either. Safety is my responsibility, not the towers. Even says so in the regs.

Given that I'm straight, and I can't remember the last time I talked to female controller, I doubt I'll be hitting on the tower controller any time soon. Pity that, the few female controllers I've delt with have been excellent.

I'm not protesting at all. I'm just drawing a parallel between flying an aircraft and talking to ATC and talking with a bluetooth while driving.

Interestingly enough, another poster linked to a wikipedia article that agrees with the premise that handfreee is no more safe than holding a phone. However, it also says there are conflicting results on exactly how distracting a passenger is, and in fact talking to a passenger may be no more safe than talking on a bluetooth. Which says to me this may all be much ado about nothing.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[I'm just joshin]

BTW, I'm referring to the mess that is wireless communications with the "that's what happens..."

Also, looks like we registered for /. within a couple days of each other...

-J

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[FlightTest]

Heck, I often use voice dialing even when I'm NOT driving. Far easier. Interesting that the studies comparing talking to a passenger vs. conversing on a cell are mixed, I don't think I'd classify it as "probably" safer, at best I'd say "possibly" safer. I think it would be quite revealing to see studies of things like listening to music vs. listening to the news vs talking on a cell. Might be a bit surprising.

No, my conversations are not more important than the lives of people around me. But then again, I have no trouble shifting my focus as necessary, even if it means asking the person I'm talking to to repeat themselves because I've shifted enough of my focus outside the vehicle that I'm no longer listening to them.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[mr_death]

Doesn't make it any safer, the problem is the conversation with someone you can't see.

A grand, unfounded assertion. When flying a small aircraft under Instrument Flight Rules, I routinely speak with someone I can't see (the controller), listen to other conversations to visualize the traffic around me; and at the same time fly on course, on speed, and on altitude; and navigate and anticipate what coming down the road.

Communication with "someone you can't see" can be done, and done well -- even in the face of high traffic, turbulence, and a difficult approach. Compared to hard IFR flying, driving is a joke. Those who can't drive and talk at the same time probably shouldn't have a license.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[shutdown -p now]

I fly small airplanes regularly, which means it's just me, I don't have a copilot to handle the radios. I do the most communicating with air traffic control during the most critical aspects of flight, which is takeoff and landing.

Do you land with another plane 10m in front, one more at the same distance behind you, and yet more on both sides?

Because that's how a typical city traffic looks if you scale it to speeds. I strongly suspect that, even during takeoff and landing (except for the few very brief moments), a pilot actually has more margin to correct a momentary mistake than a car driver.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Anonymous Coward]

You look to the left economically and anti-authoritarian socially to me. Being to the left doesn't mean you have to agree with the democrats.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Anonymous Coward]

A big problem with Americans is that they expect dedicated lines without having to pay for dedicated lines. If you want to have unlimited bandwidth and guaranteed speeds then buy a dedicated line, but you sure as hell wont get it for $30 a month.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Miamicanes]

> 2. FCC mandates all wireless carriers switch to GSM.

Er, actually GSM is an officially-deprecated dinosaur. Even in Europe. 3G "GSM" is actually "W-CDMA".

Now, that doesn't stop everyone from CALLING W-CDMA on a 3G GSM phone "GSM", but it doesn't MAKE it "GSM". GSM is a variant of TDMA (3 virtual channels that share a single frequency channel by sequentially using their own exclusive timeslices within it). TDMA is the reason why GSM-based devices cause a bursty buzzing sound if they're placed too close to an amplifier... the buzzing noise is caused by the click when the carrier rapidly cuts off for a fraction of a second, and the next phone's carrier cuts. Think: the click made by a Commodore 64 when you changed the volume register (which was really a wavetable DAC hardwired to a circuit emulating a single byte of RAM, with the various SID effects produced by directly manipulating the apparent value of that virtual byte).

Need more proof? Read up about picocells. Picocells that handle CDMA and *ONLY* 3G GSM are fairly cheap, and becoming commodities. Picocells that handle oldschool GSM *and* CDMA/WCDMA("3G GSM") are quite a bit more expensive, because THEY require implementation of two completely different technologies. Adding the ability to roam on a European 3G network to an American CDMA phone (a-la Verizon's Touch HD, I believe) is more of a political and business decision than a technological problem. Adding true GSM capabilities to a CDMA phone requires a second radio module & baseband processor, because the technologies are completely different.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[dougisfunny]

Driving through and intersection is the most dangerous (as in where most accidents occur) part of driving, but I guarantee that no one pays any more attention then.

You would be wrong to guarantee that, as I usually look both ways when going through an intersection because I am paranoid that someone will run the light and T-Bone me, I do the same with rail road crossings, and especially in parking lots.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[R3d M3rcury]

That actually brings up another good point, though feel free to correct me if I'm wrong--I am not a pilot and you obviously are.

The communication with ATC, from what little I know of flying, isn't really much of a "conversation." They tell you things and you acknowledge. You tell them things and they acknowledge. Short, curt, direct, and to the point. Not a whole lot of "Hey, ATC, what are your plans for the weekend?" type of stuff.

So these are brief messages which are informational inputs. When ATC says that you are cleared to land on such and such runway, the response is "Roger." Not a lot of dialog going on.

I think there's a difference between doing alot of tasks simultaneously which accomplish a singular goal and attempting to accomplish two goals simultaneously. Landing an airplane means keeping up to date with a number of different things going on inside and outside your airplane. In the case of cell phones and driving, however, it's usually about accomplishing two different things (eg, maneuvering through traffic while simultaneously talking to someone about what's for dinner).

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Anonymous Coward]

The "free market" works when it can, by having greedy people try to outdo each other in offering things customers will value - like the iPhone. Or do you suppose Apple built it out of the goodness of their heart?
When government regulates, say, wireless spectrum allocation, it ends up doing so at the behest of the biggest players. It's always like that. The Department of Labor works in favor of the unions, not the public. The Department of Energy works in favor of the big oil companies, not the public, and so on. And the FCC has done all it could to help the baby bells maintaing their near-monopolistic hold on US communication networks. That's why all you have, in most places, is over-priced local service by a former baby bell, and a choice between two protected, cosetted, government-favored wireless carriers, ATT or Verizon. Regulate it more, and the big players get bigger, and more powerful, by using the power of regulation to kill off competition and protect themselves.
To answer your question, there is no body or organization called the "free market" that works for you. But if you let people try (by lowering the regulatory burden on new-comers, and stop favoring the big carriers in spectrum allocation) they will try to make money by giving consumers what they want. In the long run, this always leads to better service and lower prices.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Coren22]

All of these people posting about the split concentration really are missing the point. I strongly believe there should be a test of this type to weed out those who just can't split their attention safely, there is no reason that those of us who can should be legislated out of it. I am no more distracted by a bluetooth link to my cell phone then I am by a bird flying by, or the radio playing, or another pasenger. Maybe this is the benefit of ADD, but I can split my attention quite well without degrading my driving ability. I live in a very heavily congested area, and I can say quite confidently that I have never had a problem talking on the phone. I can say however that I would never be able to drive my clutch while holding the phone...that would be impossible.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Coren22]

You sir win my prize for the most off the wall response to any of my posts so far. I did not request this option on my car, nor would I have. This was a included feature when I bought my car. It appears that Toyota has moved to putting them in all their cars, as even the base model Tundra also comes equipped with this feature. You can make jokes about bluetooth being gay, but I will use whatever feature makes it easier to accomplish a given activity.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[AnnoyaMooseCowherd]

I'm old enough to remember when it was an expensive treat to call long distance. Today you can get unlimited long distance for pennies.

Would the tremendous increase in bandwidth and reduction in costs of changing to a digital infrastructure have anything to do with this, or is it all just down to competition?

In the UK, the telecoms provider (BT) was privatised, not as a result of any political ideology, but so that they could borrow the billions required to digitise the network without the government's involvement. In the end however, they didn't need to borrow anything as the massive savings they made from digitising the first parts of the network more than paid for each subsequent upgrade.

Being digital, the new infrastructure enabled BT to do many things from a computer keyboard that they previously had to schedule a highly trained engineer out to do and BT soon found that it was making a profit from the standing charges alone - any money made from people actually making calls was a (huge) bonus.

All this success was sold as being as a result of privatisation, rather than digitisation, which in turn led to a rush to sell off anything that wasn't nailed down - usually at, what later investigations found to be, significantly below real value.

Of course none of the subsequent utility sell-offs had anything that corresponded to BT's digitisation and have instead led to inefficient monopolies. In the fine tradition of BT however, the privatised companies rarely actually have to put their hands in their own pockets as all upgrades are paid for by large, government approved levies added to the bills - long before any benefit (if any) to the consumer is actually provided.

These levies ensure that dividends are not affected by the need to invest in the infrastructure but, being able to have their cake and eat it, the value of these infrastructure improvements (paid for by the customers and not the shareholders) significantly boosts the value of the company and so the share price.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Coren22]

I have to ask, and maybe someone who modded this can answer as AC, how exactly was this funny? Insightful, Interesting, sure, but Funny?

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Marauder2]

Which is something that I try to point out when various Vehicular GPS' refuse to accept input while the vehicle is moving. My Dad has to go through a convoluted routine to put the integrated GPS into a service mode every time he starts his car so that it is willing to accept input while in motion, such as from the passenger...

I see it as another example of "Nanny State" thinking where they feel necessary (or in some cases may be mandated by law) to protect us from the very possibility of our own stupidity.

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Mycroft_VIII]

Wasn't subject to opinion, a few years ago some folk decided to study the increase in safety offered by various hands free options for phones and found NONE.
      Later research was done to find out why.

Mycroft

Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses

[Mycroft_VIII]

It's founded, check earlier in this thread for the many links to the studies and research.

Invest

[Runaway1956]

Build more towers. Increase capacity. Uncle Sam has doled out a lot of money over the last couple decades to build infrastructure. Build it. Cut dividend payouts a little bit, and build the infrastructure up. Maybe cut executive and management pay a little bit. DUHH. And, while you're at it, maybe you can get that "last mile" built so that all Americans can get online. Tiered pricing isn't the solution. Demand is going to increase every year from now on. Get used to the idea that you need to keep adding to and improving the infrastructure. You can't take a snapshot at some arbitrary point, and say "We need this much more infrastructure, then we'll be on easy street." Invest your earnings back into the system, where it belongs - in the business.

Re:Invest

[microcars]

Invest in more infrastructure is exactly what AT&T won't do if they move to tiered pricing.
As soon as extra money from the new fees rolls in their shareholders will start screaming that it belongs to them or the executives will just give themselves nice fat bonuses for implementing such a great new business model.

I don't know a good solution to this problem except for some serious competition to AT&T where their only possible response is to beef up their infrastructure to match or beat the competitor.

Re:Invest

[RDW]

'Build more towers. Increase capacity. Uncle Sam has doled out a lot of money over the last couple decades to build infrastructure. Build it. Cut dividend payouts a little bit, and build the infrastructure up. Maybe cut executive and management pay a little bit.'

Or (and call me crazy for such a ludicrous idea) end the purely greed-motivated exclusivity deal that dumps all the traffic on a single network in the first place. Imagine a bizarre alternative universe where Apple stuck to being a hardware & software vendor, without attempting to squeeze even more cash from the deal in network kickbacks every month, and the networks themselves knew their place as Dumb Pipes who just provided bandwidth. Pretty much how the rest of the internet works, come to think of it.

Re:Invest

[agnosticnixie]

This is possible in every other country, but quad band 3g will not work on T-mobile because it uses a fifth band that nobody (not even T-Mobile outside the US) uses. Now the question remains to see whether all it takes is a firmware hack, some people think it might just be that.

Re:Invest

[Sponge Bath]

...extra money from the new fees rolls in

That is the cruel truth of how ATT, and most carriers, operate. They won't lower the fees for light users, they will only add fees for heavy users. In fact, they would probably add a new fee to light users called "bandwidth usage monitoring recovery fee" to compensate themselves even more for the capability they already have. This fee will, of course, not be counted in the total fee for the remaining 23 months of a contract, just like they do with all the other bogus fees they try to mislabel as some generic 'government tax' like fee.

Fee Fi Fo Fum, ATT can kiss my bum.

Re:Invest

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh man!! No salary cuts please!!

To support the dividend - the company has stopped giving out FREE paper cups to employees for drinking water (if you are contractor or vendor to AT&T and want to step into AT&T office - bring in your own cup or a sack of coins for the carbonated water). No more trash picked up alternate days (it is now picked up once every week). Oh you may want to relieve yourself at the nearest starbucks before you step into an AT&T loo; the whole rest room is littered with bits and pieces of cheap toilet paper that shreds the moment you touch it. If you are not used to 78F in summer bring in your own fan and a sweater to combat the 68F in winters.

Re:Invest

[Buybye]

Don't even let these pirates get away with tiered pricing. I don't have an iPhone but I travel all year in an RV. Verizon at one time had a unlimited data plan. Since I am a photographer I use the hell out of it. I have been told that Verizon doesn't sell that option anymore. So if I ever violate my current service I'm screwed. When I bought a new laptop a couple of months ago I had to load over 1GB of patches and while that is a different issue, I can only imagine what my "tiered" bill would be.

Re:Invest

[farble1670]

just like they do with all the other bogus fees they try to mislabel as some generic 'government tax' like fee

oh i see. so at&t adds fake fees and deceptively labels them as government taxes? do you think that might get them in a bit of trouble? sheesh.

Re:Invest

[iphoneman]

Probably impossible to do now that all the GPS apps are available. ATT's included.

Re:Invest

[nxtw]

Uncle Sam has doled out a lot of money over the last couple decades to build infrastructure.

I'm unaware of the US government funding mobile Internet services - just voice (and even then, they only fund mobile voice services when they compete with high-cost rural landline voice services.)

Indeed, networks pay the US government for the privilege to use the spectrum to offer their mobile communication services.

Re:Invest

[SerpentMage]

The problem is not one of infrastructure only. There is a real limit.

1) Screams from people who yell and scream that towers generates DNA errors. Thus there can only be so many towers with so many watts of power.

2) Interference, and band splitting. There are only so many connections that can be served via a single tower. Exceed that and you have problems.

3) Wifi is not the solution. Conferences now give free Wifi. Want to see how fast those connections come to a crawl?

The reality is that wireless only has so much capacity. It is like Satellite Internet and its limitations. Prices do need to be tiered. Granted the old pricing was really expensive, but this new approach is no better.

Re:Invest

[Sponge Bath]

so at&t adds fake fees and deceptively labels them as government taxes?

You changed my wording, I said 'government tax' like fee. And yes, they do.

The exact wording on a bill was "Regulatory Cost Recovery Charge".
This is in addition to:
* Federal Universal Service Charge
* Texas Universal Service Charge

Keep in mind that these are separate from the actual tax section of the bill and are not counted in the total contract monthly charge, they are added on top of that.

do you think that might get them in a bit of trouble?

No it does not.

sheesh

Indeed.

Re:Invest

[Xaedalus]

Thank you for posting this. I hadn't realized those limitations and it's insightful. Wish I had points to mod you up.

Re:Invest

[tverbeek]

If they're going to charge a metered rate for data, and since they already offer a zero-usage data rate for "stupidphones", how about offering the same option for voice? They charge extra for using lots of voice capacity, but offer no discount for not using it. The cheapest iPhone 3G voice plan is for more voice minutes than I use in a year. (I'm over 40, so I grew up without the ability to talk to my friends and family every few hours, and I'm not about to change just because I can. And since I like to understand people when I do talk to them - and vice versa - I usually use a landline for that.) I got a used iPhone EDGE with the cheapest Pick Your Plan rate, and even still my "remaining balance" creeps higher and higher every month, as I'm forced to buy voice minutes that I have no use for, just to get the data that I want and use throughout the day and evening. Or better yet: dump the phony distinction between voice and data, and charge people for whatever network usage they run up each month.

Re:Invest

[farble1670]

yes, and your post was very much like a post that is written to mislead the reader.

Re:Invest

[icebeing]

Even if ATT were to add more towers in its ideal world, it still would not be enough. You're talking about a problem that scales linearly (adding more towers). In the case of iPhone adoption (through basic word-of-mouth and ads), I think it scales linearly, but faster (super-linearly), or even geometrically. So, throwing more towers into the mix won't necessarily help, because ATT will eventually hit the wall again or max capacity.

Even then, putting up towers brings up the NIMBY factor from home owners that don't want one put in.

Personally, I think this is one case where I would not mind some kind of tiered pricing scheme; it gives users more choice, but at the same time, makes them VERY aware of the bandwidth they are using, and the iPhone "battery-like" or gauge-like widget would make that really easy to do. When the widget turns red, stop using, or pay to play...but this is not QoS at all in the net-neutrality sense either..more like a good compromise.

Anyway, just my 0.02$...talk amongst yourselves.

C.

Re:Invest

[CharlieG]

You say demand is going to increase. You seem to forget there is a tradeoff - Supply, demand and cost - you really can play with the curve - too much demand for the amount of supply, you can easily increase cost, and it reduces demand. You can also increase supply to meet the demand

Maybe they are happy with the amount of cost/demand they are at right now. Are they losing customers due to low supply? Some (I won't get an iPhone because of it). Thing is, does it behoove them to build new cell sites to make me switch over? Probably not, as they won't make enough profit on me

Heck, if they have people clamoring for iPhones (They do) and for more bandwidth (they do), they can probably increase costs, and not improve their network at all. Don't like the package - go elsewhere

Re:Invest

[tsm_sf]

No he's dead on. I just signed up for a new phone and noticed similar language. If you read the fine print you see that it's basically an unspecified portion of your bill that's been given a name designed to make you think you're paying more in taxes than you are.

Re:Invest

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you know that AT&T is building a 5 billion dollar stockpile to become an entertainment company? They're most of the way there now. They don't want to upgrade their network a penny more that necessary because they're too busy trying to work out a vertical integration scheme.

Re:Invest

[sjames]

It never has before!

Re:Invest

[Runaway1956]

There may be limits. It's possible that in some built up inner city areas, the limits are being pushed. But, as a nation, we are NOWHERE NEAR the limit. Rural America isn't even covered. Many small towns aren't covered. Even some medium sized towns lack coverage. To use her cellphone, my wife has to stand out in the yard, because there is a water tower between the house, and the single cell tower that reaches our property. Just north of me, there is a dead spot that NO ONE covers.

I am sympathetic to city user's complaints - but far to few people realize how many Americans have no coverage, or how many more Americans have shoddy, marginal coverage.

Re:Invest

[quarterbuck]

Look, bandwidth really cannot be the problem because otherwise Japan would already be hitting the limits. They already have tons more of people per square mile and use cellphone data networks much more than America. Same goes for India - Cities like Mumbai have a lot more people than NY and still the phone rates are about 10% of what it is in USA. Now I agree that labor is cheaper in India, but the cellphone towers cost the same as the US (and land rental rates are the same as NY in Mumbai).
AT&T has a lot more room to give and if US would simply introduce more providers and increase competition, the prices would drop.

Re:Invest

[Runaway1956]

"they can probably increase costs, and not improve their network at all. Don't like the package - go elsewhere"

Not an "ethical" solution, when taxpayers have footed part of the bill.

Re:Invest

[CharlieG]

How do you say that - AT&T, and the other cell carriers paid for their airspace - we have collected taxtes back for our investment - I do say we should tax the snot out of them, but..

Listen, they don't want to invest, what SHOULD happen to them is what SHOULD have happened to GM - Out of business - the folks who blead them dry lose their investment (including the unions with the pensions). Oh well

Re:Invest

[Tumbleweed]

And since I like to understand people when I do talk to them - and vice versa - I usually use a landline for that.) I got a used iPhone EDGE with the cheapest Pick Your Plan rate, and even still my "remaining balance" creeps higher and higher every month, as I'm forced to buy voice minutes that I have no use for, just to get the data that I want and use throughout the day and evening. Or better yet: dump the phony distinction between voice and data

Or even better than that - dump AT&T and go with a carrier that has decent call quality. This will unfortunately vary region to region. I'm in the Seattle area, and Sprint has worked best for me. I've tried all the major carriers here so far except for T-Mo. I'm on Sprint now, but may return to Verizon when my contract runs out next quarter, depending on who has the best Android phone experience, once all that shakes out with the new phones coming up.

Re:Invest

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen. Most super-huge companies are complaining simply because their bottomless pit of profits are drying up. They can't screw customers over forever and expect no competition, or to gouge people endlessly. Time Warner wanted to put caps/tiered pricing on Roadrunner internet earlier this year and look at the screams of protest from users (myself included); an analysis of profits showed, incontrovertibly, that they were lying through their teeth, and just wanted more profits. The same will prove true for AT&T, and they will learn the hard way that they will lose customers to competitors with flat rates and/or better pricing.

Re:Invest

[coaxial]

Your solution of investing in the infrastructure is completely correct, but is a completely alien concept in modern business practices. Investment is a cost, and so by not investing you're cutting cost and maintaining profit.

AT&T's behavior is endemic in American business today, and has been for god, 20 - 30 years? The US frequently comes in near the bottom, and all too often, dead last when its infrastructure is compared to the other industrialized nations. If you just compare the modernized coast of China, it's infrastructure is better than the United States. Our broadband is horribly slow. Our cell phone system is antiquated and undeveloped. Our electrical system is overstretched and prone to brownouts. Since everyone else can't be "ahead of the curve," we're left with the unescapable conclusion, that we're behind it. We're way behind it when emerging economies are on par with us.

It's not just infrastructure. The auto makers are in collapse (with the notable exception of Ford) not only due to crushing healthcare costs due to retirees, but also because the lack of will to adapt to new trends and technologies. It's embarrassing that after getting their lunch ate by the Japanese back in the 70s when Detroit was turning out crap (in all fairness, American cars today very well made, and can compete in quality with anyone), that they let it happen again by placing all their eggs in the SUV basket while not just ignoring, but actively fighting fuel efficiency standards and slow walking the development of hybrids and all-electrics. Guess who owns that market now?

With electricity, we're told that our infrastructure doesn't suck, but yet a fucking squirrel can cut off 50 million people. Meanwhile we're told to deregulate to decrease costs, but instead we get market manipulation that actually increases costs. (It seems like we always forget why the regulation was put in place the first time, and then we have to repeated learn that companies will screw over the most people in worst possible way, thus harming all of us, all to increase profits.) Then when we do say that we're going to invest in a new electrical infrastructure, and do develop new technologies, we don't. The US is already lagging the world in green technology development.

We make nothing here, except except "exotic financial instruments," and we know how well those work. Yet, people wonder why this is is the second jobless "recovery" in a row. Real unemployment is at 17%, but hey, the Dow Jones Industrials have been on a steady rise since March, so everything is cool. Wages are down, unless you're to top 1%. The Chicago Fed reported that the US has the most unequal wealth distribution of any OCED country. We have government that won't pass reform that 65% of the public wants, because it would hurt the megacorp that bought politician.

We've been asleep at the switch for too damn long, and now we're over the cliff.

When Obama came in and was talking about reform, and infrastructure investment, and new technology investment, I thinking that it was about damn time. Yet, we're not getting it. Instead we get "too big to fail." None of these promises are playing out like he said, because the entrenched interests, and yet you can't vote for the Republicans, because they simply deny there's a problem.

Goddamn we suck.

Re:Invest

[coaxial]

We've been asleep at the switch for too damn long, and now we're over the cliff.

Times like this, I so identify with the hauntingly beautiful, yet incredibly nihilistic song "Dead Flag Blues," by Goodspeed You Black Emperor.

The car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
And a dark wind blows
The government is corrupt
And we're on so many drugs
With the radio on and the curtains drawn

We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death

The sun has fallen down
And the billboards are all leering
And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles

It went like this

The buildings tumbled in on themselves
Mothers clutching babies picked through the rubble and pulled out their hair

The skyline was beautiful on fire
All twisted metal stretching upwards
Everything washed in a thin orange haze

I said, "Kiss me, you're beautiful..
These are truly the last days"

You grabbed my hand and we fell into it
Like a daydream or a fever

We woke up one morning and fell a little further down
For sure it's the valley of death

I open up my wallet
And it's full of blood

Re:Invest

[Anonymous Coward]

Build more towers. Increase capacity. Uncle Sam has doled out a lot of money over the last couple decades to build infrastructure. Build it. Cut dividend payouts a little bit, and build the infrastructure up. Maybe cut executive and management pay a little bit. DUHH. And, while you're at it, maybe you can get that "last mile" built so that all Americans can get online. Tiered pricing isn't the solution. Demand is going to increase every year from now on. Get used to the idea that you need to keep adding to and improving the infrastructure. You can't take a snapshot at some arbitrary point, and say "We need this much more infrastructure, then we'll be on easy street." Invest your earnings back into the system, where it belongs - in the business.

mabye I am nieve, but could all those jailbroken phones have something to do wit it?

Re:Invest

[Anonymous Coward]

look up "femtocell" for how at&t is going to expand their network capacity.
they'll put a tiny cell tower in your house, shipping data up/down via DSL.

Re:Invest

[Anonymous Coward]

1) I do doubt towers cost the same. But overall the point stands. AT&T's making plenty of revenue to invest in their network, they are just not doing it.

            2) This is ALL *ALL* ****ALL**** AT&T's problem. Verizon has unlimited data for on-phone, PDA, and Blackberry, and people like me with grandfathered unlimited aircards on computers. Unlike AT&T, Verizon is not restrictings apps to video streaming via wifi only -- it's all over the regular cellular data network. Their network does not slow to a crawl. There ARE practical limits, but AT&T is nowhere near them -- they just are not expanding to match even customer count (i.e. even without heavier data users, AT&T'd be in trouble now.)

          3) Tiered pricing is the wrong way to do it. The right way is just how landline services should do it -- not hard MB limits, but as usage gets heavier on the site, throttle the speed of the heaviest users. Verizon's doing this to a limited extent -- people on grandfathered unlimited aircard plans (as opposed to the current 5GB plan) may get throttled to about 220kbps once they hit 5GB. So I don't have to watch my usage, but if I was torrenting all month or whatever I won't be slowing everyone else down.

Re:Invest

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering an I-Phone 3Gs plan runs roughly $80 USD / month ( that is minimum ( 450 ) minutes, no texting plan and no texting at all on my part ) do you think I feel guilty for using the hell out of the data plan ? Not a chance. The GD Iphone unlimited data plan is only $15 cheaper per month than my main internet connection and it's a 6-8MB cable line. :|

On a busy month I MIGHT use an hour of talk time. Maybe. I have like 3K + rollover minutes lol.

The rest is pulling down data.

So if we use the other 'smartphones' as a baseline, the Iphone is at the top tier of pricing schemes already. :|

You want to fix the saturation problem ? Tell AT&T to quit being so GD stingy with their money ( and believe me they are. I work for them ) and get the infrastructure up to par with the promises they are making. If the AT&T network can't handle the load, I'm sure Verizon would be more than happy to help out . . . . . .

Re:Invest

[Anonymous Coward]

If AT&T thinks that 400MB/month is too much traffic, then they need to hire someone who remembers the time when the web started, and have that person kick some sense into the AT&T management. Back then some people insisted that web pages with graphics were going to overload the internet. Mind you, those were small graphics. People were on 28.8kbps or slower modems at that time.

400MB/month is less than 15MB a day. 15MB is 15 minutes of MP3 streaming. Or 15 web pages the size of the times.com homepage. Or two full resolution JPGs from a digital camera. It's not enough for a single rickroll. If 400MB/month overloads your network, you have an outdated network and need to invest. Now.

Re:Invest

[Anonymous Coward]

The investments that are already being made by AT&T are in the billions of dollars. Cell technology changes 5x faster than the tower upgrades can be performed.

BTW, GSM has been cracked - that includes all data plans (except Blackberry and those running a good VPN). Do you want security or more bandwidth?

Re:Invest

[Voyager529]

they would probably add a new fee to light users called "bandwidth usage monitoring recovery fee" to compensate themselves even more for the capability they already have.

Don't give them any ideas.

Re:Invest

[R3d M3rcury]

I don't know a good solution to this problem except for some serious competition to AT&T where their only possible response is to beef up their infrastructure to match or beat the competitor.

Which is why "exclusivity agreements" for handsets are a bad idea.

Imagine if Apple had released the iPhone unlocked. Figure that half the people would have gone with AT&T and half the people would have gone with T-Mobile, here in the US. Suddenly, AT&T has half the number of iPhones sucking data down and their network is responsive. Problem solved.

All you'd have to give up is Visual Voicemail, which is the only thing that AT&T contributes to the iPhone (and, while I'm not an expert on these things, I'm sure that there's some way that Apple could provide an open standard so that any phone network could implement it and provide it to their customers).

Re:Invest

[dangitman]

Or (and call me crazy for such a ludicrous idea) end the purely greed-motivated exclusivity deal that dumps all the traffic on a single network in the first place.

OK, so the exclusivity deal with AT&T ends (which it will soon, anyway) - what then? The iPhone is a GSM device, so without exclusivity, your options are basically AT&T or T-Mobile. The other major carriers use CDMA. So, to spread the traffic across multiple networks, Sprint and the others need to build... a lot lot more new towers, of a different technology than they currently use.

Re:Invest

[Anonymous Coward]

This is hitting on what I believe is a big problem with the way our economic system has gotten. It used to be that people would say, "we're cutting costs and saving a little extra money, so we'll pass those savings onto the consumer". Now it's more common to offload more cost to the consumer. Or worse, they cut cost and save a little extra money, but the market is still willing to pay what they pay now, so they can probably get away even with jacking up prices to make more money for themselves and for Wall Street. And they do.

And the American consumer is too stupid to realize that any of this is going on. It's seeped deep into a lot of people's psyches that it works this way. You start questioning this and ordinary people defend it, not seeing how it can be any other way. It's their duty to gouge the public! Their civic responsibility to create more wealth disparity! These attitudes is what will eventually make us a third world country, except for a very small number of people. And a lot of middle class folks are inexplicably rooting for this.

Re:Invest

[Anonymous Coward]

and the networks themselves knew their place as Dumb Pipes who just provided bandwidth. Pretty much how the rest of the internet works, come to think of it.

Except that the Internet providers have similar anticompetitive traits. In a typical US city there are at most 2 serious internet providers. Sometimes there is only one. Sometimes they got there by bribing the local officials for an exclusivity deal. (I used to live in a place where Comcast had done this...)

Not only that, but certainly Comcast and the like would like to start having control of the content we see. Today I can get Comedy Central programming online without subscribing to cable or satellite. Imagine a world where I couldn't do that without getting my Internet connection from a cable company. It isn't so far fetched... As citizens we ought to be vigilant of our legislators to prevent that from happening.

Re:Invest

[hairyfeet]

Well I don't know about mobile but we did pay 200 billion for nationwide fiber and all we got was the finger in return. I wonder how much of that congestion would have been cleared up with so many folks being about to run wifi and set up ad hoc networks thanks to those big fat pipes?

Of course if they actually gave us what We, The People paid for, well there wouldn't be all these screams for caps and tiers, would there? And of course the *.A.As would have a living shitfit, as they would have to be drug kicking and screaming into the 21st century and might have to update their business model. Yep, we just can't anything like what we paid for, nope that would hurt profits! Think of the free market, the "invisible hand" and all that!

I think the teleco/cableco cartel duopoly is pretty much proof that the country is royally screwed unless we take the last mile and open everything up to REAL competition, instead of a couple of good old boy billionaire golfing buddies deciding to "cherry pick" the best spots and only compete there. Mark my words things are gonna get a hell of a lot worse before they get better.

Re:Invest

[God of Lemmings]

Seriously, building more towers is the only sensible thing to do. I mean, 10 years ago in Japan, I could go just about anywhere; including in the subway, without ever losing a signal; The transmitters were everywhere.

Re:Invest

[ers88]

American cars today very well made, and can compete in quality with anyone), that they let it happen again by placing all their eggs in the SUV basket while not just ignoring, but actively fighting fuel efficiency standards and slow walking the development of hybrids and all-electrics. Guess who owns that market now?

As a mechanic I cannot agree with this statement. While American cars aren't necessarily a bad idea to buy, they are some of the most PITA cars to work on. I am a freelance mechanic on the side (mostly doing jobs for friends, everything from oil changes to engine rebuilds) and let me tell you, I'd rater work on a 2000, or 2009 honda, toyota, nissan... hell even a BMW any day than a 2000 or 2009 ford or chevy (or any year except the pre-70s models, and those certainly aren't reliable due to age). Example of a car i worked on recently: to get to the slave cylinder on a 2009 ford focus you have to UNBOLT THE TRANSMISSION, compare to almost any other car where you just drop the exhaust and have at it, if that. I have an associate who is full time at a ford dealership, and he told me one day why the designs suck so horribly to work on and maintain (this plays into reliablilty and TCO a lot. im not just talking about jobs you need to hire a mech for). Two reasons come to mind, one is that Ford has not stuck with old designs and improved them, they insist on coming out with some new model every few years, imagine if they had stuck with and refined the nova, for example. Toyota has had the Corolla (ok it was called the the Corona before) for how long? How long has the focus been around? Consumers associate names with reliability, and the longer something has been known to be reliable, the more this is reinforced (civic and corolla being great examples). Second reason is under-skilled engineers. American car companies are known for hiring green engineers fresh out of school, rather than more seasoned professionals like the foreign companies do. Why? Short term cost cutting I'm sure, just more of the same mentality that has been wrecking this country for the last 20-30 years.

Re:Invest

[slonik]

A full disclaimer is in order. I work for AT&T Research and my specialty is wireless. But here I offer my personal opinion and I do not speak for AT&T.

It is unfortunate, that too many technical people on slashdot, who should know better, still think that wireless cellular network is just another "series of tubes" that carry bits around (senator Stevens, anyone?). In reality wireless communications is very different from wireline (copper, fiber, cable) communications due to the physical nature of Radio Wave propagation in open media (air) versus transmission lines (copper, fiber, etc). It is basic physics and scarcity of useful spectrum that is responsible for most grievances of wireless users rather than "evil telcos". Your suggestion to increase cell tower density does not hold water and here is why:

(1) You cannot simply increase the density of cell towers to solve capacity problems. Modern cellular networks in densely populated areas like NYC are already interference limited. Just imagine a New York Stock exchange floor where every broker is shouting like crazy all the time and the noise is unbearable. Now you double the number of brokers on the floor and make them shout twice as loud. Would your network capacity increase? As a matter of fact, it would actually go down because noone can decode anything.

(2) Radio wave propagation characteristics put fundamental limits on what each user can do. Every bit sent to a user that is far away from his/her serving base-station (high RF path-loss) costs more in radio resources to a carrier than a bit sent to a user close-by because it has to occupy wider bandwidth (OFDM) or it would take more time slots (TDMA) or spreading codes (CDMA). Distant user takes radio resources away from other users and contribute harmful interference back to the system. That is why average user data rate is so different from its peak rate under ideal conditions.

(3) Unlike wireline networks, wireless is a shared medium with much less capacity due to shortage of useful spectrum. You can easily lay out fiber links with lots of excess capacity that nicely cushions peak load. Cellular wireless networks, on the other hand, run at much higher utilization and load levels and suffer from the ugliness of terrestrial radio wave propagation and interference.

There are some Good News though. New wireless technologies are coming. 3GPP LTE (Long Term Evolution) and WiMAX are two similar technologies that will squeeze some more juice from existing airways. But it would require huge capital expenses to roll out new networks. Moreover, IMHO user demand grows still faster that the capacity gains achieved by those technologies. More spectrum will be needed and it is very expensive and scarce.
Someone will have to pay for all this, right?

Re:Invest

[Runaway1956]

"Cell technology changes 5x faster than the tower upgrades can be performed."

That doesn't explain why there are vast swathes of the United States with no signal at all. Nor does it explain why the critical last mile only works close to the cities. I call bullshit. And, if you're going to ass-troturf, you're supposed to disclose who is paying you to do so, dude.

Re:Invest

[m0s3m8n]

As soon as extra money from the new fees rolls in their shareholders will start screaming that it belongs to them .....

Could it be THAT IT DOES BELONG T THEM. Shareholders OWN THE FREAKIN COMPANY. That is the way it still works here in the USA - well at least until the socialists change all that.

Re:Invest

[nxtw]

Well I don't know about mobile but we did pay 200 billion for nationwide fiber and all we got was the finger in return.

Are there any other citations for the allegations on the linked site?

I think the teleco/cableco cartel duopoly is pretty much proof that the country is royally screwed unless we take the last mile and open everything up to REAL competition

Yes, the country is royally screwed if we don't all have 100 mbit wired broadband and unlimited 7.2 mbit mobile internet. Right.

Re:Invest

[shoemilk]

No.

Re:Invest

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a bizarre alternative universe where Apple stuck to being a hardware & software vendor...

I think this is where Apple wants to go eventually, it's just that they needed partner to get their foot in the door in a new industry.

Just as Apple cow-towed to the music industry (and even accepted being forced to DRM the AAC files), they're now the top music vendor in the US (even having DRM-free files), and have enough clout that they have a much better bargaining position.

When the AT&T-Apple contract ends, I don't think Apple will agree to another exclusivity deal unless a boat load of cash is thrown their way. I think they'd prefer the option to sell unlocked phones to anyone will to pay a straight ~$700, but are also willing to deal with the carriers with contract revenues. Right now they're stuck with contracts only, which no one really likes except AT&T.

Re:Invest

[biryokumaru]

"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br

Dude! Fix your sig! Just make it say "Brooker, C" or something! Jeez.

Re:Invest

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not that simple.

Have you seen what the average Japanese mobile website looks like? The mobile browser that ships on either docomo or au (I forgot which) actually can't open pages larger than 100KB.

Trust me, the average JP mobile user is not using as much data as an iPhone user. The average user is mostly sending email and browsing janky mobile-optimized mini-sites.

Re:Invest

[RDW]

'So, to spread the traffic across multiple networks, Sprint and the others need to build... a lot lot more new towers, of a different technology than they currently use.'

Because this makes much more sense than (God forbid!) Apple sticking a CDMA chip in some of their phones for compatibility with other networks. You know, like the other hardware companies do. Apple would presumably have already done this if their initial talks with Verizon before the launch of the first iPhone had been fruitful (3G would still be required for overseas models). In any case, infrastructure upgrades to new technology are inevitable in the fairly short term (like Verizon's move to LTE), as consumers start to demand more mobile bandwidth than the current networks provide.

Re:Invest

[RDW]

'Except that the Internet providers have similar anticompetitive traits. In a typical US city there are at most 2 serious internet providers. Sometimes there is only one. Sometimes they got there by bribing the local officials for an exclusivity deal. (I used to live in a place where Comcast had done this...)'

That sucks for you. In my town in the UK, I can choose from about 15 providers (even though I wouldn't touch some of them with a bargepole!). The local loop unbundling legislation (all EU countries have some form of this) seems to do a reasonable job at providing a framework for fair competition.

Re:Invest

[RDW]

I'm not really convinced. The iTunes DRM scheme was suspiciously convenient for Apple in establishing its initial market position by locking the content to the hardware - I suspect they didn't argue terribly hard with the music industry at that point. The iPhone exclusivity deals also work very well for them, as they get monthly payments from the service providers which may well exceed the profits from the phone itself:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9803657-37.html

Here in the UK you can in fact buy an officially unlocked phone from retailers like play.com. The 32Gb 3GS goes for an eye-watering 900 GBP, over $1400 USD (for comparison, a 32Gb iPod Touch goes for 235 GBP at the same shop). I suspect we won't see cheap officially unlocked iPhones any time soon...

Re:Invest

[hairyfeet]

Well how about my own personal experience? My cableco/teleco duopoly hasn't moved a damned foot in ANY direction in a good 20 years. My mom had her house built 29 YEARS ago and was exactly two blocks from where the cable ended. Want to guess how far she is from the cable now? Can you say two blocks boys and girls? i think you can.

And that "free market" bullshit doesn't work when it comes to the cableco/teleco duopoly. case in point the above area where my mom lives. No less than 3 times have little independents tried to set up to service the area, and every. single. time. they were crushed by the duopoly. One of which was done by a good friend and former classmate who paid for a T1 to be run out there and was selling access. Basically what happens is this- someone provides access, local teleco starts to lose their $60 a month 33k dialup customers ( you read that right, $60 for 33k dialup) and then simply raise the rates on backbone access so damned high there is no way the customer can afford it and the independent goes under. My buddy talked to a lawyer and was told anywhere from 2-10 million would be required to sue, along with a decade or so to deal with all the bullshit tactics the teleco lawyers would pull. So naturally he just walked away.

As for more citations how many do you want? Because this isn't exactly some big secret here, we gave them 200 billion+ in tax breaks and other "bonuses" in return for nationwide broadband and all we got was the finger. So if you are a capitalist you should be ALL FOR seizing the last mile, after all we paid a huge amount for a service that we didn't get. We should give the teleco/cableco duopoly 90 days to pay back the money with interest, or we seize the whole damned thing. After all if a company rips off its customers you sue and seize the assets to pay the debt, yes? And I'd say robbing the public to the tune of 200 billion plus interest is more than enough to warrant seizing of their assets.

Re:Invest

[tepples]

In telephone service, "regulatory cost recovery charges" are fees for services required by an unfunded government mandate. The first that come to mind are 9-1-1 geolocation and local number portability.

Re:Invest

[nxtw]

Well how about my own personal experience? My cableco/teleco duopoly hasn't moved a damned foot in ANY direction in a good 20 years. My mom had her house built 29 YEARS ago and was exactly two blocks from where the cable ended. Want to guess how far she is from the cable now? Can you say two blocks boys and girls? i think you can.

Is the cable company licensed to serve her house? Did she try paying to have cable installed?

As for more citations how many do you want? Because this isn't exactly some big secret here, we gave them 200 billion+ in tax breaks and other "bonuses" in return for nationwide broadband and all we got was the finger.

How about some sources that don't cite/involve Bruce Kushnick?

Note that the "broadband" the telecoms were apparently interested in providing was for a 45 mbit video on demand service - not Internet service. And offering "cable TV" services has its own problems. And the Cringely article even mentions the very high equipment costs for a brand new video service in the mid 90s.

The Cringely article states that each state contracted with its local telco(s) to provide video service. If this is the case, why do AT&T and Verizon have to fight for franchises from individual states/communities to offer their own IPTV (AT&T) and cable TV (Verizon) services in this decade? Have states decided that competition is a bad thing since the 90s?

We should give the teleco/cableco duopoly 90 days to pay back the money with interest, or we seize the whole damned thing. After all if a company rips off its customers you sue and seize the assets to pay the debt, yes? And I'd say robbing the public to the tune of 200 billion plus interest is more than enough to warrant seizing of their assets.

Cable operators aren't involved here. They already offer a service with almost 5000 mbit of bandwidth (excluding analog services).

Indeed, cable operators spent quite a bit of money in the 90s upgrading to HFC (hybrid fiber coax) networks. This is how they are able to offer two-way data services.

The public paid for phone service, not "video dial tone" service. The article doesn't even allege that any of the alleged "$200 billion" phone companies made was a specific incentive to install residential digital video service, even though it tries to connect the two events. And you and Cringely somehow connect this once-planned "video dial tone" service to fast Internet access.

Re:Invest

[hairyfeet]

Actually when I was flush with cash in the mid 90s I got together with those that lived on her road, and after talking to someone who worked accounting at the cableco and had them figure up how much it would cost to run the line the whole 1/2 mile (which at the time was between $10k and 14k by her estimate) we got together and offered them $15k PLUS a guaranteed 5 year contract for EVERY house on the half mile for the full package. By our calculations they would have made nearly a quarter million on the deal. Do you know what their answer was?

They wanted $75k PLUS us to pay for the line PLUS the linemen PLUS the 5 year contract. That's right, they wanted $75 in profits BEFORE every moving a single inch. And that right there is why without seizing the last mile we are doomed to have our infrastructure fall apart. Because the cableco/teleco can either A-invest in infrastructure, using some of their profits to increase distance and capacity and continue a slow but steady rate of growth, or B-don't fix shit, don't add shit, just keep jacking rates and watching that stock climb baby,yeah! Can you guess which ones the cableco and telecos are doing? Instead of building they simply bought out potential competitors, and now that they aren't anymore to buy they can simply slowly squeeze the customers and enjoy ever rising bonuses and profits! Damn everything but the quarterly stock report!

I personally blame the obscene amount of corruption in congress and the affect day traders have had on the market. After all, why do you think there are SIX healthcare lobbyists for EVERY member of congress ATM? Because instead of competition, where lowering prices and costs could eliminate many of the problems, it is simply more profitable to bribe congressmen to turn healthcare "reform" into a pile of "free" money from the American Taxpayers, that's why. The cableco/teleco duopoly has decided long ago to "cherry pick" the best and most populous neighborhoods for what limited competition they do allow, the rest? Fuck them! And they are rewarded for this behavior thanks to day traders manipulating the stock market. Hell they wouldn't care if you burnt your company down for the insurance if it drove up the day price. If you invest you are punished by the traders, so why do it?

You mark my words, because you can come back here in 5 years and see they are true: In five years we will be MUCH farther behind the rest of the free world when it comes to broadband, my mom and everyone else who isn't being served now will still be stuck on $60 33k dialup, and healthcare reform will turn into the biggest pile of "free" money for the drug and insurance companies that the US has ever seen. With corruption so rampant it is simply cheaper to bribe than to build, sad but true.

Re:Invest

[crmarvin42]

tiered pricing would be acceptable to most iPhone users if it meant those using less were charged less than they are now for unlimited. If they want to meter my use I'd have no problem if the lower half of the teirs (at reasonable use levels) ended up with my bill going down, instead of going up being the only possible change.

Re:Invest

[eleuthero]

Visual voicemail is not ATT exclusive. Apparently some patent troll grabbed it up years ago and Verizon and several others have licensed the technology after ATT lost in court.

Re:Invest

[dangitman]

Because this makes much more sense than (God forbid!) Apple sticking a CDMA chip in some of their phones for compatibility with other networks.

No, that wouldn't make sense. It's not simply a matter of "sticking a CDMA chip in" as the two systems require different antennae, etc. So, Apple would have to re-engineer the product and have multiple SKUs just to service a small amount of users, when the rest of the world uses GSM. The real question is why the hell did Sprint and Verizon choose CDMA in the first place?

Re:Invest

[SetupWeasel]

And don't expect them to actually restrict your data or inform you when you are over limit.

Re:Invest

[PeterBrett]

Investment is a cost...

Um. That doesn't seem to ring true with what I was taught in my accounting classes.

Re:Invest

[Anonymous Coward]

How about allow Iphone users the option to ... change to a plan that will provide the service they want... I hate the service im getting and would love to move but because att and apple are married i can't.

Re:Invest

[mrlpz]

Build more towers. Increase capacity. Uncle Sam has doled out a lot of money over the last couple decades to build infrastructure. Build it. Cut dividend payouts a little bit, and build the infrastructure up. Maybe cut executive and management pay a little bit. DUHH. And, while you're at it, maybe you can get that "last mile" built so that all Americans can get online. Tiered pricing isn't the solution. Demand is going to increase every year from now on. Get used to the idea that you need to keep adding to and improving the infrastructure. You can't take a snapshot at some arbitrary point, and say "We need this much more infrastructure, then we'll be on easy street." Invest your earnings back into the system, where it belongs - in the business.

Brotha's and Sistah's can I get an Amen in the congregation ! But seriously, it only took 5 sentences what several building-full's of MBA's can't seem to understand. And as for the squeaky investors.....hello !...this is insuring the long-term sustainability of your investment, if you were looking for "Get rich quick", infrastructure large-player data communications isn't it ! Go look at some small company like HTC and invest in them so they get better phones on the market...or better yet, Huawei (?!?) who're now starting to come out with some real competition for HTC and others.

Re:Invest

[Jon_S]

Yeah. Isn't that how Worldcom went down? They booked their costs under "investments", when they were supposed to be "costs".

Users don't know how much data they are using

[iamacat]

It's under application's control not users. So someone who has a single bad experience with a buggy app will dump AT&T and Apple forever. There are already horror stories abound with overseas data roaming.

Just limit long-term data speed to whatever can be sustained and provide higher burst speed for basic web browsing.

Sure- if they lowered the starting price.

[shidarin'ou]

And included text messages in "data"

I'm sick of paying 35 dollars a month for "unlimited" data that I don't use, and 5 dollars for 200 (or 4 Kbs) of text messages.

Most of the time I am on a wifi network; when I am not, I don't use much data anyway.

Stick the 3 GB price point at 30 dollars, 2 at 20; 1 GB at 10, etc.

Also, it should be further tiered based on what data connection you are using. Us original iPhone users got royally screwed when AT&T upped the rates because the 3g came out.

But who am I kidding? We all know if this happened, the starting price would be 30 dollars for 200 MB of data, and an additional 10 dollars for every 100 MB.

Re:Sure- if they lowered the starting price.

[sarahbau]

Yeah - I too am tired of paying for unlimited data that I don't use (there's no option on the data plan). I use about 30MB per month at most. The rest of the time, I'm on WiFi. Of course as you said, they probably wouldn't give a lower priced option. They'd just change the $30 plan to a limited amount, and make unlimited even more expensive.

Re:Sure- if they lowered the starting price.

[Midnight Thunder]

Ensuring there is a reasonable limit on the amount of data you can download will ensure that those looking for a free lunch will limit their download. Heck, its not as if they can go elsewhere. People wanting to download more than say 20GB a month should be offered options, such as:
    - throttling
    - cut off until next billing cycle
    - paying extra
Being able to choose your penalty should provide the network neutrality option, with an acceptance of your personal limits.

Additionally building more wi-fi access points will help offload data onto infrastructure that was designed for it.

Re:Sure- if they lowered the starting price.

[mobby_6kl]

Tiered pricing is really a pretty good solution for this. I'm sure many slashdotters would be posting here in outrage about how this is stifling innovation and how the man is keeping them down, but in reality it makes no sense to pay for unlimited data if you aren't using all the much. I'm glad I can get 100Mb from Vodafone for about $5/month, and I wouldn't get unlimited even if it was just a few bucks more.

This could change if I used the connection with my laptop, but as it is I'm usually either at the office or at home with wi-fi, and when I'm not I can still fit quite a lot of emails/browsing in the current plan.

Re:Sure- if they lowered the starting price.

[maxume]

So go without. If you are paying it, they aren't going to change a damn thing.

Re:Sure- if they lowered the starting price.

[maxume]

Tiers are ridiculous. Just sell metered bandwidth. Why should the customer always be expected to pay for more than they use?

It isn't as if they have any difficulty determining when people exceed their tier, so metered billing would not be onerous.

Re:Sure- if they lowered the starting price.

[mobby_6kl]

Oh, metered bandwidth is fine too, if fact it's better exactly for the reason you mention. Of course they shouldn't have a problem measuring usage, as my monthly invoice shows exactly how much I've actually used. I can see some people getting unpleasant surprises when they (or some rouge app) get carried away and download too much stuff, but overall it's a better solution.

Re:Sure- if they lowered the starting price.

[Kizeh]

What I do not understand is the insistence to measure everything by total amount transmitted. In Scandinavia the tiering is based on speed: if you have a cheap plan, the amount of data is unlimited, but you are restricted to 386 kb or so. If you pay up, you get the full 2+ Mb. That achieves the reduction of load on the radio channel just as effectively.

Re:Sure- if they lowered the starting price.

[FrkyD]

Wow. I'm pretty happy that 5 euro will get me a Gig. And I'm even happier that the companies over here (austria) finally killed the stupid over priced tiering they had been doing.

Of course, the high price of the initial data wasn't the problem. It was the price for additional traffic that could leave you shell-shocked if you had a particularly heavy month.

Re:Sure- if they lowered the starting price.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thing that pisses me off about this is the fact that you get "unlimited" data on the $30 plan... but if you want the plan that allows you to tether your phone, it costs $70/mo and limit you to 50MB a month or something equally ridiculous.

What uses so much data?

[schnikies79]

I've had an iphone since June. Total data received is just a under 1gb, data sent is around 80mb.

Re:What uses so much data?

[Hijacked Public]

Me 1234567891011

Re:What uses so much data?

[Anonymous Coward]

Today's stuff doesn't weight the same it did 10 or 15 years ago. Undust your dialup modem and see how painful everything becomes.

Re:What uses so much data?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who watches YouTube on their phone. Those vids are around ~50Megs a pop.

Re:What uses so much data?

[BLKMGK]

50megs a video??! Are you high? Noo sorry, unless you are watching entire hour long vids you aren't eating up 50megs a pop! This is crap...

Re:What uses so much data?

[rhpenguin]

I don't have an iPhone, but I do have an HTC Touch. I use about 15GB/month of data (incoming/outgoing) on my phone. This is mostly because I stream music a minimum of 9 hours a day at work and while I'm driving. I also surf on the phone and tether for occasional web surfing on the go when I need the real web. I also get all my e-mail from several accounts, attachments too.

It adds up quick.

Re:What uses so much data?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm wondering this too. I got my 3G in February and have only received 840MB. That's roughly 100MB/mo, so I find it hard to believe that the "typical" consumer uses 400MB/mo.

Re:What uses so much data?

[Alrescha]

This.

I've had an original iPhone since they came out (Summer 2007)

Cellular Network Data sent: 45.2 MB. Data received: 153 MB.
(last reset 'never', unless an OS upgrade did it)

A.
(who thinks that AT&T is a victim of the iPhone's (and their) success, nothing more)

Re:What uses so much data?

[jackchance]

I spend almost all my time on WIFI. So i would be happy to pay only $10 for 100 MB a month

Since April 22, 2009:
Sent : 72 MB
Received: 535 MB

Re:What uses so much data?

[Blakey Rat]

Mine's about 8 months old. Sent: 186 MB, Received: 2.9 GB. (I think those numbers are low... do the stats get reset when the firmware updates?)

Anyway, I used to listen to streaming radio on the bus, I imagine that was 50-75 MB per day for at least 45 days. Now I mostly just listen to iTunes and browse the web, which uses much less bandwidth.

Re:What uses so much data?

[rolfwind]

I had an iPhone for a few weeks now. Most of my data goes through the wifi network at work/home and I used 14mb a week (d/l) otherwise but there was a spike of 200mb during a business trip last week (the hotel only had ethernet as well...) and I wasn't being obsessive compulsive with it. So I guess the answer is business travelers?

But the idea of the topic is stupid. People are used to this pseudo "unlimited" and in fact they paid for it. Tiered pricing was long discussed in regular internet connections a lot earlier this decade and it never took off.

Re:What uses so much data?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had mine on unlimited data with O2 in UK since January. I use push email all the time & have 3G enabled constantly, and also use Twitter, Wordpress, & Evernote heavily. I get around 80 - 150 emails per day, and have used 285 Mb - (total sent & received)

What are people doing ? downloading movies ? it must take forever - far easier & quicker to do it via iTunes

Re:What uses so much data?

[aaarrrgggh]

That's about what I am at on a monthly average as well. They are kidding themselves if they think data usage of smart phones isn't going to double each year. They are going to have to prepare for it one way or another; starting to agree that exclusivity is making the problem a lot worse as it eliminates incentive to build up the network.

Re:What uses so much data?

[ADRenalyn]

Leecher!

Re:What uses so much data?

[dbcad7]

That's a lot of streaming.. Just curious if you do it "because you can", or because the content you get is that good. The reason I ask is that there are so many other options for obtaining, storing and playing music. This doesn't take away from having the ability to do what your doing, it's pretty cool and I also occasionally do it as well I just haven't used it as a replacement for other ways to listen to music.

Re:What uses so much data?

[bllx]

I've had mine since June too, 3GS launch day, and I've used 470 MB down and 28 MB up since then. Massively more via WiFi though, obviously.

Irrelevant fact to this issue

[NoYob]

AT&T also scored lower than any other U.S. carrier in a recent customer-satisfaction survey—the first time it has ever claimed last place.

That's not the iPhone users fault: that's AT&T fault.

What's this horseshit of blaming the customer for shitting customer service, or service for that matter?!

They sold a service and an amount of bandwidth and now that they can't deliver, they're blaming the customer.

Re:Irrelevant fact to this issue

[future assassin]

Thats the standard that most Internet/hosting companies go by. Blame high customer usage for their inadequate infrastructure.

Re:Irrelevant fact to this issue

[slyn]

Seriously, this is the stupidest fucking story I've ever read. AT&T oversold their infrastructure, and now they have three choices:

1: Do nothing, lose customers due to poor service. This is the worst idea, bad both long term and short term.
2: Raise prices to drive down demand like this schmuck suggests, lose customers. This is a bad idea, you increase revenues short term maybe, but lower revenues in the long term.
or
3: Invest in more towers, bigger backends, thicker tubes, etc. "Lock in" customers not just with exclusive contracts with manufacturers but instead with a combination of exclusive contracts AND quality service. That would make a lot of happy customers, and though the initial investment would likely be many billions of dollars, happy customers are worth at least as much.

Re:Irrelevant fact to this issue

[phantomfive]

I don't think he's blaming the iphone users, he's saying exactly what you just said: that they can't deliver what they promised.

He said now instead of continuing to offer miserable service, they should just change their offer to something they actually can deliver. Sounds pretty reasonable to me. Although they shouldn't rip off the people who already have plans.

Re:Irrelevant fact to this issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Telecom and insurance have to be the only industries in the world that piss and moan about customers actually WANTING their service.

Re:Irrelevant fact to this issue

[TJamieson]

+5 Rational. I wish I had mod points!

Re:Irrelevant fact to this issue

[westlake]

2: Raise prices to drive down demand like this schmuck suggests, lose customers.

I'd say that depends on which customers you lose. It can make perfect sense to lighten the load.

Re:Irrelevant fact to this issue

[jackchance]

although your post made me laugh, the people who actually have to do the work piss and moan in almost every industry about doing their job.

Re:Irrelevant fact to this issue

[coaxial]

4. Raise prices, lock in more users with contracts and exclusive manufacturers, and buy a tower here and there, just enough to pull people along.

AT&T isn't going to fix this problem, as long as the iPhone is popular. Investment is a cost. And modern American business is about the short(est) term.

Re:Irrelevant fact to this issue

[Anonymous Coward]

4. Receive 'Infrastructure subsidies' from the Government to expand your network, while not changing a thing for your customers.

The fact is, AT&T is bringing in over a $100 Million a month from their customers (go look it up yourself, tyvm). Obviously the majority of that isn't profit, but to claim they are in any way shape or form hurting for cash for infrastructure upgrades, is pure bullshit. Simple fact is, THEY DON'T WANT TO PAY FOR UPGRADING THEIR NETWORK!

Re:Irrelevant fact to this issue

[Anonymous Coward]

2: Raise prices to drive down demand like this schmuck suggests, lose customers. This is a bad idea, you increase revenues short term maybe, but lower revenues in the long term.
or

You must be new to this world. Customers on average are dumb as shit. Don't confuse you or other individuals capable of critical thinking with the mass of customers. The mass is shit. They will swallow anything with enough marketing. Especially when you have a quasi-monopoly on a hip gadget that every fashionable hipster has to have.

Re:Irrelevant fact to this issue

[Anonymous Coward]

agreed.

just an addon comment:

raising prices only drives away the "light" users. the very people they want to keep.

the customers that are ripping the network a new asshole, will gladly keep paying, even after an increase.

Re:Irrelevant fact to this issue

[Anonymous Coward]

AT&T isn't blaming the customer. Farhad Manjoo is.

Re:Irrelevant fact to this issue

[Tokerat]

I ditched Sprint for what was then Cingular because I couldn't get Sprint signal in an area I had moved to. Cingular charged me over $400 on my first bill, claiming my first service month was only 2 days long (so the first bill I received was for 2 months, for only 32 days of service), and that I had 3 phones with individual full plans when in fact I had two phones with a share plan. I also lost a number that I wanted to have ported over, and tried really hard to keep. After some fighting, they charged me contract termination of $250 per phone because I wasn't paying the grossly over-inflated price, including for the phone that didn't exist. This bill was $1000 in just under 2 months and I barely used the service.

Needless to say, I now am a very happy Palm Pre owner with a big black mark on my credit score because for almost 5 years now Cingular/AT&T refuses to acknowledge the mistake. Sorry Apple, I've loved the Mac for years, but the iPhone could dispense beer, cocaine and hookers on command and it wouldn't be enough to get me to switch to AT&T.

Re:Irrelevant fact to this issue

[dkf]

Seriously, this is the stupidest fucking story I've ever read. AT&T oversold their infrastructure, and now they have three choices:

1: Do nothing[...]
2: Raise prices to drive down demand [...]
3: Invest [...]

They could also stop allowing new iPhones to be connected and throttle bandwidth to existing devices to allow them to all get at least a fair share.

Not that I believe they'll do that. My bet is on #1 with a little #3 - doing (almost) nothing and and keeping investment as low as it is possible to get away with. It's short-sighted and just what Wall Street likes (plenty of dividends and/or capital gains), so that's what will happen.

Re:Irrelevant fact to this issue

[Anonymous Coward]

i'll post as anonymous coward, since I work for the suck ass at&t. They give employees jack-squat, force them to work crazy hours and effed up rules and policies. We use 3rd rate computers and 5th rate operating systems, and they expect world-class customer service...in 26.7 seconds per call. That's all you rate as a customer when you spend $1.99 per 411 call. 26.7 seconds. That's why we're rude and cut you off. You don't even rate 1 minute of at&t's time.

and at&t doesn't blame the customer, they blame the employee, lay them off, ship their work overseas, and then Randall pockets the profits.

Customers, don't yell or swear at the operators, we are really on your side. We've been compaining about the same things you have, and for much longer. We get told to shut up and do your job. We complain that we can't hear the customers on our cheap $4.99 headsets, management says "get your hearing checked".

Send a message. you don't NEED all the crap the iphone does. Go back to a reliable network with Verizon/Sprint. I'll gladly take a layoff if it means sending a clear message to the idiots in charge.

Better yet. Get organized. at&t rolled out some new app for the iphone 2 weeks ago that caused the 411 network to crash. Get organized and everyone download huge files or whatever else you do to cause MAJOR problems to their network. do it every day for a month, send a messge to the company that this will be a daily action until they actually, to quote Tallahasse in Zombieland "Nut up or shut up"

Do it people, the power is in your hands, literally. Use it.

Re:Irrelevant fact to this issue

[Carl.E.Pierre]

Call me crazy, but i would actually like for them to do nothing. Perhaps then apple will come to its senses and end this exclusivity crap and allow me to use an iPhone without being ATT's bitch. But knowing how these things work, ATT probably has exclusivity for a long time to come(did they not help fund the iPhone?).

Re:Irrelevant fact to this issue

[CAIMLAS]

Eh, actually, from what I've heard, it very well might be the iPhone's/Apple's fault. I've got a couple friends who are huge smartphone geeks, one of which has been using smartphones since 2003 or so. He's used them all. From his assessment, iPhones will perform significantly worse than a Windows Mobile or Android based phone in the same area, and that's for basic voice service. Data rates are lower in the exact same 10'^2 area, and the latency is worse. This holds with the limited experience I've had with the platforms.

I don't know if it's due to QoS from ATT or the iPhone modems, but considering how many iPhones ATT has these days, I'd wager that iPhone users coudl very well account for the bulk of unsatisfied ATT customers.

use their phones too much

[Mike Rice]

???

How much is too much?

Tiered pricing doesn't solve the problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

The ATT network infrastructure still needs upgrades to handle existing traffic, and Apple hasn't stopped selling iPhones. Charging people more to use more data will not have as much an effect on usage as you are suggesting it will, but it will tick customers off even more than they already are, because they'll get charged even more for the same mediocre service. ATT should have seen this coming a while ago and done something about it.

Change plans?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlimited data with half a meg as speed is 15€ a month here where I live, do something like that? Then you can pay more to get faster connection, like 1mbps is 5€ more.

Let me get this right

[rshol]

ATT offered users an unlimited data plan, no wait, they required one with an iPhone. Now the problems with ATT's network are the fault of those selfish users who took ATT's offer seriously. Give me a break. ATT is rolling in money from iPhone, they should use it to build out their network.

Re:Let me get this right

[monoqlith]

This is yet another case of a Slate writer writing about something that they clearly don't understand.

Re:Let me get this right

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously the solution is tiered pricing. That way AT&T's service remains shitty, but they can begin maximizing the amount of money extracted for said shitty service.

Re:Let me get this right

[Tweenk]

They should go with a metered plan with a reasonable rate, so the customer pays only for services actually used, rather than an unlimited plan they can't provide thereby cheating the customer out of their money.

Re:Let me get this right

[Shawn Parr]

ATT is rolling in money from iPhone, they should use it to build out their network.

That is an understatement. Nielson claimed that in April there were 6 million iPhones in the US, and some estimates say 2.4 million iPhone 3Gs units were sold in the US. Let's pretend there are 7 million iPhones due to upgrades, breakage, and other such events.

If they all had 3G data plans, that would be $210 million per month, but there are still some 2G iPhones out there, so let's imagine $175 Million per month. That's a bit over $2 billion per year.

Now the question is, how many smartphone users are there overall, and how many have iPhones? I have no way of knowing, but I'm pretty sure AT&T still sells plenty of non-iPhone smartphones, all with unlimited 3G data plans. Is it unreasonable to assume that AT&T has 20 million or more smartphone subscribers? That would be 1/3 of their entire subscriber numbers in 2007, so based on iPhone, Blackberry, and even WinMobile gains in the overall industry, I think it sounds like a reasonable guess.

20 million smartphones, all with data plans. $600 million per month, or more than $7 billion per year. Just for smartphones, just on data plans. Those same customers also have minutes plans, SMS plans, and other profitable add ons.

AT&T is claiming they will spend just shy of $18 billion in 2009 on upgrades. With more than a third of that cost being covered just by data plans, and the cellular industry making crazy profits on services like SMS I'm pretty sure they aren't exactly hurting for money. With SMS profits they will likely cover more than half of the upgrade cost they quote just from smartphone users. And just on data services.

These numbers get to be pretty striking when you find that AT&T's smartphone users comprise quite a bit less than half of their subscriber base. And many of those other subscribers are also buying into high profit items like SMS plans. And even data services, GPS services, etc.

Plus next year they will add a lot of subscribers from Centennial Wireless, and all the profits from those customers, some of which may upgrade to new phones with data plans as they live in areas where AT&T or Verizon service was weak and they couldn't get an iPhone, or a newer Blackberry.

AT&T needs to step up, and build out the network they should have had originally. There is no way they didn't see this coming when planning on adding the iPhone, they simply chose to ride the short term profits and deal with the issue later. Well 'later' ended up sooner than they hoped, and now they are doing what they always planned on doing:

• Playing catch up
• Sending out feelers in the press and at conferences to see how well they can get away with metered or restricted service
• Waiting for the above point to get people used enough to the idea that it will seem more 'natural' to them when it actually happens

Of course a lot of my math above is based on guessed numbers, including the numbers that come from Nielson and AT&T themselves, after all they are likely guessing and passing it off as fact as well. However I'm pretty sure the dollar figures for what AT&T makes is more than my guesses not less.

Re:Let me get this right

[blindseer]

ATT offered users an unlimited data plan, no wait, they required one with an iPhone. Now the problems with ATT's network are the fault of those selfish users who took ATT's offer seriously. Give me a break. ATT is rolling in money from iPhone, they should use it to build out their network.

Another solution that seems obvious to me is to offer the iPhone without the data plan. If the iPhone users are killing the cell towers with so much usage then offer them a "discount" for not using the cell towers for internet access. In other words, by not paying for unlimited access you are limited to using the Wi-Fi capability for your web surfing needs.

I have unlimited broadband at home and a Wi-Fi access point. Nearly every place I go around town there is someone offering Wi-Fi for free or by subscription. Even while traveling I have little trouble finding Wi-Fi, I see it advertised at every rest stop, coffee shop, hotel, and airport. Since I don't make a habit of using the phone, and especially the internet, while walking, driving, or flying I can certainly wait until I reach my destination, or a convenient rest stop along the way, to check my e-mail.

I think that if people are offered to purchase, or rather required to buy, unlimited internet service with their iPhone no one should be surprised if people actually take advantage of that service. It's like someone offering an all you can eat buffet complaining on how people stuff themselves with every meal. If I'm buying the $10 all you can eat buffet I'm making sure I get my money's worth. If I get the $6 plate meal then I'll eat what is offered, and think real hard if I need another plate once I've finished.

Re:Let me get this right

[david_thornley]

If they make me feel reluctant to use data services, they've seriously messed with the value of my iPhone. The only reason I have anything to do with AT&T is the iPhone. If AT&T finds having customers too inconvenient, well, that's their choice.

Cars are too hard on roads!

[Anonymous Coward]

We should outlaw everything but horse and buggy. These new-fangled auto-mobiles just destroy our roads with their speed!
We should pass laws to make them travel no faster than a horse, or face fines!

Re:Cars are too hard on roads!

[Anonymous Coward]

And while we're at it, let's sue the horse feed producers, their damn shit doesn't work in my car!

Dump AT&T Exclusivity

[binaryspiral]

If there was any love from Apple for its users, they would dump the AT&T exclusive deal and allow the iPhone to be sold and supported on all the other networks out there. But since they get such a sweet kickback from AT&T, they have zero incentive.

Every iPhone user I talk to in the midwest says they would dump AT&T in a heartbeat for Verizon or US Cellular (if they would ever support SIM cards). Even more people who don't have an iPhone would get one if they didn't have to sign up with AT&T.

Re:Dump AT&T Exclusivity

[xannik]

Apple will be forced to drop that exclusivity deal, once Android starts kicking ass and taking names in 2010. With Sprint and Verizon both rolling out multiple Android phones Apple can't afford to stay tied to a crappy network.

Re:Dump AT&T Exclusivity

[agnosticnixie]

a) T-Mobile is the only other major US GSM network

b) CDMA networks carriers are only used in America (the continent), Japan and Korea, so it's not going to happen

c) T-Mobile USA, for some unfathomable reason, uses a non-standard "fifth band" frequency for its 3G, which means while a quad-band HSDPA phone will work fine in Europe, it won't in the US unless you roam on AT&T's network. It might be a firmware hack, or not. Until then, we'll see.

d) That said, it saddens me, slightly - I'm lucky, I guess, to never be away from wifi for too long so in the end all I use is an unlimited EDGE/texting (I cheated and cancelled my contract, also I live in a major north american city where 3G is, well, pretty bad, and on roadtrips, it's only a good deal in major metropolis on this side of the world)

Re:Dump AT&T Exclusivity

[nxtw]

c) T-Mobile USA, for some unfathomable reason, uses a non-standard "fifth band" frequency for its 3G

In some US markets, T-Mobile does not have enough spectrum to run both GSM and WCDMA on 1900 MHz. Where I live, they have 10 MHz total 1900 MHz spectrum and would have to stop all GSM service in order to implement WCDMA on 1900 MHz.

Re:Dump AT&T Exclusivity

[maxume]

The idea that it isn't worth developing a version of a phone for CDMA, which has tens of millions of subscribers, is utterly preposterous. The development costs would end up being something like $1 per phone sold (that's assuming that the development would cost a lot and they would only sell one or two million phones).

Apple likely wanted exclusivity to start with (they are making monthly money on the contracts) and GSM makes worldwide sense if they can come to terms with AT&T in the US, so it makes sense that they went with GSM, but the need for a different chip isn't even an issue when it comes to carrier exclusivity.

Re:Dump AT&T Exclusivity

[agnosticnixie]

Except exclusivity deals mostly only happen in the US, they were dropped in most of Europe and the iPhone has had lots of sales increases in every country where it did it. Tens of millions of subscribers is really a drop when a lot of the CDMA networks are already working on dropping CDMA and switching to HSPA or whatever will be the GSM side next gen. Bell-Telus in Canada is already rolling it out so it can get a bit of Rogers' cake, iirc Virgin America is working on it and so are either Sprint or Verizon (one is, I forgot which, the other, well, I don't know if it is or not) - for Mexico, Japan and Korea, no idea. It may have made some sense 3 year ago, but now it's looking like CDMA is, well, a bit of a dead-end.

Point taken on the dev costs though.

Re:Dump AT&T Exclusivity

[maxume]

Virgin Mobile, which is the "Virgin" branded carrier in the United States, is wholly owned by Sprint (happened this year), and exclusively uses their towers (roaming is not an option, at least on the prepaid stuff, not sure about the monthly).

Are you talking about a Canadian or Latin American branded service?

Re:Dump AT&T Exclusivity

[agnosticnixie]

Ah, that might have been Sprint's testing with LTE then which I conflated. No, I just missed the buyout which happened during a time when I was on the road.

Re:Dump AT&T Exclusivity

[maxume]

As far as I can tell, all the networks are converging on the same technologies, maybe not for so-called 3.5 or 4g, but one or two full upgrades from now, I think they will be homogeneous (except for the frequencies, which are determined by the available licenses...).

Re:Dump AT&T Exclusivity

[xannik]

Yes everyone is moving to LTE, but Apple should not wait for everyone to upgrade their networks to LTE. As was pointed out it would not be a lot of money for them to roll out on other carriers.

Re:Dump AT&T Exclusivity

[piero.grimo]

Except exclusivity deals mostly only happen in the US, they were dropped in most of Europe and the iPhone has had lots of sales increases in every country where it did it

Wow, wow! I live there and AFAIK only France has seen its exclusivity dropped early this year.

Of course, prices dropped down and 1 in 3 smartphones sold are iPhones nowadays.

England should confirm this trend early next year, but no other country has witnessed this yet. The good thing is that it might give Apple some ideas.

Unlimited data is necessary for REAL smartphones

[nweaver]

If you have a real smartphone, one with a wide variety of applications, one that everyone will WANT to use, you must have an unlimited data plan.

Rather, what AT&T and Apple need to do is "WiFi tunnels": Have the iPhone associate with WiFi networks and encrypt traffic through a tunnel opportunistically to AT&T, so you can use and migrate between WiFi networks transparently, and between the WiFi and 3G, while having the phone act like its just continuously connected through a single network.

except this will kill AT&T too

[Anonymous Coward]

Because a change of the pricing tiers would institute a contract change. Therefore you would be able to terminate your iphone contract without any penalty. The day they do this is the day that even the most tech illiterate iphone user learns how to jailbreak an iphone.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that something like this could break AT&Ts exclusivity agreement with Apple on the iPhone.

They make you pay $0.25 per text each way and now

[Anonymous Coward]

They make you pay $0.25 per text each way and now they should start billing you $10+ per meg?

cell towers or WiFi routers?

[CdBee]

Given that WiFi routers in urban areas with DSL backhaul can take a lot more data than 3G, maybe AT&T shouldnt consider their network as solely GSM-based.... and start getting iPhone and any other WiFi smartphone users to use wireless networks more..

Re:cell towers or WiFi routers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, and that's exactly what users will start doing themselves if there ever is a data cap on the iphone's 3G. The thing is, it's a bit of a scary scenario for AT&T, because once communities gather with ad hoc, consistent wifi network coverage, people will want to scale back their GSM data use and buy the cheapest plan available, or maybe even a voice-only plan.

Re:cell towers or WiFi routers?

[alen]

they already do

you can use the wifi for free in any starbucks on the iphone. and at&T has more than 20,000 wifi access points around the US

Re:cell towers or WiFi routers?

[CdBee]

You say 20,000 routers as if it is a lot. In a nation of 300mil people, it is a tiny number.

Re:cell towers or WiFi routers?

[nxtw]

How much space will one wifi access point cover? A 100 ft radius? For 20,000 access points, that's only 22 square miles - less than a typical US township (36 square miles).

Re:cell towers or WiFi routers?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Actually, I think the 20,000 routers may be a low number. I travel in places out in the "sticks", and am surprised by the number of free WiFi hotspots that are available.

This is a case of having easy to install wireless routers that owners of mom-n-pop restaurants and hotels can purchase. They see it as adding a perk for their customers by sharing their DSL line that they don't have enough free time to take advantage of anyway...

Re:cell towers or WiFi routers?

[aaarrrgggh]

They could at least try and get a "roaming" agreement in place with all the wifi providers for transparent access, but all that really ends up doing is saturating the USM bands.

Ultimately, the macrocell concept needs to be ditched and they need to deploy a whole lot of mini and micro cell sites in urban areas and high density buildings. If you use the backhaul properly, you don't have the problem with last quarter-mile connectivity being wireless.

GP is right that the tiers become obsolete too quickly; most of what iPhone users do is low-volume web browsing-- there is just a lot more of it now than ever before. When video calling comes to the iPhone expect the same big step in usage. Service providers should focus on catering to growing demand rather than maximizing profits on current or year-ago demand levels and hoping a disruptive technology doesn't put them out of business!

Re:cell towers or WiFi routers?

[DJRumpy]

Where do they get these numbers? 80 MG a month? I'm probably on the net more than most, and my phone says 5 MB over 3G most months. The rest all runs over WiFi. I suspect a lot of people have the same usage habits.

Re:cell towers or WiFi routers?

[dgatwood]

Why keep voice? If I were in Mountain View most of the time, I'd be tempted to ditch my iPhone for an iPod Touch running Skype. Why carry a pay-per-minute cell phone at all if there's free ubiquitous Wi-Fi. The last thing AT&T is likely to do would be to add caps to iPhone data usage. As soon as they drive people to Wi-Fi, they run too great a risk of losing all their voice traffic, too.

Re:cell towers or WiFi routers?

[tepples]

Given that WiFi routers in urban areas with DSL backhaul can take a lot more data than 3G

If the owner of the property you're visiting refuses to give you a key to get past the WPA encryption or captive portal, you have to rely on 3G or a USB stick. If you're riding the bus, you have to rely on 3G or a USB stick because 802.11 just isn't designed for a handoff every five seconds.

Re:cell towers or WiFi routers?

[ProfessionalCookie]

Incoming calls.

Re:cell towers or WiFi routers?

[dgatwood]

I don't see your point. There's nothing preventing incoming calls on Skype. In fact, if you do it right, you can even have it forward your home phone calls so you only need one number where people can reach you no matter where you are. It's a lot better than having to have a separate cell phone number.

The only benefit to having a cell phone at this point is the lack of ubiquitous Wi-Fi and the lack of the ability to rapidly roam from one Wi-Fi AP to another. Both can be fairly easily solved at this point, at least within major cities.

Re:cell towers or WiFi routers?

[Jon_S]

I don't know. Last time I was in Mtn. View, I had to pay for my WiFi. This is on the main street (Castro St.?), at the starbucks there. I don't know who/where these people are that always have a free WiFi signal available.

Re:cell towers or WiFi routers?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I have the same suspicions

Re:cell towers or WiFi routers?

[dgatwood]

How long ago was this? Google WiFi pretty much covers the entire city.

http://wifi.google.com/city/mv/apmap.html

Haha serves you right

[Anonymous Coward]

And the money to expand this supply, which is now in the pockets of overpaid Apple, would have gone to the carriers. The traffic would have distributed because consumers would react to lower service levels and changed to other carriers, and when the system is balanced the pressure to expand and innovate is also balanced. Instead of, as in this case, creating a cartel in which both AT/T and iPhone deserves any shit thrown at them. And before anybody answers, NO this is not business, there are rules to business and if you cannot understand that then fuck off. Unfortunately I'm posting Anon due to the fucking Macibans infecting slashdot who mod down Apple criticism even when it's true.

And ditch that 8/16/32mb option

[nick_davison]

As a great man [allegedly] once said, 640kb should be enough for anyone.

Modern users with their demands for eight, sixteen and thirty two megabyte options are just needlessly draining the world's silicon supply so they can listen to a few songs. Traditional phone users who don't have all of those cutesy multimedia options can get by with a fraction of that.

Alternatively, time moves on. Just because 640kb was once enough for anyone, doing what they did with the limitations of that era, just because 40-80mb/month was once enough for anyone... That doesn't mean time doesn't move on and it doesn't mean it's appropriate to only support what once was the norm.

AT&T have made a metric assload of money from people who bought the iPhone for, well, being an iPhone and not "some other" smartphone. AT&T's network sucks, just about everyone seems to gripe about it. They suck it up, when they'd never have gone with AT&T in the first place, because it does come with a more able phone, because it does come with unlimited data access, because it does come with an interface that makes using 5-10x as much bandwidth as before a practical reality.

To play bait and switch, to get users to buy $600 phones (yes, I'll claim full price in a world where you either pay inflated monthly rates or a fee to cancel), to get them to sign up for those contracts, to get them to leave companies with more reliable service, all with the promise of an unlimited phone and then to say... yeah, we don't feel like paying to support that so, instead, surprise! we're capping the unlimited service we sold you and charging overage fees is obscene.

If AT&T can't really roll out coverage to support iPhone users using an iPhone as an iPhone... perhaps the real answer is for Apple to say, "OK, you can't meet your end of the agreement - we'll sell it to Sprint/Verizon/whoever instead."

AT&T entered in to an agreement with Apple to provide a network that supported Apple's product. AT&T entered into an agreement with the customers to provide a network to support that product in a certain way, too. If they'd like to acknowledge they can't honor that, I'm sure another company would like the opportunity.

Re:And ditch that 8/16/32mb option

[Darkness404]

The problem is, we have 4 main crappy phone companies. You have AT&T with good coverage, good phones (though sadly no Android yet), medium price, but their networks are just so congested. You have Sprint with decent-ish coverage, great speed, decent enough phones, but pretty high prices. You have Verizon with good coverage, medium price, decent speed but they neuter their phones to being the point of unusable (want proof? compare a generic phone like the Motorola Razr between the 4 cell networks and you will find the Verizion one has most of their functions taken away and an awful hideous UI put in) and you have T-Mobile with open phones (lots of Android), decent prices, but their network just isn't as complete as the other 3 so coverage isn't the greatest and 3G is non-existent in non-urban areas. Myself I'd ditch AT&T and go for T-Mobile if they had decent service everywhere that I go but they don't.

Re:And ditch that 8/16/32mb option

[Anonymous Coward]

draining the world's silicon supply

75% of the Earth's crust is silicon and oxygen. If we were "running out" of silicon, that means we had already "run out" of everything else.

You can hyperbolize to make your writing sound more interesting, but once you make absurd statements like that, you'll lose your audience. The reader walks away believing you are either an idiot or you are lying.

Re:And ditch that 8/16/32mb option

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is, we have 4 main crappy phone companies. You have AT&T with good coverage, good phones (though sadly no Android yet), medium price, but their networks are just so congested. You have Sprint with decent-ish coverage, great speed, decent enough phones, but pretty high prices. You have Verizon with good coverage, medium price, decent speed but they neuter their phones to being the point of unusable (want proof? compare a generic phone like the Motorola Razr between the 4 cell networks and you will find the Verizion one has most of their functions taken away and an awful hideous UI put in) and you have T-Mobile with open phones (lots of Android), decent prices, but their network just isn't as complete as the other 3 so coverage isn't the greatest and 3G is non-existent in non-urban areas. Myself I'd ditch AT&T and go for T-Mobile if they had decent service everywhere that I go but they don't.

You have your pricing completely backwards. AT&T and Verizon have high prices, while Sprint and T-Mobile have far lower prices.

Re:And ditch that 8/16/32mb option

[jim_v2000]

Maybe I'm just a masochist, but I like Verizon and I like my Windows Mobile phones. Yeah, people bitch about WM all the time, but I've not had too many issues with it, and I like the wide availability of applications. I generally just use my phone as a phone, calendar, and time piece...and occasionally to check email, the internet, and gaming when I don't have my laptop. I wouldn't want to do much more on it because a 3 inch screen just isn't that fun to look at.

Re:And ditch that 8/16/32mb option

[TJ_Phazerhacki]

I spend a few hours a day with my phone connected to the internet, RDP to damn near everything on it, and LOVE Verizon's service (and their customer support has gotten orders of magnitude better in recent years.) If you can't hack your Verizon phone, you don't deserve the features for free. Everybody RAVES about the "customizability" of other phones without realizing that Verizon basically requires you to do so.

Re:And ditch that 8/16/32mb option

[Spittoon]

"Traditional phone users who don't have all of those cutesy multimedia options can get by with a fraction of that." I don't want to just "get by". Fuck that.

Re:And ditch that 8/16/32mb option

[Swift2001]

If we keep on using all that silicon, we will run out of sand!!!!

Stupid Idea

[okmijnuhb]

Consumers do not like tiered pricing, particularly those who purchase a smart phone for the purpose of fully using all it's fancy data consuming capabilities. The all you can eat plan, in this case, is a big selling point.

He's right

[davidwr]

The main reason not to meter a limited resource is if the overall added cost minus benefit of metering exceeds the overall cost minus benefit of not metering.

That isn't the case with a congested spectrum.

Or ATT could improve the network

[xannik]

I say ATT needs to improve their network or die. If they can't innovate and build a better network then someone else will step up to the plate. I don't feel sorry for them.

When android phones really start to become ubiquitous on other networks in 2010 those carriers will have to deal with the same issue, but I am willing to bet you that they won't suffer problems like ATT has, because they did things in the proper order, network first and then the phone. I think for ATT it is really about a misappropriation of money. Spend money wisely and invest in infrastructure, then roll out the smartphone.

ATT has had so many complaints with the iPhone that ATT is NOW being forced to invest in infrastructure, the problem is it is going to take a while for the benefits to show up. Hence, we get idiotic ideas like tiered pricing, because users are so upset about the state of the network they are willing to do anything to see service improve.

Re:Or ATT could improve the network

[Anonymous Coward]

I say ATT needs to improve their network or die. If they can't innovate and build a better network then someone else will step up to the plate. I don't feel sorry for them.

Apparently you don't understand the capital investments this infrastructure requires. You don't just grab your cousins Bo and Luke and start slapping up cell towers.

Slashdot readers want an unlimited quantity of data, at blazing speeds, for dirt cheap. I get that.

A realist with an ounce of business sense would say you probably can get two of the three. Which two are most important to you?

I'm posting AC because as a realist I realize that a comment like this will probably be modded as troll or flamebait. But I will tell you that I live in Michigan and am a big Michigan State fan... Go State!

Re:Or ATT could improve the network

[xannik]

I never said you improve the network by "slapping up cell towers". There is a lot more to telecommunications infrastructure than just the number of cell towers a carrier has or do they not teach that in Michigan? :-)

Re:Or ATT could improve the network

[bertoelcon]

I'm posting AC because as a realist I realize that a comment like this will probably be modded as troll or flamebait.

Parent should have posted under a username, because the post is informative.

I Have A Better Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop selling what you don't have, and improve your infrastructure.

Why does everyone's brilliant "solution" involve squeezing more money out of consumers?

Good argument to expand iPhone to Other Carriers

[okmijnuhb]

AT&T is selling something they cannot deliver.

The Real and Likely Solution

[sammysheep]

The problem: iPhone users suck up too much bandwidth for the ATT network. The solution: decrease use or increase network capacity.

For ATT, the decreased use can happen using updated pricing, and increased capacity will happen as a matter of course from year to year, but I think the real and likely solution ATT will just not like: when the contract is over and the iPhone is made available on other networks the ATT network will experience less use (lost customers) and iPhone users will experience greater capacity (they are spread out on multiple networks).

2 Problems with this

[Bytal]

Most AT&T customers do not go anywhere near 100MB of data and are perfectly willing to pay a flat $40 monthly fee. By cutting their bill by $30 you have just thrown away $30 of AT&T's profits. You're only hope would be to recover that money by raising the prices on the high bandwidth users by the same amount or more. If anything, by restricting their bandwidth usage you'd actually be encouraging a saving behavior that by definition results in lower profits for you. You're also cutting the profits on your largest subscription base, all for a dubious increase in "goodwill". Maybe it would be a lot more cost effective to just build more towers.

Whenever I hear tiered pricing, I never imagine a $30 discount to the low level users. I see a $5 discount (in return for a 50% lower effective usage cap) to those guys and a $20 increase to everyone else.

Re:2 Problems with this

[DavidTC]

Most AT&T customers do not go anywhere near 100MB of data and are perfectly willing to pay a flat $40 monthly fee.

Indeed. I have an iPhone, and I do a lot of data transfers on it. Lots of stuff, up and down. When it was jailbroken (When the hell is the jailbreak for 3.1 coming out for Windows?), I even put scummvm with huge 600 meg games on it via scp.

But I did that all, of course, over my wifi, not the cell phone network.

I'd love to have some sort of restricted plan. Hell, I don't even need 100MB...how about 10MB? That should be enough to look up when a movie starts or even load a Google Map a few times a month.

I'd make sure I was on wifi when I synced my RSS reader or bought a new app. In fact, they could make new purchases of apps or music or whatever wait for wifi if the user wanted.

They could even make push notifications that you could restrict to just when you're on wifi. Which would not actually be 'push', but whatever. You would not have to launch an app to check it, the phone itself would tunnel into Apple and check for notifications.

Why won't they do that?

By cutting their bill by $30 you have just thrown away $30 of AT&T's profits.

Ah, that's why they won't do that.

They should upgrade.

[Reeses]

They're going to need it as a competitive advantage. As more smart phones come out, they're going to have just as much impact on AT&T's network, and then everyone will be contributing to making the network slower.

If they don't upgrade, someone like Verizon is going to see it as a competitive weakness, and capitalize on it once they get their smartphones/iPhones (when the exclusivity contract runs out). The iPhone is just a harbinger of what's to come with mobile devices.

While I understand the benefits of applying an early adopter tax, it also makes AT&T vulnerable in a market that's pretty competitive already.

Rollover Data Plan?

[Ender77]

I rarely use my iphone internet because the speeds suck and I live in an edge network. I would like to see an alternative to the $30 unlimited plan and instead have something like $10 X amount of time/data plan that roll overs unused data to the next month like roll over minutes.

Re:Rollover Data Plan?

[mdwh2]

I agree - I'm on Pay As You Go with my V980, and the Internet rates are extortionate (£1 for 15MB, and then the rates go up rapidly if you go over that limit in a day). As far as I can tell, you can only get better prices on a contract, which doesn't suit my usage.

The interesting thing is that this is very different for 3G USB mobile broadband devices - here PAYG is common, and you get more sensible deals (e.g., £15 per 1GB). So I plan on getting one of these soon. But it just seems mad - it would be much simpler to just use my phone as a modem, but instead I have to buy a separate device and have separate accounts. The joke is that the one I plan on buying is from the same company that is my phone network...

Re:Rollover Data Plan?

[Anonymous Coward]

This won't happen. The $30 option will be the cheapest.

Re:Rollover Data Plan?

[GlassHeart]

So you want AT&T to charge you $10 per month because you don't use it much, when you've proven to them that you're willing to pay $30? They might be evil, but they're not retarded.

Inevitable

[UnknowingFool]

Really, how could AT&T not have seen this coming? Having attempted to surf the web on other phones, on an iPhone, while it is not perfect, it is at least functional. And guess what? More people will surf the web when they get an iPhone. When AT&T promoted that phone, more users that will tax their infrastructure. Unless someone at AT&T was praying that people would get the iPhone and not use one of the most useful features about it.

Re:Inevitable

[mdwh2]

It's functional on my 4 year old V980. My mum (who is not very good with phones or computers, and has yet to work out how to store numbers in the phone's address book) still manages to use the Internet on her Motorola phone. It's pretty bog standard since, ooh, about 2004. Of course more people will use a phone's Internet if they've paid through the nose for it, or they're offered an "unlimited" plan, but in general web use as been increasing on all phones.

Which just makes this all the more embarrasing for AT&T if they can't cope with web traffic.

Re:Inevitable

[DavidTC]

It's not really 'surfing' that's sucking bandwidth. I'm betting than purchasing stuff from the iTunes store is causing large bandwidth usage.

Manjoo should shut up

[koan]

And ATT should upgrade their crap network, and all we need for that to happen is to have the media monopolies broken up and regulated.
Until a time comes when ATT has to compete to stay alive, you will have crap plans, crap contracts, and, of course, a crap network.

Leave it to an idiot like Manjoo to look for the worst solution...tiering.

Re:Manjoo should shut up

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you expect he's a joo who wants dem joogolds.

BullSh!t

[zenwaves]

I get only 450 f'ing voice minutes per month with that unlimited data plan, so AT&T and you, Farhood, can kiss my @$$

Re:BullSh!t

[Widowwolf]

Data plan and voice plan are completely separate..Want more minutes, then move up to the next plan you freaking idiot!

Re:BullSh!t

[zenwaves]

fuck you asshole

Re:BullSh!t

[Widowwolf]

Oh what an insightful and witty comeback..Something i expect everyday from you Slashdot trolls. What you would like to speak more to people outside of your 450 "daytime" minutes, free night and weekend, free mobile to mobile? So here's my question..how many points in your rollover minute? Because with a family plan with 1400 minutes and 5 people calling I have an excess every month.. If you really need to talk more I suggest upping your talk plan. don't like it..Wait for privacy or contact rules to change then cancel your contract without a fee. Then you can go complain against Verizon or Sprint or one of the other carriers...OH WAIT, you just want to be a troll. enjoy being under that bridge and scaring all the little kids..

Re:BullSh!t

[zenwaves]

well you pussy, try calling me a "freaking idiot" in person, you'll find out what damage this troll can do to your face.

Re:BullSh!t

[Widowwolf]

If you don't know the difference between a data plan and a voice plan , then yes you are a freaking idiot

Re:BullSh!t

[zenwaves]

Yeah, like I thought: you're the kind of pussy who has a big mouth when he's sitting in front of a keyboard. If you said that to me in person, which I highly doubt you would, I'd rearrange that smart mouth for you.

Flawed Premise

[Shadow7789]

While the logic is sound, his basic premise is quite flawed. His article is based upon the idea that these "iPhone Users" are something so different and special from other phone users, that the world has never seen anything like them before (sounds like a bit of Apple propaganda to me). However, that is patently wrong. Just look at Japan. A very large percentage of the Japanese population uses their cell phones in ways that would put iPhone users to shame. That is not even mentioning that Japanese cities have much higher population densities than American cities, and you don't hear stories of how the Japanese phone network is falling apart. Between these two points, his conclusion that we will never be able to build enough network capacity to support iPhone users is clearly false.

Re:Flawed Premise

[spintriae]

A very large percentage of the Japanese population uses their cell phones in ways that would put iPhone users to shame.

Porn? Video games? Or a combination of the two?

Re:Flawed Premise

[cdrguru]

That is mostly because (a) the Japanese phone system is government supported rather than a competitor in a field of many companies, (b) Japan uses an entirely different type of phone system with lots and lots of very small cells, and (c) the traffic mix in Japan is very different - lots and lots of SMS, almost no voice traffic.

Re:Flawed Premise

[farble1670]

compare the size of japan and US. quite different. for an equal number of users, providing service over a larger area is more costly. japan's population density makes providers' problems easier to solve.

Re:Flawed Premise

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually his logic is valid, but unsound. In a valid argument if all the premises are true, the conclusion is true. A sound argument is one in which all the premises are true.

Other than that, your point is excellent! I'd love to see a comparison of data usage on plans in Japan with notes on network coverage and consumer complaints vs similar data points in the US.

Re:Flawed Premise

[zioncat]

Just look at Japan. A very large percentage of the Japanese population uses their cell phones in ways that would put iPhone users to shame. That is not even mentioning that Japanese cities have much higher population densities than American cities, and you don't hear stories of how the Japanese phone network is falling apart.

14th century Europeans fantasizing about Japan as "land of gold" was cute, but these rampant portrayal of Japan as something of technical nirvana is, I dare say, borderline pathetic. The supposed 22nd century phones that "puts iPhone users to shame" exists only in Japanophile's head. In reality iPhone is vastly superior to anything Japan has made thus far. And those super cool and infallible Japanese phone network? Oh, they just throttle their network.

Re:Flawed Premise

[__aawkdb2598]

Maybe they have lots of SMS traffic because their networks don't charge $0.20 per message? Many of my friends I'll call simply because that cost is fixed to them if they don't run over their plan's minutes, whereas the cost of an SMS is not.

Re:Flawed Premise

[Anonymous Coward]

(a) the Japanese phone system is government supported rather than a competitor in a field of many companies

Wrong. NTT (Docomo's parent company) was privatized in 1985. Softbank (nee Vodafone Japan) and KDDI have always been private companies. If you're going to bring up government assistance, you should mention the $200 billion we gave to the phone companies in the 90's and got nothing back for.

 

(b) Japan uses an entirely different type of phone system with lots and lots of very small cells

Wrong. NTT and Softbank use 3G UMTS, just like AT&T and T-Mobile do in their 3G coverage areas. KDDI uses CDMA, just like Sprint and Verizon.

 

(c) the traffic mix in Japan is very different - lots and lots of SMS, almost no voice traffic

As another poster said, one could argue that this is a result of price scheming on the part of US carriers. Note that very few people use SMS in Japan, they actually use full e-mail. Also, SMS costs essentially nothing in terms of local cell capacity while Internet does cost something.

Re:Flawed Premise

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: (a)

There are a fair number of competing mobile phone carriers in Japan.

NTT Docomo
Au by KDDI
Softbank (formerly Vodaphone)
Willcom (PHS system)

Re: (b)

The lots of very small cells applies only to the PHS system of which Willcom is the only
survivor. The other carriers use long range cell phone towers.

Re: (c)

Correct. Japanese users spend most of their time looking down at their phones. American
users spend most of their time with their phones at their ears. The iPhone is changing the
way the US uses its phones.

The contributor's case implodes ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Your arguements evaporate quickly when you understand
that ATT feels its system is sOOO burdened that it just
opened it up to Multimedia transfers!!!

Your conclusions are erroneous and blame the wrong party.

wake up.

Why AT&T should stop whining like a spoilt bra

[Ant P.]

Would this bandwidth disaster have happened if they hadn't simply embezzled those billions of tax dollars of government handouts they were given to prevent this happening in the first place?

I hope these scum go bankrupt after their network crashes and the iPhone cash cows jump ship. Same for every other ISP and telco in on the scam.

iPhone haters

[Pointy_Hair]

iPhone is just the most visible because it can be equipped with all sorts of apps that actually work as advertised most times, and people actually use them. If [fill-in-the-blank-other-carrier] supplied an equally useful product, their network would get hammered too.

Personally, I would say the topic of this article hasn't really affected me and I travel a lot. My iPhone on AT&T works at least as good as my previous Blackberry 8830 and Treo before that did on Verizon. The aircard for my laptops consistently works better than the Verizon one did. The only time I've seen crappy data rates is usually at/near an airport where a zillion other people are connecting to the same tower as me. Not too surprising and not worth the effort to whine about.

'Induced traffic' - Hah

[monoqlith]

The writer builds his entire argument on the idea that, like highways, building network capacity produces a phenomenon called "induced traffic". The more roads you build, the traffic they attract, producing an unending(but not really) cycle of expansion and congestion.

Setting aside the obvious dissimilarities between network traffic and highway traffic, what he fails to mention is that there's an upper limit to induced because, as usual, there are a finite number of people and cars. If it really was the case that highways inevitably congested no matter how many you build, all of our highways - not just the ones outside of major metro areas during rush hour - would be chronically congested, at all times. But they aren't. This is because there is an upper limit on how much people drive no matter how many highways are available for them to use, and there is an upper limit on how many people drive to begin with.

Similarly, the Internet would have grinded to a halt long ago if building out capacity wasn't at least a partial solution, if not a complete solution, to the problem. Most broadband users have unlimited access as well, and while some tax the network disproportionately, the Internet's infrastructure is able to support it.

Why the author thinks the same principle doesn't apply to iPhones is beyond me. Yes, people will do more data-intensive things on a faster network. But there's an upper limit to how much data can be transferred by a single iPhone user in one month anyway, even if the user is transferring data 24/7, 7 days a week. if the network is built to handle the upper-limit of the most data-intensive users even in a hypothetical "induced traffic" scenario, this won't be a problem.

The whole traffic analogy belongs in the "The Ted Stevens Dumptruck of Bad Analogies," and Slate should stop publishing articles about shit it doesn't know about.

Re:'Induced traffic' - Hah

[TubeSteak]

The writer builds his entire argument on the idea that, like highways, building network capacity produces a phenomenon called "induced traffic". The more roads you build, the traffic they attract, producing an unending(but not really) cycle of expansion and congestion.

Your logic is so full of fail I don't know where to begin.
1. Induced Travel: Frequently Asked Questions
[Federal Highway Administration's] position reflects the consensus of the transportation planning and travel behavior research community that induced travel is neither more nor less than the cumulative result of individual traveler choices and land development decisions made in response to an improved level of transportation service.

Literally: if you build it, they will come.
The result of this is that new highway projects are less about extra lanes and more about toll/HOV lanes.

if the network is built to handle the upper-limit of the most data-intensive users even in a hypothetical "induced traffic" scenario, this won't be a problem.

Almost nobody designs roads or wireless networks (or even wired networks) for peak capacity except in very specific situations. This is why subway trains fill up during rush hour, highways slow to a crawl, and cellphone towers start dropping calls. Heck, I once managed to get stuck in a highway traffic jam so big that the local cell towers got overloaded.

Your entire argument is based on the false idea that businesses will build for peak capacity.
They won't. It is extremely expensive and the idle capacity doesn't pay itself off.
Seriously, it's like you've never heard of contention ratios or overbookingbefore.

Re:Why AT+T should stop whining like a spoilt brat

[Ant P.]

Oh great, /. doesn't know how to count so now my subject line sounds perverted.

what they need is load based pricing and display

[freshfromthevat]

ATT should charge more on overcrowded cell-sites and less on lightly loaded cell-sites. Also they should show the consumer what and where they are. This does two things, keeps sales up in areas where sales are low, and shows the users in the areas where insufficient network resources exist, how horrible the vendor is, or something. Oh well.

if they'd be fair,

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be OK with this if the carriers weren't historically predatory.But they'll do it just as they do minutes. $40/month for 50G (say), but if you go over it's $1/MB. That's just not a reasonable model. If they would just charge a reasonable flat rate per GB, and not make it difficult to find out my current balance, that would be great.
      However, we all know they thrive off of the occasional accidental $2000 bill.

Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towers

[way2trivial]

source: http://www.companypay.com/executive/compensation/at-t-inc.asp?yr=2008
Total compensation of the five active execs listed for 2007 $59,359,833.00

Source: http://www.celltowerinfo.com/faq-4.htm
cost to build a tower $100,000 - $300,000
so I'll take 200k as an average

source: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=59359833%2F200000&aq=f&oq=&aqi=
number of towers that builds if they take NO PAY AT ALL- 296.799

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_states_of_america
surface area of the US 3,794,066 sq mi

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_site
range of a cell tower gsm 25miles otherwise 30-45 miles..

lets say 40 miles-- be generous
source http://www.onlineconversion.com/shape_area_circle.htm
area of a circle using 45 as the radius= 6361 miles

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=6361%2F3794066&aq=f&oq=&aqi=
6361 into the size of the USA .00167656546

you've taken away 100% of their compensation, and added 1/10 of one percent of the towers needed to blanket the nation

Deliver what you promise

[Jonathan A]

I'm sick of companies selling services they know they can't deliver and then just hoping that enough customers don't actually use what they paid for. Then they whine about it when it all comes crashing down. "Unlimited" means "Unlimited". If you can't deliver it, then don't sell it. Trying to reap the profits of selling "unlimited" while not paying the costs of delivering "unlimited" is just dishonest. Huh, "dishonest". Now there's a word you hardly ever hear applied to large corporations. /sarcasm. Just for the record, I don't own a smartphone.

What did ATT do with all taxpayer money?

[gemada]

that was given to ATT in th 90's for infrastructure upgrades? oh, right, i forgot. It was used to snort coke off of hookers tits and buy islands for the CEOs.

Re:What did ATT do with all taxpayer money?

[maxume]

How much did they get? According to their 2008 annual report (page 2), they spent $20 billion on construction and capital expenditures in 2008, and $17 billion in 2007:

http://www.att.com/Common/about_us/annual_report/pdfs/2008ATT_Financials.pdf

(They spend less from 2004-2006, but still, a total of $18 billion over those 3 years)

AT&T isn't my hero or anything, but I think the idea that the big consumer networking companies don't invest in infrastructure is pretty wrong.

Hey bucco

[djfuq]

I wish people like you would keep your stupid suggestions to yourself. My iPhone works just fine and I could give 3 shits about its reliability because it is so useful to me - I live in Silicon Valley and sure sometimes there is no bandwidth when in a huge crowd of hipsters but I DONT CARE I like my phone and dont have any trouble accessing services. AT&T needs to upgrade their system - that is all. I Already pay $150 a month for this phone... I dont need an extra teir of pricing... in fact I believe the phone should cost me $80 bucks a month max with unlimited everything. That seems fair - not your suggestion.

Go kick rocks!

Re:Hey bucco

[Anonymous Coward]

So AT&T should charge you less money and give you more stuff? I'd love to get that myself in everything, but it doesn't seem to happen very often.
A tiered plan would work in the sense that it would make user's pay attention to their usage, and I doubt it would increase their revenues much but it would make an impact in the bandwidth usage. I'm not sure AT&T can go back and force existing plan's to change, but they can make future contracts that way. Of course it would make users unhappy and they would have to balance those two against each other.
They are upgrading to 4G in the next few years so I doubt any of the carriers are doing more than the minimum to upgrade their 3G networks.

Re:Hey bucco

[djfuq]

Hmmm well yes actually, or can you not read? Also I am not asking for more of anything. I have a phone that has internet access just like everyone else. I didnt ask for more of anything moran.

In case your still willing to be a devils advocate douche and do your puny little song and dance to contradict me, here is how I see it:

Internet access: usage: 300mb a month (really more like 60mb but I'll be really fucking generous and lie and say I use 300mb.)
Compare to Dial up internet: $20 a month max you can download on dialup a month looking at google maps, quickly checking out something on the net or reading some email? probably 300mb if your willing to wait...
Cable internet: 50 dollars a month: how much do I download a month? probably 100GB+ Do I download that much on my iphone? fuck no!

Phone service: 40 dollars a month for spotty but useful reception -- really do we need to play the minutes game? lots of carriers offer $50 a month unlimited - AT&T is NOT superior - they just have the ambition to charge what they do.
Unlimited text messages? ummmm well that doesnt cost shit when compared to the amount of data that you use if you have a data plan. But I sure as fuck pay a lot for it.. again, am I asking to much here by feeling that AT&T is greedy?

Total I believe is fair for this phone:
$80 a month. Kiss my Irish white ass if you dont agree.

Oh and the guy who came up with the tiered pricing suggestion and you sound like greedy capitalist douchebags. Have fun working for your big corporation you sterile fuckwit

Yey I love chewing out invisible people on the internets when they dont think like me
  lulz

Backward methodolgy

[smooth123]

This does not make sense. If the network cannot handle the load, improve the network would be the right call to make. Making users use the network is thinking backwards. What if the same solution was applied to all enterprise apps. Oh The performance of the app is suffering because too many users are using it at the same time. Lets charge the users who are using it, or ration the app out to different departments based of priority. Whaaaat? If AT&T wants to prove that it is not their network that is the problem, they shoulld let Verizon have a go at the iPhone and see if it crumbles their network too.

Re:Backward methodolgy

[cdrguru]

With the current rate plan, no matter how much they grow the network AT&T gets nothing from it - it just costs money.

There might be an argument if people were running from the iPhone because it was unusably slow and network congestion was preventing phone calls from working. Then you could make the case that for customer retention and new customers is was necessary to spend the money.

Spending money with no hope of increased revenue isn't the way to run a business. It specifically leads to either someone else running it the right way or no business left to run.

JOKE TIEM

[Emesee]

stop whining, and shut up GOT KIDDIES? go ride your bikes.

Re:JOKE TIEM

[Emesee]

that should read, "......GOT IT KIddiesS?"

Re:Good argument to expand iPhone to Other Carrier

[IBBoard]

A company is selling an "unlimited" plan and can't handle unlimited usage? How dare you suggest such a thing. That is blasphemy against Capitalism at its highest. No company would ever stoop to such lengths as offering more than they can handle in the hope that people won't use it. That just wouldn't be proper, even if it did increase profit in the short-term.

Next thing I know you'll be telling me that all of those "unlimited" broadband connections aren't unlimited, and that my $2 per month "unlimited" hosting account won't really let me host unlimited files with unlimited bandwidth!

Let the iPhones have the network

[Grei]

I'm all in favor of the iPhones having AT&T's network. I don't have an iPhone and won't be getting one, and my phone has already been bumped off with 'Network Congestion' way too many times in the past few months.

Since AT&T's taken on the iPhone, there has been no network upgrade/expansion in the area I live. My basic phone service is as tempermental and annoying now as it was 5 years ago when I moved into this place. Even the 'upgrade plan' map that the salesperson gave me the last time I changed up phones is identical to the one I was given 5 years ago--just with the years changed to reflect the passing of the years.

After being with AT&T for over 10 years, I'll be changing to a carrier that does provide service to my home when I need to change phones next. Nothing AT&T can say will change that...they've had their chance these past 5 years.

We're in trouble

[gd23ka]

Some iPhone fans will argue that metered pricing would kill the magic of Apple's phone -- that sense of liberation one feels at being able to access the Internet from anywhere, at any time.

If being able to access the net is freedom then I rest my case for the destruction of the species.

Tragedy of the commons AGAIN

[Normal_Deviate]

How many times must we repeat this lesson? EVERYTHING that is free gets overused, or pissed on. Even air. EVEN AIR. There are no exceptions. NO EXCEPTIONS.

Don't make me say this again.

Re:Tragedy of the commons AGAIN

[mysidia]

It's not free. Customers pay for the service, so they're using it... imagine that? They're already paying overly inflated prices.

How would you feel if your cable provider decided you get to download 100 Megabytes of files per month, and every additional 100 Mb doubles your monthly price?

The iPhone data plan is quite expensive. You pay more for it than you do for land based broadband services, even though land based broadband requires the larger capital outlay.

The real problem is ATT does not invest in their network infrastructure.

Just compare ATT's 3G coverage map to Verizon's, and you'll see what I mean.

Also, compare to Europe, where Tethering is commonplace, and they laugh at the US cell companies' puny networks.

How do you explain this phenomenon, other than greedy US cell companies, practically colluding to keep wireless services artificially scarce, avoid upgrading their network, so they can avoid getting into a price war and actually giving people a good price for decent service?

Re:Tragedy of the commons AGAIN

[agnosticnixie]

If you thing that's what the tragedy of the commons is about, I suggest you read the fucking article because you missed the damn point.

Re:Tragedy of the commons AGAIN

[agnosticnixie]

lol, ironically, the website hosting the link happens to also fail at getting the point.

Re:Tragedy of the commons AGAIN

[Normal_Deviate]

You pay a lot for the first byte. Every subsequent byte is the free commons.

Re:Tragedy of the commons AGAIN

[dangitman]

Where the hell are you getting your free iPhone data plan from?

iPhone lOvers

[mdwh2]

iPhone is just the most visible because

It's the most visible because it's the only one that gets advertised by the media. I mean seriously - I used to joke about daily Iphone stories, but today we have, what, at least three on the front page? Where's the coverage for the big names like Nokia? Of course it's the most visible - but sales figures show a different story. And a good thing too, as I for one don't want the future of mobile computing to be a monopoly like we ended up with Microsoft, but worse one that's locked down to the extent that you can't even release an application without Apple approval.

Personally I'd much rather to see a future that continues with multiple companies (of which Apple can be one), with choice, and most importantly, compatible standards so that I can release an application that Just Works on all phones, without needing me to recompile it especially for each make, or getting corporate approval from the companies. I don't see why this is so controversial - and why Slashdot of all places is supporting the Iphone all the way.

Once upon a time, this was a place to support open and alternative solutions, not to give coverage and free advertising solely to large companies with locked down products!

Note that all phones can run so called "apps". Running applications on phones has been common on all but the most basic phones for at least 5 years, and note that the market of Java smartphones is estimated at two billion.

I'm not a hater. That's just another deceitful trick put out: that if someone uses another phone, disagrees that the Iphone is the best phone ever - or disputes claims that the Iphone is the best selling phone out there - they must be doing so out of an irrational hatred (e.g., the story about Japan hating Iphones).

By all means let's have a sensible debate about which phone is the best, or argue about how many phones are sold by which company. But please, let's have a fair debate, with evidence - rather than resorting to the usual tactic of branding people "haters", or modding people down out of sight simply because you disagree with them, and can't respond to their criticisms.

Re:iPhone lOvers

[Anonymous Coward]

As an owner of an iPhone, I totally agree with you. My reasons for owning an iPhone basically boiled down to the fact that it does most everything I want and better than most other phones. At the time that I got it, there were no other phones that came close to doing what it does and had an application store and hacking community that follows it so well.

Do I like the iPhone? Eh, it's kind of a love hate thing. If it weren't so damn locked in, I would say I adore it, but due to Apple's typical lust for control, I just can't bring myself to say that it's the "best damn phone ever". I was really hoping the Palm pre would take off better than it did, as it might've actually given Apple something to be a little concerned about.

Though it would be very hard for me to switch just because there's such a following behind it. Apple has done very well to make sure that the iPhone, no matter which version, is still THE iPhone. For the most part, what can be done with the 3GS can be done with the 2G, given they use the same hardware components. Obviously a 2G can't do anything that requires a compass, but that doesn't matter too much because it's still an iPhone and still immensely useful to someone on the go.

However, it's usefulness drops completely when the illusion that the internet is always available disappears. If AT&T decides that punishing the iPhone customer for using the one big feature they were touting since day one, then they've lost the battle. It won't happen right away, of course, but people aren't going to forget something as glaring as that and they'll be clamoring for a way out of their contract as soon as possible to go with somebody else that provides the service they're looking for. TMobile would probably make some serious bank if they start taking this news seriously and ramp up their tower base and 3G infrastructure.

Re:iPhone lOvers

[dangitman]

This story isn't about sales figures or visibility, it's about the amount of bandwidth that iPhone users typically use. And that is much higher than for other phones. Did you even bother reading the summary?

Re:iPhone lOvers

[indiechild]

You obviously didn't read the article. Why did you have to weasel your rant into this discussion, when it's not even about Apple or the iPhone? It's about AT&T.

Re:iPhone lOvers

[laird]

"It's the most visible because it's the only one that gets advertised by the media."

No, the iPhone is the subject of this article because people use it very differently from other phones, even other smart phones. So while you are right that most phones can technically run apps, and use data, and browse the web, the reality is that people rarely use their other smart phones to do those things. The result is that in the real world iPhone users consume 10x as much bandwidth (on average) as other smartphone users.

That being said, the iPhone should be viewed not as unique, but as a sign of where the industry is going. That is, if Palm and MS and Google and so on can make smartphones that people use as much as iPhones, then the users of those phones will have a similar network consumption model as iPhone users.

The real issue isn't that iPhone customers use the network. The real issue is that the telco's sell expensive smartphones with expensive data plans to their customers, with web browsing, media downloads, video chat, etc., as features. So if the telcos accept the revenue form selling those products and services, the telco's need to be prepared to for them to use those services. It sure looks like AT&T underestimated usage, and is under capacity. So as usual when ISPs screw up capacity planning they are trying to blame their customers. Hopefully they will end up building out capacity to match demand. This is all very familiar - Comcast went through the same routine last year, first blaming users for using their network too much, then (gradually) rolling out DOCSIS 3.0, with the capacity to satisfy demand.

As a number of telco network engineers have explained the situation, they are forced by competition to offer wireless services to customers at very low prices that don't cover the cost of providing those services. So rather than lose money building the capacity to deliver what they sell, their management has decided to run under-capacity.

Since the iPhone is exclusive to AT&T (in the US) AT&T might be able to run under-capacity without losing too many customers. But as other smartphones become more usable, I believe that the same issue will hit all carriers, at which point competition will force them to increase capacity.

Re:iPhone lOvers

[IHC Navistar]

"Since the iPhone is exclusive to AT&T (in the US) AT&T might be able to run under-capacity without losing too many customers."

-AT&T is already at capacity. Just like the telcos offering "Blazing broadband", AT&T is has oversold itself. If it can't figure out that signing a huge contract with Apple for a product that is going to be locked into it's networks, then it is in for a big reality check. AT&T will become the bastard child of Comcast.

  But as other smartphones become more usable, I believe that the same issue will hit all carriers,"

-The issue is hitting other carriers. Again, AT&T is not understanding the basics: More sales/contracts means more congestion.

".....at which point competition will force them to increase capacity."

-Competition shouldn't be needed to increase capacity, network congestion should. This is the same exact problem that is occurring with ISPs: Too much overselling = too much congestion. Waiting for another carrier to come around that is big enough to seriously threaten your market share isn't a good business strategy. Customer base is not as important as infrastructure when it comes to carriers and the massive user bases that they have. Comcast isn't going to be upgrading its network capacity because they HAVE NO SERIOUS COMPETITION. Their business model legally eliminates competition from critical markets by gaining legal monopolies in cities. Competition is non-existent in markets with legal monopolies so, according to your logic, there will be no need to upgrade. And, shuld there service become so poor that the city refuses to renew a contract with them, they will move on to another city rather than upgrade their network, since signing a contract with another city is cheap compared to an upgrade done just to renew a contract. The new carrier will do just the same as Comcast.

"Waiting for competition to force an upgrade" is what got us into this mess, so it certainly won't get us out of it.

Re:iPhone lOvers

[laird]

"Comcast isn't going to be upgrading its network capacity because they HAVE NO SERIOUS COMPETITION."

This is incorrect. While cable operators don't compete with other cable operators (they almost always have geographical monopolies) they compete vigorously with other ISPs. So if Comcast's network were badly congested their customers could switch to FIOS, or satellite data, DSL, etc.

Compare this to British Telecom, where there isn't any real competition. Their publicly stated goal is to manage their network (using aggressive traffic shaping) so that the network is always saturated.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[AuMatar]

You're ignoring population density- the vast vast majority of iphone users are urban. Blanket those 300ish towers in the op 20 metropolitan areas and your problem is 99% solved.

Better solution.

[lattyware]

Increase capacity. Let's face it, this usage is only going to increase in the future. You can try limiting it now, but that is a short-term solution. Increase capacity and reap the benefits later.

jesus

[Anonymous Coward]

What happened to Slashdot? The comments on this article are barely better than Digg quality. Come on people.

1) The article is talking about *lowering* the prices for people who don't use as much data, and still having it be unlimited once you pass a certain point. This is not a continuously running timer like early-90s AOL that will eventually run your bill to eleventy billion dollars.

2) What's with the stupid "CEO bonus" bullshit? I realize Slashdot is more liberal nowadays and therefore ignorant about economics, but surely we're smarter than that. Put down the Daily Kos and the New York Times, guys.

3) I doubt Apple will ever redesign the iPhone to work with CDMA. It's not just "end the exclusivity contract with AT&T", it's "do that and then completely redesign the phone that is the same everywhere else in the world just because Verizon can't use GSM". Why would Apple pay to do that? Maybe if Verizon helps pay for it, I guess.

Simple answer

[cdrguru]

AT&T should build more network capacity.

Of course, they aren't getting any money for this increased capacity, but it would make lots of existing customers feel better. Happier. Happy customers mean ... well, happy customers, right? That would be a good thing.

Of course, it might mean that AT&T Wireless just pulls the plug because their wireless costs far exceed their revenue. Sad, really sad. Not so happy customers. But it was great while it lasted.

I guess the lesson is that all good things comes to an end. Maybe someone else will come along and provide unlimited wireless pretty much for free. I mean, how much can it really cost, anyway?

Maybe the government should just make sure that everyone has free wireless, you know like the "right to have wireless" or something. It would be really great. Well, maybe not for AT&T, but great for the rest of us.

You wouldn't think that AT&T is driving themselves into the ground by having (a) limited capacity and (b) selling unlimited access would you?

I guess we can all hope for free government-mandated wireless now. Since Bush is gone it could probably get passed.

Re:Simple answer

[PopeRatzo]

The article suggest that AT&T should start a tiered system starting at $10/100MB.

At AT&T nothing starts at $10.

But I agree that the clock is ticking on "unliimited" plans for iPhone users.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[Anonymous Coward]

Your math is totally off.

3,794,066 sq mi / (6361 sq mi / tower) = 596 towers
596 towers * 200,000 $/tower = $119,200,000

So the top five would have to go without pay for two years in order to theoretically blanket the US. Of course, since the coverage of a tower is roughly circular, and circles don't tesselate, you'd actually need a lot more than 600 towers. However, for the pay of the top five execs, you could build about 300 towers.

Verizon, T-Mobile would be happy to help

[Anonymous Coward]

If ATT can't support the users, just ask another service provider to help out. I am sure Verizon would pitch in.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue isn't blanketing the US though, it's providing more bandwidth in the congested areas. More towers need to be added to the big cities and places where there's lots of users (NY, DC, etc.)

A significant portion of the US is totally unpopulated so it wouldn't take that many towers at all. It's not like the iPhone users in Yellowstone are congesting the network!

AT&T already has lots of towers as well, so your math is even further wrong since it assumes that they have no towers and are starting from scratch. No provider is trying to blanket the whole nation, they just want the largely populated areas and cities. That's where the money and the network load is.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[Anonymous Coward]

Critical missing step: Number of cell towers you intend to build (296.799) times the percentage of the USA that one tower covers (0.00167656546) equals the total percentage covered: 0.497660, or approximately 50%. So for all those statistics, your conclusion is just a damn lie.

But they don't charge "the same"

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets see. iPhone data plan is $30/month. The regular 3G unlimited data plan for other phones from AT&T is $15/month (or $10 if you have family text messaging).

So on my 3G Nokia, where I am allowed to do things such as Skype, VoIP, Sling video streaming (in), Qik live video streaming (out), tethering and downloading of large podcasts I am actually charged 3x less than for my spouse's iPhone.

$10 per 100MB proposed in the article is silly. The issue is that AT&T needs to continue improving their network.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Area covered by 1 tower is .00167 of USA, and for yearly exec compensation you could build 300 of them. So they'll cover 0.0016 * 300 -> 0.5, that is half of the USA area.
Not that bad.

cut off the %0.01 user

[farble1670]

my old ISP comcast, while saying nothing overtly, would cut off people that exceeded some very high transfer limit. i think it was 100GB / mo. while i am not sure on the exact limit, the idea is probably a good one ... don't let 0.01% of your users kill the experience of the other 99.99%.

at&t can have something similar. that data plan, while still technically unlimited, can include stipulations in the contract to cut off the 0.01% of users that are streaming CD quality audio 24 hours day. for users that for some reason need that bandwidth, offer a "business" data plan at a higher rate.

the problem is how to "cut off" those people. there'd probably be a lawsuit if the data service was just turned off. if you silently start charging a higher rate, there's going to be the story of the one person who got a $5k phone bill which will scare many users away from at&t+iphone.

Re:cut off the %0.01 user

[PopeRatzo]

don't let 0.01% of your users kill the experience of the other 99.99%.

But that's the American Way!

Re:cut off the %0.01 user

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually a TB/mo. I work with two guys who bump up against the limit regularly.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[Shin-LaC]

Mods, mod this AC up. GP forgot to include the number of towers into the calculation (300); that brings his 0.17% up to about 50%.

Why make things more complex?

[fermion]

The idea of incremental plans is that there is some fixed costs, and then some additional costs as one uses more of the service. As it stands right now, all iPhone users buy a voice plan that covers a fixed number of minutes of calls. I suspect that many are like me and text or email quite a bit, so never use all the minutes. Texting plan, as has been pointed out,are pure profit and on the 3g phone are an additional expense. In addition to these expenses, there is the data plan.

I don't know if iPhone users really cause anything to run slower, or if this is just a myth put out to shift blame. My iPhone runs plenty fast over the cell network. What I do now that iPhones users pay for the bandwidth.

If a change is to made, then it needs to be made simpler. Realize that the iPhone may not be used as a phone, and therefore selling a voice plan as the basis may serve the customer. Or combine voice and data. One MB and one minute are perhaps the same thing. Sell 1000 units at the same cost as the basic package now. Get rid of charging for texting. I bet more people would text and not email if texting were cheaper.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[Florian Weimer]

you've taken away 100% of their compensation, and added 1/10 of one percent of the towers needed to blanket the nation

Data-induced congestion occurs only where there's already coverage, and where smartphone users live. So carpeting the entire nation is not necessary. If that's your goal, your calculation is seriously off anyway because you need to deal with the backhaul issue.

Metered? Not a chance

[Anonymous Coward]

"and that the iPhone should have an indicator like the battery bar that changes color as you pass each monthly tier."

The last thing the phone companies want -- on ANY phone -- is an indicator of how much time you've used and whether you might be about to cross a threshold into a higher cost tier.

I've got a wild idea...

[Daneurysm]

Why not upgrade the infrastructure to support the usage they have been advertising and people have been using?

Simply ridiculous.

"People are using the phone in a manner consistent with how we told them they could use it! Upgrade the network to meet our promises? Wrong. Change the pricing structure. This problem is clearly the consumers fault."

End phone exclusivity

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the real solution here is to end phone exclusivity entirely. At the moment, all AT&T has to do to attract customers is to simply be selling the iPhone. There is no incentive for them to do anything else. If phone exclusivity were to end (I'm talking about ALL phones, not just the iPhone) then carriers would be forced to compete based on their *gasp* service rather than the devices they've paid enormous amounts of money to have exclusive (and of course pass those costs onto us). Of course this is never going to happen but it would be beneficial to everyone involved.

I personally have never had any trouble with AT&T's network though I've heard lots of horror stories in more populous areas like New York City or LA. At the moment I'm still using an original RAZR since no cell phone manufacturer seems to want to make a good smartphone for AT&T seemingly because they'd have to compete with the iPhone.

Re:End phone exclusivity

[Caetel]

In the US, aren't your main choices for GSM AT&T and T-Mobile, with T-Mobile's network footprint being substantially smaller than AT&Ts? And with CDMA, devices can't be easily moved from carrier to carrier?

If so, then how is the lack of phone exclusivity going to solve anything?

AT&T Smart Phones

[Anonymous Coward]

I was just on AT&T's web site and if you bought a smart phone after 6 Sep 09 you now need to purchase a data plan with it. I bought the Blackberry Bold prior to 6 Sep 09 without a data plan simply because I like the phone. If I had to buy a data plan I'd buy an Iphone. Wouldn't most other smart phones users?

Automatic Throttling

[ironicsky]

Back in the old days of dialup my provider offered an unlimited plan. Here is how it worked.

At the start of the month everyone started off with the same traffic priority. For the sake of argument, lets call that number 1.0
As you used more bandwidth your traffic priority dropped proportionately to other users on the system.
Those who used less bandwidth got higher priority when they did decide to use the system. Those who used more got bumped aside on the network.

Why not do this here?

Re:Automatic Throttling

[Anonymous Coward]

It won't work because some of us have an iphone on a company account in order to do email, and VPN in to run remote desktop. Yes, I'd *rather* have a blackberry--but that's not what they'd get me.

Believe me, the moment the service changes, work will cancel the account--and there won't be an early termination fee involved when I tell them AT&T has knowingly degraded the service our sales rep promised.

Just because somebody signed the contract, doesn't mean
    1) it'd make business sense to enforce it when it might cost them every other line at the company
    2) that it is enforceable in court

Now, I've got the benefit of being in a large metropolitan region with competition--but even the average *consumer* in metro regions gets screwed by lousy per-user plans.

I know not everybody has the benefit of running a million a year corporate account with a telco to get actual useful service, and terms that aren't unconscionable. But it's about time people start pooling together. Have an entire neighborhood write a letter to a sales rep--carbon copy AT&T, cricket, tmobile, verizon, and whoever else you want on the same letter--and tell them you and 100 other people are going to purchase the best phone plan and sign a *ONE* year contract. That's enough to get a sales rep interested and get some sort of discount. It also gives you the ability to pool resources. When we have a billing issue, the account rep handles it as long as we're being remotely reasonable (something the companies never are unless you risk their profits seriously). If for some reason we can't get our sales rep that day, I've often gotten great results by making it clear "You have ten minutes to get a supervisor with the power to do what I need, or we're going to cancel fifty lines with you by tomorrow morning."

The only way you're ever going to get noticed by the assholes at these companies is to pool together and twist them by the short hairs. And when you do--the terms suddenly get a LOT better.

I'm almost certain that if you lived in a large apartment complex in Chicago or NYC regions, one building alone would *easily* be sufficient to do it, even if only 1 in 4 people expressed interest.

Re:Automatic Throttling

[seanadams.com]

In fact this is how *nix process scheduling has worked for decades, and it is extremely effective. Why ISPs haven't adopted it is a mystery. Although aggregate throughput isn't improved, the typical customer's satisfaction would be... overwhelmingly so, with the same infrastructure.

Um...

[Anonymous Coward]

So, more people are signing up and generating more traffic. But also, more people signed up implies more revenue. I have this crazy idea, why not use some of the additional revenue to upgrade the network they're running and meet said demand?

I mean, I realize that scarcity allows the provider to charge a premium, but come on. At some point you're just going to end up losing more revenue than you generate via scarcity when customers get fed up and leave.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[Anonymous Coward]

You're ignoring the fact that the dense urban centers are already covered. And no, two cell towers in the same spot don't give you twice the bandwidth.

They're called "cell" towers for a reason...

the author is correct

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't agree more with the main author and I'm glad people are finally saying it. The unlimited data plan IS the root cause, and changing unlimited data plans to tiered data plans DOES solve the root cause.

Now, it's completely true that AT&T is to blame for this. They're offering something (unlimited data) that they can't possibly deliver and hoping no one uses it.

I'd like to take it a step further and see these sorts of preposterous, unsustainable business plans outlawed. Yes, I mean that. The root cause beneath the root cause -- why AT&T offered something it couldn't possibly deliver -- is because many companies have been offering many things in an "unlimited" fashion that they couldn't deliver, either, so AT&T felt it needed to make this ridiculous claim so as not to drive away customers. The practice of offering something you can't deliver and hoping no one uses it has got to end, and it's endemic throughout the tech industry, so won't go away without regulation.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[Joren]

Eh... the 1/10 of 1 percent figure applies only to one tower. Your guesstimate has the number of towers being almost 300. So actually, 0.167656546 % coverage per tower (we're not counting for the inevitable overlap between towers) * 296 towers = 49.6263 % - almost half of the nation. We're also ignoring the already existing towers, of course, but these would be a welcome supplement in any case.

However, suppose we were to assume a 25 mile radius, instead...given that 40/45 seems optimistic, as you noted. 1,963.49541 sq. miles, divided into America's size would give us 1,932.3 towers needed to blanket the nation, at 0.0005% coverage per tower, ignoring overlap and ignoring existing towers. Of which, the executive contribution would cover 15.360% of the nation.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[ThisIsForReal]

As someone who has worked for a city planning agency for many years, I can attest that your tower costs are merely the cost of the material inputs. The cost of putting up a new tower in a residential or commercial area that has already been developed is perhaps 20x that due to the amount of red tape involved and billable hours for attorneys, expert witnesses, and more.

Why AT&T will become the big one

[Sam Garedner]

If only they invest. If they just invest to provide sufficient data streams for their clients, they will have a next generations'network, with the clients, while the competition is still nowhere. You can't milk a cow with your hands in your pants.

Correction

[Joren]

However, suppose we were to assume a 25 mile radius, instead...given that 40/45 seems optimistic, as you noted. 1,963.49541 sq. miles, divided into America's size would give us 1,932.3 towers needed to blanket the nation, at 0.0005% coverage per tower, ignoring overlap and ignoring existing towers. Of which, the executive contribution would cover 15.360% of the nation.

gahhhh it's 0.05% coverage per tower, not 0.0005%. Got mixed up between percent and decimal...these errors are infectious!

Double urban coverage, leave Execs only 16Million

[Saysys]

Actually the square created inside of the circle is what matters, making each tower, at best, able to cover a grid square of 625-4050 square miles.

http://www.demographia.com/db-uland2000.htm
then we have not to cover ALL of the US for some reasonable amount of coverage but, instead, the urbanized land where we actually need the towers: 92,505

At $300,000 (the highest possible cost) a 25mi tower(the lowest possible range) it would cost ATT about 44million to double the coverage in urban portions of the US.

It is important to not that by only paying the top executives at ATT an average of 3.2 million each ATT could double coverage every year.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[Anonymous Coward]

I think your math might be wrong. That "1/10 of of one percent" is the percentage of the US surface area that each tower covers. If you want to know how many towers are needed then it should be the US surface area divided by the area covered by a tower. The calculation would look like this:

3794066/6361 = 596.457475

Almost 600 hundred towers needed. Either your math is wrong or I misunderstood your post.

Ridiculous

[JustNiz]

As a Brit now living in the USA, it continually amazes me how Americans 'understand' or even even agree with corporations consistently crappy service (20 minutes on hold anyone?) even when they aren't getting what they clearly paid for up front.

Yet more costs to customers? No! The blame lies with AT&T. The proper solution is for AT&T to spend some of their massive profits gained from iPhone sales and contracts on better infrastructure and provide what they already promised as a part of the contract.

Re:Ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a certain segment of Americans, highly concentrated on Slashdot, who love nothing more than to suck corporate dick, even (especially?) when it's of no direct benefit to themselves.

I don't think it's uniquely American, but it certainly is more popular there. It takes a special kind of derangement to justify everything from human rights abuses to crummy service in the name of increased profits, which are the one and only goal worth considering.

Re:Ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Brit now living in the USA, it continually amazes me how Americans 'understand' or even even agree with corporations consistently crappy service (20 minutes on hold anyone?) even when they aren't getting what they clearly paid for up front.

What the fuck are you smoking? I'm not ever on hold more than a couple minutes and even that is rare. More than five minutes, and the company is likely to have lost my money. Note, they lose my money not my business per se. I take it back and it is rare indeed for any company to stop this from occurring. What amazes me is what an asshole you are thinking you've learnt something about "Americans". You don't shit.

Re:Unlimited data is necessary for REAL smartphone

[Achromatic1978]

That /would/ be the Apple way, just like OS X on laptop. "Latch on opportunistically to any Wifi network in range, regardless of any authorization to be using it or not". Sounds like a plan - instead of you and AT&T figuring out a solution to the "problem", the rest of us can just subsidize it for you. Yay us!

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[Anonymous Coward]

You did your math wrong. First you say that money will build 300 towers and then you calculate the coverage area of 1 tower but fail to multiply that coverage area by 300 to get the TOTAL coverage area of all 300 towers.

When you do it correctly it comes out to 1,908,300 sq miles of coverage or roughly half the surface area of the US (3,794,066 sq mi). Soooo yeah I'd say that would improve things quite a bit.

The best/fairest solution to allocate bandwidth:

[Michael G. Kaplan]

The concept of "unlimited" plans is obviously a fiction, but there are problems presented by selling customers a fixed monthly data allotment because people who download at off peak hours will unfairly pay as much as someone who downloads during peak hours, and regardless of the time of day someone who downloads from a cell site with a huge excess of capacity will be penalized just as much as someone who downloads from a cell site that is breaking under overwhelming demand.

The best solution is for the cell phone companies to sell customers 'shares' of bandwidth. It would work something like this:

With your cell phone plan you own one 'share' of bandwidth and you are allowed to download 10 Gb/month of peak demand data. You have an unlimited monthly allotment of non-peak data that you can download.

Say that the cell phone company defines 'peak' data usage as anytime an individual customer for an individual cell site is unable to download at a rate of at least one Mbps.

Now say a given cell site has a capacity of 10 Mbps. If two different customers are accessing this site simultaneously (each has one share) then each one will be able to download at a rate of 5 Mbps. This cell site obviously has a lot of excess capacity - neither of these two users will have eaten into their 10 Gb/month data allotment.

Now say that the same cell site has twenty users - each user's share will come out to 0.5 Mbps of bandwidth. The data that is being downloaded will be deducted from their 10 Gb/month allowance because the available bandwidth per share is now less than one Mbps.

What happens when a user exceeds their monthly allotment? They get throttled down to... well let's say 0.5 shares. Now when they download they will only get 0.25 Mbps at the same time that other users are getting 0.5 Mbps from the same site.

Users who want more capacity can purchase more shares from the wireless provider.

The cell sites should give real-time feedback to the smartphones when the cell site is operating at peak capacity and deducting from their 10 Gb/month limit.

The FCC will need to put out some rules to prevent the usual predictable abusive wireless provider behavior. We don't want AT&T to suddenly charge you one dollar per Mb that you use in excess of the 10 Gb/month limit. In my view it is criminal when companies generate revenue via 'gotchas' instead of honest practices.

*Non-discriminatory* unit pricing is desirable

[rmcd]

We pay by the unit for almost every thing, I've never understood why people think bandwidth should be different. It's a scarce resource, particularly at certain times of day. We pay more for heating fuels in the winter, we pay by the unit and by time of day for electricity, why not bandwidth?

The problem is that when companies like AT&T engage in tiered pricing, they typically try to price-discriminate, i.e., they charge more per unit to those who value the service more highly. This is why we get ridiculous charges for text messages and using data in Canada gets you hit with absurd prices per megabyte. This obnoxious behavior is why everyone reflexively tenses up when tiered pricing is raised. But it doesn't have to be like that. The price could be very low, and could vary by time of day, but could scale without limit. And if it were really a fair price, I think folks would be okay with that. And if we're going to have per unit pricing, the software should permit easy overnight downloads at a reduced rate (just like running your dishwasher at 3am to get a reduced electricity rate).

However

400 MB? Really?

[iCEBaLM]

I've had an iphone 3G since launch, I stream radio every day, I browse, have push exchange email, use a ton of data apps, even used PC tethering in a pinch, and I have never gone over 300MB/mo. I have a 6 GB/mo plan, so there's no reason for me to skimp. I just simply cannot break 300MB/mo no matter how much I use it.

How in the hell is everyone else going over 400MB/mo?

Did ATT have a choice? I thought Apple dictated..

[WoTG]

I thought Apple dictated unlimited data plans (and visual voicemail) in exchange for the exclusivity agreement with AT&T?

In Canada, it took over a year for Apple and Rogers to agree to terms. The rumored sticking point was again, the data plan. When the iPhone came here, the data plan was a fraction of the cost of existing data plans - even though, it's not unlimited.

Do I understand this correctly?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's ok and recommended for AT&T to limit bandwidth but when comcast\time warner, etc want to then it's bad?

Must be tough to have it both ways. AT&T can stop their whining, stop spending 100s of millions of dollars on surveillance and spend it on the infrastructure for a change.

This is why I won't own an I-Phone AT&T sucks. Putting a wig on a beast doesn't make it any more attractive.

Re:Why AT+T should stop whining like a spoilt brat

[knappe duivel]

Oh great, /. doesn't know how to count so now my subject line sounds perverted.

stop whining like a spoilt bra

Pay for what you use?? Heresy!!

[fastbiker]

The rate at which demand is increasing will far outpace any attempt at building infrastructure to keep up. It's that simple.
A simple solution is to rely on old fashioned supply and demand. Demand is huge and the supply is limited. Use all you want, you just have to pony up for it. It's fair for everybody. Maybe ATT could lower the price for customers who don't use a ton of bandwidth.
I'm not an advocate of the capitalism-can-solve-everything view but in this case it seems straight forward.

Why is tiered pricing evil?

[Arkem Beta]

I don't understand why everyone is against metered data costs whether it be on phones or one their home connections. Electricity and other utilities are metered by use and it doesn't seem to provoke the outrage that metering of data connections does. Adding metered data usage could make the iPhone data plan cheaper for light users. The concept of metered usage is not inherently any less fair than unlimited usage plans, it all depends on what price structure they propose. If unlimited data is $30 but 1Gb/month is $15 then the average iPhone user is saving money, on the other hand if instead the pricing was $1/Mb obviously the users would be losing. It's clearly too early to be worried, why don't you wait and see what happens? Why shouldn't the people who use a little data on their iPhone pay less than the people who use a lot?

Re:Why is tiered pricing evil?

[JSBiff]

"If unlimited data is $30 but 1Gb/month is $15 then the average iPhone user is saving money, on the other hand if instead the pricing was $1/Mb obviously the users would be losing."

I see both sides of this. You're right that if the metered usage is *reasonably* priced, then it's usually a pretty good deal. Right now, I'm doing pay-as-you-go "metered" wireless from T-Mobile for my phone (it's only voice, btw, no data). Before discussing the T-Mobile pricing, let me mention that before that, I was on a month-to-month plan with Verizon. I was paying $45/mo (the price was nominally $40/mo, but there were various bs fees, plus if you used 411 they charged you like $1.75 or $2.00 - something outrageous (thank goodness for 1-800-goog-411). That package gave me 300 'anytime' minutes, plus the normal 'unlimited nights after 9pm, and weekends'.

Thing is, my usage is not 'normalized'. That is, I don't make the same amount of calls every day/week/month, or talk the same amount of time every call. So, one month I might use 100 minutes, and the next month closer to the 300. One month I went 100 minutes over - 400 minutes instead of 300. That month, my cell phone bill ended up being something like $120 instead of the normal $40 (the extra minutes after 300 were billed at something like 45c/minute).

With the T-mobile pay-as-you-go, if I buy $100 of credit on the phone, I get 1000 minutes (or 10c/minute). The minutes last for a year (but only when you buy at least one $100 credit per year; otherwise they will typically expire after a month or three months, depending on how much you bought) Now, if I was going to talk 1000 minutes or more, every month, I'd maybe do better with an all-you-can-eat plan. So, that is one lonely example of a relatively *good deal* with metered payment. I never pay outrageous overage fees when I talk more than 300 minutes a month, I don't 'waste' minutes months I talk less, and I'm paying a relatively affordable rate for phone service (in my case, with the pay as you go, I'm paying an average of about $30/mo).

BUT, here's the important point here - T-Mo not withstanding, the mobile phone industry has a horrible track record with most 'tiered pricing' schemes. For the most part, with the mobile carriers, customers who wish to talk less minutes per month get charged *a lot more per minute* than customers who are in the higher tiers (I mean, you expect there to be *some* price difference, but sometimes the difference is astounding). Applied to data, I'm afraid the mobile industry really tends to screw their customers.

Check out this ATT page for laptop-dongle 3G data plans.

Notice how for a 50% increase in monthly cost, they give you an allocation that is approx twenty five times more data (200MB vs 5 GB, at $40/mo vs $60/mo). About a year ago, when I checked that page, they used to have one *lower* tier which was like $30/mo for 20MB or something. My point is, that the mobile industry likes to force people to spend more by making the 'lower' cost packages so ridiculously overpriced on a per-unit cost basis, that it's impractical. I mean, it would be *very easy* to go over your 200MB/mo allotment on your data plan. So, let's say you accidentally use 400MB one month (maybe some program is using your bandwidth and you don't realize). At $10/100MB, that means you payed $60 that month - the same price as the person who gets 5GB, but you only used 400MB. God forbid you use a Gigabyte one month, and end up paying $40 + (about)$80 = (about) $120 for the 1000MB.

To most of us, when you talk about metered pricing with telecoms companies, that's what we think of - getting slammed with unexpected phone bills that are God-aweful overcharges.

People "like" the monthly plans because, even though they are expensive, EVERY MONTH, it means that they are not likely to get any month that is 2-3 times larger than a normal month's bill. They can basically fix, budget for, and know what they will be paying.

Re:Why is tiered pricing evil?

[keithpreston]

No one knows what is really going on, after working for a company that sold AT&T a phone, you figure out all AT&T is trying to do is increase revenue per subscriber. The mobile phone has become a necessity for most people and there isn't much competition. Although unlimited makes the network suck, it also makes them $30 a person. If they did tiers most people would try and fit in the lowest tier, this is why they don't offer, or cripple the lowest tier. I find it very sad that in 7 years since I got my first mobile phone, I can not get a plan with comparable features as cheap as I first did ($30 a month). With unlimited although the overall experience sucks, the people getting the worst of it are the people that use the most. This is the kind of experience AT&T doesn't care about because them dropping wouldn't be a problem since they are a high bandwidth user. This has become the norm for a lot of industries (Cable, internet). Make as much money per subscriber as you can, and optimize the user experience for those you are making the most money off of.

WCDMA issues

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in a small city just big enough to be taken seriously by major carriers. Recently took a little trip to the big apple downtown manhatten - times square..etc. Expecting AT&T 3G data to be better in a larger city (Have no compliants where I live) I was amazed that in many areas as I walked around data was soo slow as to be practically unusable with a 3G signal. On the bright side voice and text always worked fine.

There just needs to be more towers in dense areas and likely further improvements to underlying technology -- wider wideband, steering, algorithms..etc.

Calling for data caps could have an effect short-term but is not a long term solution. There needs to be pressure kept on carriers to provide capacity to meet demand. Increasing available capacity via decreasing demand by increasing cost is a step in the wrong direction.

Capping bandwidth slows the acquisition of more bandwidth as there is reduced business and operational pressure to acquire more. More available bandwidth drives costs down while improving capacity.

In summary its all about economies of scale and pushing technology.

The industry has ample money to do both. Consumers should demand nothing less.

How does this help?

[hydromike2]

Okay, so you charge the heavy iphone users more than they are being charged now, and piss them off, charge the light iphone users less(im guessing the severe minority), or if there are equals numbers of both then maybe the loss from the light users will be balanced out by the increased revenue from the heavy users. But the thing is that ATT wont make anymore money unless most users are heavy users and if not then they will lose money. Also it seemed to me that the author thought that a change in pricing would magically make all iphone work faster. The only thing tiered pricing would do is make more work on ATT's part, because in all likelihood even with tiered pricing the heavy users will still use the same amount of data, or if they get pissed off enough they leave ATT, and the light users may start using it more because they are paying less, so in summary tiered pricing is more trouble than its worth for ATT.

Per-byte billing

[Tweenk]

The only good solution to the problem of network billing is per-byte (or per-kilobyte) billing with a reasonable rate, and maybe a small monthly 'connectivity fee'. Any other solution is unfair to customers, and sets up a wrong reward structure for the company. With unlimited plans, the company is rewarded for having less available bandwidth, because the revenue per customer stays the same while costs are roughly proportional to available bandwidth. With metered plans, the amount of money that can be made is proportional to available bandwidth, so it is in the interest of the company to invest in infrastructure.

Unfortunately this is also the solution that doesn't have any loopholes to not provide the service that was paid for, which is what US telecoms want.

I don't really know why people want unlimited plans. A metered plan with a reasonable rate can be much cheaper, and does not bring the risk of being disconnected, because the more bandwidth you use the more incentive the company has to keep you aboard.

Re:Per-byte billing

[arbiter1]

yea right their is no reasonable rate, they charge 3cents per kilobyte and to put that in terms. Last time i checked cnn.com just to load the site would cost ya 21$

Re:Per-byte billing

[keithpreston]

You have it totally wrong, the best solution for the cell phone company is only if this solutions nets them over $30 a month per subscriber which it won't. The make everyone pay a ton and the make sure that the experience sucks for the highest bandwidth users. If they get fed up then the drop and AT&T is better off without them. They figured this out a long time ago. Get the light users to overpay in exchange of easy billing, try and make the heavy users drop because of a poor experience. You can't expect them to do anything else. Cell phone companies a while ago found out that when they compete on price everyone loses (see about 5 years ago), and now just try and increase revenue per subscriber.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[Deanalator]

Why should building a tower cost as much as a house? Even 100k seems way inflated for a pole with some repeaters on it.

It's really NOT even about the 3G network anyway!

[King_TJ]

What so many people seem to be completely ignoring is the fact that AT&T is focused on the NEXT generation of networks... the "4G" if you will.

I attended an AT&T sponsored "lunch and learn" session on "The future of wireless", several months back. (I got a free invite from our AT&T business sales rep. at my work. It included a free lunch at a nice hotel, and it's not often AT&T gives you ANYTHING free, so I figured "What the heck?" and went.)

They made it abundantly clear at this session that AT&T sees "smartphones" as the future of their business. The speaker even made a point of emphasizing that they feel the idea of a "telephone" is outdated. The future they see is everyone carrying around pocket computers, essentially, which do happen to allow making/taking voice calls, but will be used just as much, if not more, for data-related purposes.

They went on to say that they were pretty much getting behind the iPhone as *the* premiere device for this future, with the Blackberry being supported strongly as well, as the "alternate". They felt that a large display screen was an essential component to making all of this work, and right now, the iPhone is the only "smartphone" in widespread use with a big enough screen. The Blackberry, by contrast, they felt was a big player for other reasons. (Some people prefer having a real keyboard, if they're going to do a lot of data entry from their device, and the Blackberry has obvious advantages right now from corporate standpoints, where secure communications takes precedence over all else.)

AT&T has some interest in expanding into selling software and services related to all of this. (They mentioned a partnership, for example, with a company that makes development software that allows someone to code an app once, and have it support many different smartphone devices, without the developer having to concern him/herself with details of the screen resolutions and input limitations of each specific device. They also wanted to move into the space of selling tools to companies, to enable the remote use of their internal databases from mobile devices.)

Although it was more implied than stated, I came away with a pretty strong "hint" that AT&T really doesn't want to spend TOO much on improving their admittedly sub-standard 3G data network, because they feel the future is with migrating people to the next generation of data networks instead. They have goals of rolling it out by some time in 2011, at least for trial use and testing. If they make any moves like eliminating "unlimited" plans for iPhones to get more revenue, you can bet the extra profits WON'T improve your 3G performance. They'd simply funnel that into future R&D and rolling out of the new network (which won't even be compatible with the current crop of iPhones anyway). Any improvements you'd see would ONLY be from people leaving AT&T for other networks, or people reducing their usage of their iPhones to try to save money.

Oh, and for what it's worth, another "key point" they made (in response to a question from someone in attendance) was that AT&T still feels the "bread and butter" of the Internet should/will reside on land based connections. At the end of the day, they don't think much of the idea of everything "going wireless" to the point where T1 circuits and such cease to exist. They view the "wireless cellular network" as never being more than a "bridge" back to a wired network someplace nearby. (I happen to largely agree with them here, and think that's probably "common sense". Yet others would say that just reflects AT&T's long-standing mentality and interest in copper wires and land-lines ... and that they're incapable of "thinking far enough outside the box". Some might envision high-speed wireless comprised of everything from satellite to wi-fi repeaters placed all over as a future that would take the whole Internet into the wireless realm....)

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[misexistentialist]

And you are ignoring the vast numbers of pirates who need coverage in the middle of the Pacific, matey.

News flash: NYC and SF are congested

[clyde_cadiddlehopper]

I suspect I am not the only happy ATT subscriber / iPhone user. Few, if any dropped calls. 3G where I need it, EDGE in the exurbs / boonies. Simple, reliable, easy.

Granted I live in the Minneapolis area, not Silicon Valley or midtown Manhattan. But overbuilt cities with inadequate infrastructure have many congestion issues, why should this be any different?

Not again

[Anonymous Coward]

Another idiotic post from Farhad. One among many. Anything for page views I guess. Obviously what needs to happen is AT&T needs to invest in more infrastrcture with their iPhone profits.

Re:Pay for what you use?? Heresy!!

[xannik]

Yes this may force people who can't pay off the network and solve the congestion problem for those who can, but I don't think anyone wants that, except for maybe ATT, so they can improve their profits. A much better solution is to invest in infrastructure and keep the pressure up on the FCC to release more spectrum for mobile devices. In the short term, service will suffer, but for consumers it will be the best long term solution. Innovation is the solution, not pricing people out of the market.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[mosherkl]

Have you EVER done anything related to cell site design? 40 mile RADIUS? That wiki states the LIMIT as 25 miles for GSM. In case you've never driving along a highway, there are towers a lot closer than every 50 miles. Wonder what the reason for that is? Oh, maybe it's because the radius of each cell site ISN'T 25 miles.

Let's try this. The signal being transmitted by the cell site, regardless of carrier or technology, travels at a certain frequency. When this signal hits any obstruction (yes, even air counts) it gets degraded and weakened by a certain amount. Buildings, trees, and ground are the main sources of signal degregation. If your tower is in a valley, you ain't getting signal from that tower on the other side of the mountain. The sad reality is that almost every tower is too low (either the height of the tower or it's ground elevation) to provide a 25 mile radius of coverage. Some mountain towers or towers along large bodies of water (Great Lakes for example) can get substantial line-of-site distances where calls can be made at 25 miles or more. So to assume that you can build towers to cover 6000+ square miles is absurd. Do the calculation assuming a radius of about 2 miles (most towers on highways in New England are spaced about 2-4 miles apart) and see how many towers you need to blanket the US. You could even go with a radius of 5 miles, because your towers in the Great Plains and other flat areas will get much greater radius of coverage and mountainous regious would have much smaller radius towers.

Either way, you can't have a valid calculation with an asinine assumption like each tower can cover 25 (or 40) miles in every direction. Nice try, though.

Sprint has high prices!?

[isThisNameAvailable]

Sprint has the Pre and Hero and it's damn near impossible to spend more than $70/mo. That gets you unlimited mobile calls, data, text, gps, tv. The only way to spend more is if you spend more than 450 minutes a month calling landlines before 7pm. AT&T's base iPhone plan is $70 with no texts, favorite numbers, or gps, and the free nights start at 9pm.

Re:Sprint has high prices!?

[LurkerXXX]

Don't forget Sprint includes turn-by-turn navigation and some other nice things for that price that other carriers charge extra for, or require a paid app for.

Re:Sprint has high prices!?

[Swift2001]

So, who wants the phone? I'm getting MLB videos of the playoffs just after the homer happened. I'm playing a game. I'm watching the latest episode of Mad Men while waiting for my friend to get out of emergency. I'm sending e-mail. I have NEVER spent an extra dime for the phone time. I have always kept a 3,000 minute bank of rollover minutes. I did throw in $5 for some texting. But I'm over 25. Nobody I know texts.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to multiply covered area (6361) by number of towers (296). Thus it is more close to 50% (6361*296/3794066) including deserts and mountains.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[sjames]

You left out the retired execs who are still drawing a more than substantial compensation. Edward E. Whitacre, Jr alone got 78 million in one year.

Presumably they would build less in death valley, rural Alaska, etc. vast areas of the country have a population near zero and so aren't straining anything with massive data transfer.

Presumably they could start with the much smaller urban areas that are actually being overloaded. Note that the compensation is annual, so it would contribute year after year.

Don't forget to add in the billions in grants from Uncle Sam.

Re:Good argument to expand iPhone to Other Carrier

[rcolbert]

Good Lord man! Next thing, they'll start doing the same with hotel rooms and seats on planes. What's the world coming to?

It isn't hard

[maxume]

In the terms, write "If you exceed SOME_NUMBER of transfer, your connection will be restricted for SOME_PERIOD."

That's all it takes, tell people up front that mega-consumers will be limited and given that caveat, they can decide if the service is fairly priced.

What I find astonishing...

[AliasMarlowe]

...is that 400MB per month is considered "heavy". We occasionally exceed 400GB on the wired connection at home, without running torrents/worms/bots/etc.

Are the wireless networks really so wimpy, or has the bandwidth just been massively oversold? OK, maybe it's both, and illustrates that wireless is not ready for prime time, as was mentioned here recently (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/10/08/2243242/FCC-Chairman-Warns-of-Wireless-Spectrum-Gap).

Re:What I find astonishing...

[NoobixCube]

I find it amazing that, in a system without data usage limits, 400MB is considered heavy. I work in an Optus shop in Australia, and we sell several different iPhone contracts, the highest of which comes with 2GB of data, and you can pin on another 1GB as an extra cost; I have seen people come into the shop to pay bills where they have exceeded the 3GB, month after month. I know this is just anecdotal, but it would suggest that usage limits encourage people to use all of what they pay for, and then some. Imposing limits on a previously limitless system, apart from angering customers, may actually increase traffic.

Re:What I find astonishing...

[grahamsz]

I think that's absolutely true. If my ISP set a 100GB/month limit, then i'd make damn sure i used that each month. I'd probably finally get my crap together and find an online backups service and start streaming my 400 gigs of digital photos to somewhere else.

I suspect home users are quite similar, i'm sure plenty of cable internet users use less than 5 gigs a month. If they were to see a bill that showed them that they used 5% of their available capacity that month, they'd probably consider downgrading.

Re:What I find astonishing...

[Mr2001]

We occasionally exceed 400GB on the wired connection at home, without running torrents/worms/bots/etc.

Wow. What are you running to suck up so much bandwidth? I get all my TV from torrents, but I still barely push 75 GB (upload + download combined) in a typical month. My heaviest month ever was only about 120 GB.

Re:What I find astonishing...

[MegaThawt]

> ... people come into the shop to pay bills where they have exceeded the 3GB, month after month. and what I find astonishing is that people who consume over 3GB/month of iPhone data take the time and effort to pay their bills in person.

Re:What I find astonishing...

[StringBlade]

While it's tempting to think that one only uses some small percentage X of their monthly (theoretic) capacity, the concept of downgrading to save money would almost certainly be met with disappointment.

Unless you're paying by the MB (which is something of the antithesis of these comments) then you're paying by bandwidth (i.e. speed). Let's say you pay for 20 Mbps download but only use your computer 5 days out of the month for 2 hours each day. It seems like you're not using your connection to its full capacity and you're wasting your money so you decide to downgrade to 5 Mbps. (I'm assuming here we aren't talking about data limits.)

The user experience at 5 Mbps will be significantly different than that of one at 20 Mbps especially for certain activities such as watching streaming HDTV.

The fact that you don't use your connection frequently is immaterial to what you are paying for. You are paying for a fast connection when you use the Internet regardless of how frequently that is. So downgrading to save money only works if you're talking strictly about data usage and not access speed.

Unfortunately, many cable companies and ISPs inseparably merge the twto - data limit and speed - with higher speeds equating to higher limits (if they are imposed). If people could choose their connection speed separate from their data cap, and if standard data caps were reasonable for the time (meaning they increase as the average use increases), and if overage fees were reasonably priced (for example, charging an extra $1 for every 10GB over the cap or charging a pro-rated rate for the time spent in the "next data tier"), then we might have a chance at acceptable data and speed tiers.

Sadly this is probably too complex for Joe the Plumber and certainly more than the ISPs want to deal with so I don't expect to see anything like it any time soon.

Re:What I find astonishing...

[AliasMarlowe]

We occasionally exceed 400GB on the wired connection at home, without running torrents/worms/bots/etc.

Wow. What are you running to suck up so much bandwidth?

Running a family, actually - two adults and some kids, all with their own PCs, plus a server for the home LAN. Streaming music, streaming video, browsing sites with multi-megabyte pages, downloading a few ISOs to try a different distro. It adds up. All our nodes run linux, and I have not set up any proxy for updates (why bother?), so that's a multiplier on the regular updates & sporadic upgrades. Sometimes we have our work PCs at home also for teleconferencing, which also boosts usage.
Most months we're around the 100GB mark, which would be less than one third of a percent of the potential throughput. Our connection is 100/10 Mbps without capacity limits, so the theoretical capacity is about 30 TB per month.

Re:What I find astonishing...

[Macgrrl]

What I find astonishing is that people can get a stable enough connection to use 3GB of data on the Optus network. I work in the CBD of Melbourne and it's a 50/50 proposition whether I can get a 3G connection on my iPhone.

Re:What I find astonishing...

[NoobixCube]

Reception is generally quite good in Mackay, not so much when you get further out; particularly at the mine sites.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[Anonymous Coward]

you've taken away 100% of their compensation, and added 1/10 of one percent of the towers needed to blanket the nation

So, it's a win-win scenario.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe your math is off. Although you calculated that ~300 towers could be built, you never used this number later on when calculating the national coverage. Using your numbers, this should be the correct result:

(300 towers) * (6361 mi^2/tower) / (3794066 mi^2/USA) = 0.503 USA

Thats 50% coverage of the USA if you take away 100% of their compensation.

I'm about 175 MB per month

[bigtallmofo]

Since 9/15/2008:

Sent: 226 MB
Received: 2.1 GB

I'm usually on WiFi when I'm at home which is probably where I do most of my usage. The people that are on 400 MB per month probably don't have WiFi where they use it most often.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[shmlco]

So I only need smartphone coverage where the majority of smartphones reside?

In that case, I guess AT&T's 3G coverage map doesn't look that bad after all... (grin)

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[Anonymous Coward]

So put in a tower and do what with it? You also need to add quite a bit of backbone to actually accomplish anything. Limited field of vision is why you're not a top 5 paid exec.

All wireless carriers need to get a grip...

[crunchly]

...on the future. This future is the fully connected device, whether it be a smartphone, netbook or something completely different. Now I'm not saying that all data will live in the cloud like many vendors do, but enough will that an always connected device will pretty much be a requirement. And these carriers are all very quick to sell high end packages and lock customers into long term contracts. They also want to partner with manufacturers and offer devices and services to sell even larger packages. Unfortunately, I think they are unable to understand data use trends and still think of mobile devices as having the functionality of the cell phones of the 90's.

Now I understand that AT&T may not have been able to guess at the popularity of the iPhone and how it would be used when they signed the original contract with Apple, but if I was a wireless carrier, I'd much rather have the problem of too much usage on my network than not enough (think Sprint).

My advice to AT&T: Get to work! And remember that if you are going to build out your network, don't build it for tomorrow, build it for the next decade.

back to the future?

[Venik]

If repairing the roof in my house gets too expensive, I just might follow your line of reasoning and move back into a cave.

A better solution - Apple needs to open it up

[93 Escort Wagon]

Seriously, if the iPhone is causing so many problems with AT&Ts congested network - Apple needs to start offering it through T-Mobile, Verizon, etc. Share the network pain, er, load.

Of course I know a lot of iPhone users will then jump ship from AT&T - but the overall iPhone experience will improve (well, I won't assume that for Verizon customers, given what that company does to its phones' functionality), and I'd think that'd be Apple's primary goal. Plus the remaining AT&T iPhone customers will have a better experience.

Re:A better solution - Apple needs to open it up

[aristotle-dude]

Seriously, if the iPhone is causing so many problems with AT&Ts congested network - Apple needs to start offering it through T-Mobile, Verizon, etc. Share the network pain, er, load.

Of course I know a lot of iPhone users will then jump ship from AT&T - but the overall iPhone experience will improve (well, I won't assume that for Verizon customers, given what that company does to its phones' functionality), and I'd think that'd be Apple's primary goal. Plus the remaining AT&T iPhone customers will have a better experience.

I'm probably going to get modded down for this but you are a fucking moron. This is not simply an issue of a congested network but a problem of user behaviour and expectations. Placing some users on the shitty CDMA verizon network would just cause the Verizon network experience to suffer. Verizon continues to offer "unlimited" data because they know that none of their phones are useful enough to ever push their network to the limit.

Up here in Canada, we have some congested areas in cities like Vancouver and Toronto but the Fido/Rogers network continues to hum along because nobody has an unlimited data plan on any of the "real" smart phones like the iPhone. There are "unlimited" surfing plans for dumb phones or semi-smart phones but all smart phones like the iPhone and blackberries are on capped plans. I'm currently paying 30 CAD for 6 GB of bandwidth which I consider to be a better value than unlimited access to a network that is slow or unavailable.

Some of you might be tempted to feel sorry for me but I have a fast network on my iPhone that is typically around 2Mbits/sec down. I also have had tethering and MMS since 3.0 came out. Even with tethering a bit, I have never gone beyond 2GB of transfer in a month. Most months have been under 300MB.

AT&T should have launched with 6GB cap plans from the very beginning and explained to users that in exchange for a capped plan, they would be getting unrestricted access to the network including VOIP access. That would have been the sensible thing to do.

Re:A better solution - Apple needs to open it up

[Mr2001]

Placing some users on the shitty CDMA verizon network would just cause the Verizon network experience to suffer.

Your apparent anti-CDMA bias notwithstanding, Verizon's network is actually pretty high quality. CDMA makes very efficient use of spectrum (which is why other carriers' 3G networks are also based on CDMA technology), and Verizon has been making the infrastructure investments that AT&T seems to have forgotten about.

Verizon continues to offer "unlimited" data because they know that none of their phones are useful enough to ever push their network to the limit.

Er.. they've been offering Blackberries and laptop cards for ages now, and they'll be offering Android within a few months.

Re:A better solution - Apple needs to open it up

[aristotle-dude]

Placing some users on the shitty CDMA verizon network would just cause the Verizon network experience to suffer.

Your apparent anti-CDMA bias notwithstanding, Verizon's network is actually pretty high quality. CDMA makes very efficient use of spectrum (which is why other carriers' 3G networks are also based on CDMA technology), and Verizon has been making the infrastructure investments that AT&T seems to have forgotten about.

Up here in Canada, we had two CDMA wireless providers (Telus and Bell) and both of them are switching over to a 3G GSM standard called HSPA starting next month (November) and plan on offering the iPhone on their new network. CDMA providers such as Bell, Telus and Verizon have typically demanded features such as WiFi be disabled on their blackberry devices and have tried to insist on having their "apps" and "app stores" on the devices they offer. CDMA devices also typically do not work outside of North America. Yes, there are a lot of reasons to hate CDMA technology. People don't like having the provider "brand" shoved down their throats and being forced to pay 3 bucks a ringtone.

Verizon continues to offer "unlimited" data because they know that none of their phones are useful enough to ever push their network to the limit.

Er.. they've been offering Blackberries and laptop cards for ages now, and they'll be offering Android within a few months.

Yes, and if you check out the plans the offer, Verizon charges 60 USD per month for 5GB of data. I think you proved my point that Verizon only offers "unlimited" data on phones which are locked down and limited in their functionality.

Here is a link for those who don't believe me: http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/mobilebroadband/?page=plans

So tell us, what is so damn interesting about Verizon? They charge double of what AT&T charges for the iPhone data service and it is capped to 5GB per month.

Re:A better solution - Apple needs to open it up

[93 Escort Wagon]

I'm probably going to get modded down for this but you are a fucking moron.

Quite a demonstration of interpersonal skills there, chief.

Some of you might be tempted to feel sorry for me...

I do, quite frankly, but not for the reasons you listed.

Re:A better solution - Apple needs to open it up

[Mr2001]

Up here in Canada, we had two CDMA wireless providers (Telus and Bell) and both of them are switching over to a 3G GSM standard called HSPA starting next month (November) and plan on offering the iPhone on their new network.

HSPA is based on the same principles as CDMA (whereas GSM is a TDMA system). The CDMA technology is fine.

CDMA devices also typically do not work outside of North America.

And Asia, but fair enough.

Yes, there are a lot of reasons to hate CDMA technology.

If so, you haven't mentioned any of them.

People don't like having the provider "brand" shoved down their throats and being forced to pay 3 bucks a ringtone.

Of course not, and that's one thing that sucks about Verizon and the Canadian CDMA providers. (Although I was a Verizon customer for years and never paid for any of my custom ringtones. All you need is a data cable and some free software.)

But that's a complaint about the carriers' policies, not the technology.

Yes, and if you check out the plans the offer, Verizon charges 60 USD per month for 5GB of data. I think you proved my point that Verizon only offers "unlimited" data on phones which are locked down and limited in their functionality.

Nope - look at the business plans. Unlimited data plans start at $50/mo.

Re:A better solution - Apple needs to open it up

[dangitman]

So, T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon are going to build whole new GSM networks at great expense, just to sell the iPhone? I don't think so.

Why should the rest of us subsidize iPhone users?

[cavehobbit]

I pay ATT each month for a data plan. I do not use anywhere near what I pay for. Most of us do not, so we are subsidizing iPhone users.

I have considered dumping the plan, but the few times a month I use it, I need it.

I would be more than willing to sign up for a pay as you go plan, especially since I would likely be in the lowest usage tier. Let the heavy users pay the heavy freight.

Pay as you go is far more fair than the socialist model used now, where the greedy get a free ride on the backs of others.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[Florian Weimer]

So I only need smartphone coverage where the majority of smartphones reside?

I thought the whole point of the discussion was about congestion, not about providing clean pipes to those who already enjoy clean air?

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, GSM tower radius is nothing like 30miles in an urban environment. It's more like 3-4 blocks

You should be looking at the FCC

[fyngyrz]

Everything the FCC touches is inflated. The actual cost of a radio, in active parts, that is stable and doesn't produce spurious output and interference: In the hundreds of dollars. Antenna, less. It's just folded and formed metal, very few active components, if any. Sturdy tower, 2-5 thousand, including a stable concrete base and mount. How do we know? Because ham radio operators put up very similar gear all the time. On many frequencies, some similar, some not, using many modes of transmission, again, some similar, some not.

Cost of "FCC type-approved" transmit equipment: In the tens of thousands. To which, as someone else pointed out, you have to add the cost of lawyers, licenses, land, VERY expensive type-approved towers, surveys, antennae, inspections, the hiring of FCC-approved engineers... it goes on and on. The benefit of all these extra processes? Basically zero. Well, other than lining the pockets of lawyers and vendors of type approved equipment, of course.

This is the cost of handing the government control of the spectrum. They make using it many times more expensive than it needs to be. The same thing they do to everything else. Why? Because they have absolutely no motive to bring down costs or make a profit, and if they fail to serve the people's needs, the people have no recourse -- we don't have any control over the FCC or any other embedded government operation.

For instance, you want to put a 100 watt FM broadcast station up at your house? It can be done for well under $500. You want to do it with FCC approval? Maybe, just maybe, you could do it for $50,000.00. But I doubt it. The difference in reliability, signal purity, stability, transmit coverage and quality because of cost alone? Zero.

The FCC's job here should be limited to coming out to the site before it's powered up, being there when that happens, taking a look at the output spectrum, taking a ride around to measure the coverage, measuring the tower/antennae assembly height to ensure it isn't in the way of the local aircraft patterns, if any, and handing over a signed operating license. For the cost of about half a day's pay for the inspector. The rest should be none of their business.

Re:You should be looking at the FCC

[firewood]

You left out the marketing and legal fees and political "contributions" to counteract all the luddites who think that any antenna tower near their backyard will cause their kids to immediately keel over with brain cancer.

That could easily take a fraction of a million.

But probably cheaper than trying to remodel a house with a new roofline that blocks the entire neighborhood's view.

Re:You should be looking at the FCC

[Anonymous Coward]

Cost of "FCC type-approved" transmit equipment: In the tens of thousands. To which, as someone else pointed out, you have to add the cost of lawyers, licenses, land, VERY expensive type-approved towers, surveys, antennae, inspections, the hiring of FCC-approved engineers... it goes on and on. The benefit of all these extra processes? Basically zero.

Having your pacemaker go haywire when driving past a tower installed by Joe-Bob's Discount Cell Depo: Priceless.

Captcha: extort

Re:You should be looking at the FCC

[eleuthero]

Why can ATT not do what Tmobile has done and include a small cell repeater into every home wireless modem? I assume that the patents are licensable or at least could be "stolen" temporarily in order to expand their network before a court order blocked more being sold. Furthermore, I assume that the technology is already in the hands of ATT people in a modified form and they are for reasons unknown not using it--hurrah for patenting the unpatentable "business models"!

Re:You should be looking at the FCC

[EXrider]

In T-Mobile's case, it's not a special small cell repeater, and it's not patented. It's called UMA and it's a 3GPP standard. Basically it's Voice over IP on WiFi; you don't have to exclusively use T-Mobile's branded Linksys access points either, you can use any 802.11 a/b/g network.

Any phone manufacturer is free to implement it in their handsets, and any carrier can carry those handsets and implement the technology on their back-end to support it. Tmo isn't the only carrier that has WiFi roaming, Cincinnati Bell does and they actually launched the service a couple weeks before Tmo did. There are many other carriers around the world that support UMA capable handsets as well. AT&T doesn't use it because... hell I don't know why. Because they're stupid and evil? My house has spotty GSM coverage, that's basically the main reason I use a UMA capable BlackBerry instead of an Android or iPhone.

Re:You should be looking at the FCC

[eleuthero]

Thanks--while I obviously can't mod you "informative," I do appreciate the input.

So it's the customer's fault? ...He should STFU.

[moxley]

Seriously. Why should the customer (who is already paying out the ass already) have to suffer and pay more money?

Why isn't the solution for AT&T to improve their network?

(and honestly, it's not that bad, especially with a 3GS), it's only on occasion if you are in small extremely dense areas ....I live in Philly, and when the Phillies won the world series last year there was a parade. The entire city was on Broad st - that is one of the only times where there was a major problem - and that seemed to occur with other networks too....Other than that there have been times in small densely populated areas on Saturday nights where the web is slow or there are issues, but it's gotten a lot better.

If AT&T did what the author is suggesting then I would expect most of the customers who have purchsed Iphones exactly BECAUSE you can go online anytime to feel screwed...and screwing people who make you so much money, especially people who are very comfortable using the social features of the web..that's a bad idea.

Also, we're talking about mobile web usage, NOT people downloading binaires from newsgroups or torrents - the most demanding use is probably from people streaming music for pandora or streaming videos from youtube....Having a network support this and doing what AT&T needs to do to support the products they've sold and make SO much money off of monthly is the solution, it's the right solution, and it's the only real solution....So as I said, this guy can STFU.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[bennomatic]

Nah, that won't do the trick. Corporate farms cover thousands of acres; you can be sure that pressure will be exerted--at a golf course or strip club--to put a significant number of those 300ish towers in places that will ensure that if a combine operator needs to be reached, s/he can be, even on an iPhone.

Everything's a subsidy for those guys!

Another failure to evaluate relevant concerns

[cybereal]

Look, I'm all for consumer fairness. It would be nice to get better prices. But the fact is, whether you have a 5GB plan or an iPhone unspecified/unlimited plan, your averages are still well within the range of limits experienced by both parties. It hardly makes a difference.

The article is basically making the argument that somehow iPhone users should be punished because they're actually using the service AT&T has been selling everyone for a long time. This is pretty asinine. The real issue here is entirely different and entirely AT&T's prerogative. Let me enlighten you:

AT&T's "3G" network, which is actually 3.5G, HSPA... is on the tail end of its lifespan. The technology in all of these handsets depends on it, of course, but it's done. It's over. There is only one last stage of improvement to GSM tech and it's a stretch as it is. Why would AT&T want to invest in expansion of a dead infrastructure? They don't. They aren't going to any more than they have to. They will expand to the last stage of 3G in the largest markets just as they prepare to roll out the same LTE based networks that every other carrier is supporting.

That said, there's no reason to think bandwidth consumption is the primary concern here. The primary concern is one of density. The number of users each relying on the same cell is too great. It's not a matter of how much data they are transferring on that cell so much as that there must be more cells, or cells must be able to handle more concurrent users. That's just a factor of the proliferation of cellular phones and devices. You can't blame the iPhone for this. It's a problem that would occur eventually anyway as the trend towards data enabled devices existed before anyone even knew about the iPhone. Maybe the iPhone accelerated it, but that is no reason to punish people who like a good user experience.

Of course, there's another concern not addressed and that is the exact same concern that effects cable internet subscribers. Cable internet actually works in a very similar fashion to cellular internet. In the case of cable modems, customers share a download node that has a set maximum bandwidth with its uplink. You are sold rates like 12mbps but there is only a maximum of 60mbps at each node. So if more than 5 people all try to use 12mbps at once you won't get what is promised. However, because most people don't use nearly the maximum pretty much.... ever... the cable companies overprovision the network. They get away with it because the statistics generally match up. However, if you're unlucky enough to live in a neighborhood full of download happy geeks, you're going to hate your internet connection.

The same issue exists in cell towers. A give GSM cell can handle a fixed maximum number of communication slots each functioning as a statically wide band of communication. When a device ramps up from basic voice to data, to higher speed data, it will consume more slots. Or it won't, if there are none available and it will just stay slow or not connect to data, or whatever. So basically if you have 1000 slots on a given tower, and full 7.2mbps hsdpa+ requires 12 of those slots, you can see that there's a fixed number of people who can possibly access the network at full speed. Add to this the already common problem of the actual backing internet connection experiencing the exact same kind of limitation and you can see that infrastructure is a problem of density, not of actual transfer totals.

So, the lesson here is that more uplinks are needed so that uplinks are not as central a point of failure as they are today. What you'll earn is that cells are relatively evenly distributed across all markets but not all markets have an evenly distributed level of usage from consumers. People in metro areas will note the worst performance because there's simply too many people in one place. You'll note the epic failure of networks during large technical conventions with a 1000+ simultaneous attempts at liveblogging the latest

Re:Another failure to evaluate relevant concerns

[rwwyatt]

A couple of points need to be clarified in your comment.

• HSPA is still referred to as 3G. Specifically, it refers to the R6 version of the 3GPP standards.
• HSPA+ is a technology being rolled out now (I believe Bell Mobility in Canada). There are devices that will be commercial very shortly that support 21Mbps in the forward link (down link).
• AT&T has made the specific decision to not migrate to HSPA+ (R7) and will not offer more than 7.2 Mbps

Re:Another failure to evaluate relevant concerns

[Anonymous Coward]

Question:

I will note that LTE is Part of the GSM familly, given that it is a 3GPP project, and not a 3GPP2 project. Thus I'm presuming on the phone end it will be treated much like GSM/UTMS, especially with respect to use of SIM cards right?

The largest US CDMA provider (Verizon) plans to transition over to LTE, too. (Probably mostly because Qualcom makes most of the CDMA chips and has decided to move over to making LTE chips, meaning that the UMB is dead. That makes LTE or 802.16e-2005 the only viable options.).

Once LTE coverage is rolled out by the networks to a point where LTE only phones become viable, will we start to see a more open Cell market like in the EU? Most phones being able to be ported between networks, although sometimes requiring phone unlocking? Phones that can roam between the two largest networks (Verizon and AT&T)?

Or will the previously CDMA providers be using a different band, and use phones with hardwired SIMs, while the old GSM Networks use other bands with LTE SIM support?

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[jim_v2000]

Your math is good, but your thinking is flawed. They don't need to blanket the entire US. They need to cover areas where most of the people live, which they have already done. What they need to improve is the capacity of those coverage areas. (Adding a few towers here and there to improve signal strength wouldn't be a bad idea either.)

metered probably isn't the solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe someone else has already said this, but the post assumes that either 1) people will reduce their usage if they have to pay more for it or 2) AT&T will use any increased income to build a better network.

I don't think that there is any proof that either 1 or 2 is the case, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

Silly argument

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting how european and asian countries provide vastly better coverage and features, at lower cost, but somehow US carriers can't do it. no we should pay them even more...

The solution is for ATT to not suck.

[santiagodraco]

I wish people would show a bit of intelligence when they make up these articles designed to make themselves look clever.

AT&T's problem is they suck. Their network sucks, and their infrastructure planning people suck.

Give the iPhone an exclusive on Verizon, we won't see these types of conversations anymore.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[Rakishi]

So you make the cells SMALLER. Who ever said you need to add new towers in the exact same place as an existing one.

Add 4 cell phone towers around an existing one, some distance away, and lower the power output appropriately. Now you've got 5 times the bandwidth in roughly the same area.

I'm with AT&T

[Anonymous Coward]

in the Atlanta, GA area. I don't have a "smart phone", just a normal clam-shell make-and-receive-calls phone. And the service is absolutely terrible. I switched from MetroPCS (a nobody compared to AT&T) so I wouldn't be restricted to service just in the Atlanta area (and I wanted to be on a sim-card network). Whether I'm downtown or just outside of town where I live I consistently get dropped calls, unreceived calls (both ways) and bad echoes. I suppose the irony is my previous provider was supposed to be the low-end poor-budget choice, but they excelled compared to my service now. I sometimes wonder if those with iPhones have better service... because if that's the case, I would be beyond pissed.

How about the right thing..?

[Rowas]

You pay a price that equals an amount of money that you are allowed to spend anyway you want.. Be that voice, texts or data.

Like almost all carriers here in Sweden do.

Tiered plans, and the price you pay, is the money you get to use.
Anything above that price, you pay metered.

Paying 20$ a month and used 25$? then you get those last 5$ separate on your bill.

It really is that simple, instead of all this crazy talk you guys spout about plans consisting of voice minutes and texts and data..

But then again.. I would never ever get myself a subscription.. I'm happy with my prepaid card, I have complete control over how much I wish to spend each month.

Lemme give you some examples.
The unlimited plan for one company: 100$ (and they've recently raised the cost from ~85$, to make it an actual unlimited plan, instead of just being a price roof of ~855$, since the use of smart phones is rising)
the cheapest one: ~14$

Now, if you were to buy an Iphone through this company, then you'd pay a minimum of ~42$, but instead you'd -always- get unlimited data, so that money only goes towards voice and texts.

PS. No they have no problems what so ever with over congested networks.
And I know this from the fact that I'm working for them.

Re:How about the right thing..?

[spyfrog]

No problems whatsoever? Then why is the telephone companies crying in Computer Sweden about congested networks and need for customer to pay more?

Tiered, fair enough

[Bureaucromancer]

You know, tiered pricing seems fair enough given the realities of wireless technology, but any tiered system has a top tier, and that really, desperately, needs to be unlimited.

wow

[binarybum]

I love this backwards idea, it will bring ATT one step closer to finally losing it's market dominance and allowing people to actually choose which company they use to carry their voice and data.

A person who uses 1MB/month

[EmagGeek]

... will save money by using the pay-per-use data plan over buying the unlimited plan.

In general, I'd love it if only people who consumed something had to pay for it. I'm sick of paying school taxes when I have no kids. I'm sick of paying for roads, bridges, parks, and other things that 47% of Americans don't pay a red cent for. I'm tired as hell of paying for wars that aren't being fought for MY freedom.

People should carry their own weight, and abusive users of limited resources should pay more - not have their costs offset by others.

Fewer problems in the UK

[beezly]

From personal experience, I've seen none of these problems in the UK. Granted, our peak population density is about half that of big cities in the US (New York vs. London), but our national population density is an order of magnitude greater (1000 sq/mi (england) vs around 80 (USA) - or 650 sq/mi (UK) vs 80 (US)).

Seems to me that AT&T's network is just a bit crap. We have a bit more experience of running GSM networks over here!

Having said all that, O2 have had some spectacular cock ups on their data network recently, although not related to coverage/dropped calls.

Re:Fewer problems in the UK

[beezly]

have a bit more experience of running GSM networks over here!

By GSM, I also include UMTS.

A very shortsighted opinion

[Cyberllama]

There are 2 key factors being ignored here. The average user may well be using only 400 megabytes but the "average" user hasn't had his/her iPhone for very long and quite probably hasn't discovered all the possibilities yet. Someday, he/she will. He'll start syncing his files via Dropbox, or he'll set up a Pandora station and start listening to streaming audio over long car trips. He'll pick up new podcasts, and update them over the air. The longer you have your phone, the more bandwidth you'll use as you slowly learn to do more and more things with it, get more and more apps, and so forth.

A large percentage of the so-called "heavy users" are merely early adopters, who've embraced smart phone computing to a higher degree. They aren't the norm now, but increasingly they will become it.

Moreover, the average user lives where, exactly? Some cities have ubiquitous WiFi, others, as of yet, do not. Some cities are dense and have many access points, others are spread out and suburban.

At the end of the day, tiered pricing would be a disaster. People would find their bill increasing 10 dollars every month and realistically, how long would they put up with that? I love my iPhone but I am absolutely not paying 200 dollars for data every month just because I go through about 2 gigs of data in that time frame -- nor, frankly, am I willing to cut back. I'll simply switch to another phone on another network that isn't heavily oversold and underserved.

Re:A very shortsighted opinion

[runningman24]

What are you going to do when the next network introduces tiered pricing to deal with the influx of customers using 2 gigs of data for a flat fee? Either you're going to change your habits or they're going to charge you more eventually.

Cash

[aceofspades1217]

Wow so people feel bad for AT&T that people are paying for an incredibly expensive plan and that its slowing down the network because even though their revenues are so high they refuse in infrastructure.

They can do whatver they want...

[Anonymous Coward]

But for the next 22 months I'm getting unlimited broadband. If I remember correctly that was the deal I signed. Unless they're ready to pony-up the exorbitent fee I agreed to pay for not living up to my end of the bargain, which would likey just go back into whatever my usage ended up being anyway but still, this would not end up being a simple case of I'm taking my ball and going home. Apple and ATT need to watch their asses as it is, pulling something like that is gonna end up in 1981 or whenever it was again.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[sunspot42]

You're ignoring the fact that the dense urban centers are already covered.

Uh, wrong. You couldn't be more wrong. I've used the iPhone in Manhattan and in San Francisco, two of the most densely-populated urban centers in the US, and there are serious coverage issues in both cities. I got better performance in Napa and Sonoma, even on the fringes of town. Towers don't just cover a physical area, they also support a population of users.

If AT&T took some of the millions it wastes every year in executard compensation and invested that cash adding a couple dozen more cell towers in Manhattan and San Francisco, they'd improve the user experience of tens of thousands of lucrative customers and guarantee themselves a healthy revenue stream for years to come. But like most boardrooms in this country, AT&T's is packed full of brown-nosing, greedy psychopaths hell bent on grabbing as much cash as they can today without the slightest concern regarding what happens tomorrow.

You can bet that when the iPhone becomes available via another carrier, there will be a stampede of customers away from AT&T and their financials will go straight into the toilet. Then they'll probably beg the taxpayers for a bailout.

Welcome to unregulated "capitalism", where a bunch of slick lunatics in $2,000 suits eat all of their seed corn in the spring, then piss and moan in the fall that they're starving, before demanding that the peasants come feed them.

One of these days, the peasants are gonna wise up, and our fatted executive class is gonna find itself on the dinner plate.

How about instead of blaming iphone users

[cybrchld]

Fix the damn network, this argument is crap. if the amount of data use is killing the network then why the hell are the pushing broadband cards and netbooks which have much larger data usage than an Iphone.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[aaarrrgggh]

If I remember correctly, AT&T has about 2,000 towers currently. Microcells like the old Ricochet modems mounted to street lights would do more for areas that saturate existing bandwidth, and when you talk about rural areas it seems like you need an aerial platform to make density work.

But artificial scarcity is the key to margin... so... don't expect much change.

Why am i to blame?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the hell am I to blame here? When I purchased my plan with ATT they said it came with certain features. Now they're saying, well you're using your phone too much. HOW IS THIS MY FAULT!? YOU SOLD ME A CONTRACT AND SAID I COULD USE MY MOTHER F*****G PHONE!!! HOW IS THIS MY FAULT!!!???

Need proof that Japanese use as much bandwidth

[SuperKendall]

Look, bandwidth really cannot be the problem because otherwise Japan would already be hitting the limits

Are you so sure that they currently use the same amount of bandwidth?

They have had fancier phones for longer but the impression I got was they were mostly texting.

Re:Need proof that Japanese use as much bandwidth

[quarterbuck]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4868004.stm -- News article from 2006 about Mobile TV in Japan. Korea already has a couple of million users .http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPTV#Markets

Re:Need proof that Japanese use as much bandwidth

[shoemilk]

Then you had the wrong impression. First of all, no one texts. It's so ridiculously expensive. Everyone mails because everyone has an address. My wife's blog gets 5 times more cell phone hits than computer. At the web firm I worked at, the mobile design was almost more important than computer design.

(Japanese link) All cell providers in Japan have unlimited data plans.

Wikipedia agrees with the parent Google has a plethora of links for you.

I just couldn't resist...

[Anonymous Coward]

"the iPhone should have an indicator like the battery bar that changes color as you pass each monthly tier"

"There's an APP for that!"

What about wifi?

[cmftblynu]

Seriously, there are a couple major flaws with this. Yes people probably do use that much bandwidth but the iPhone also supports wifi which most other phones do not. So I don't thing that at&t's data is being hammered as much as they say. Plus I do agree they are getting tons millions of new customers. What are they doing with this money? I'm tired of them crying about their network invest your new iPhone revenue back into it, make it better and keep getting new customers. I am paying AT&T more money per month than I pay for my cable Internet service so get with it AT&T

Re:It's really NOT even about the 3G network anywa

[dachshund]

I used to work for AT&T back before the SBC merger, and I can assure you, this is exactly what they said about 3G. While all of the other carriers were rolling out fast CDMA-based networks with associated data networks, AT&T was in the dark ages with its proprietary TDMA network. They spent a lot of time excusing this by saying that they were building a new 3G network. This may or may not be the same 3G technology they're using now, but I stress that it took them at least five more years (plus the transition to a completely different non-3G network technology --- GSM) before any of it actually happened.

If Verizon charges 60 bucks for 5GB....

[aristotle-dude]

Why do customers expect to continue to have unrestricted data access on the iPhone for only 30 bucks a month without a cap on bandwidth? Shouldn't they be paying double of what they currently are at least? Wouldn't 30 bucks for 5-6GB per month be acceptable if VOIP and tethering were included on the iPhone plan? That would sound like a bargain still compared to the verizon data card plan.

Re:Why AT+T should stop whining like a spoilt brat

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh great, /. doesn't know how to count so now my subject line sounds perverted.

stop whining like a spoilt bra you perv

FTFY

640k

[toriver]

640 kB, out of the IBM PC's total memory of 1 MB, was definitely enough for user applications in an age where VisiCalc came in a 27 kB executable, yes. As I understand it, that was what Mr. William Gates III was talking about; Operating systems, even kindergarten-level boot loaders like DOS, need some memory of their own too.

Anyway: Usage grows to fill available memory and bandwidth, independent on actual need, it seems. So any amount is sufficient, but a higher amount is just "more sufficient" in that it can support more usage ideas.

Drop Exclusivity

[Anonymous Coward]

Im sure once Verizon, etc have the same problems (or don't) it will be clearer what to do. The other thing is despite all the press complaining about this, the biggest problem ATT has in Silicon Valley is not bandwidth, but dead spots, and they are still the same ones as years ago. Nothing to do with the iPhone.

We can't go to tiered pricing- because if you are a person who uses email in the modern world, you have massive email attachments from corporate sources, and you would be forced to STOP using your iPhone as an email client, etc or pay for highest pricing and unpredictable bills. This is part of the wisdom of Steve, the same as in iTunes, simple, predictable pricing, so people can come and enjoy products without being worried about crazy bills, which while not seeming to matter much in the more modern regions of cities, and business, rings very true in middle america, and with less tech savvy people, who are worried about Nigerians needing just a little help to get their money out of the country, being tricked into clicking on the wrong button, or just having their credit # stolen.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[SimonTheSoundMan]

If it helps, in the UK we have around 52,000 3G masts across four carriers (most are shared masts), and we're a far smaller country.

http://www.mobilemastinfo.com/information/fact_sheets/third_generation.htm

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

Just another excuse to generate more money. Unlimited Data is exactly that, Unlimited. AT&T, who has handled the Iphone horribly from the beginning, is trying to deflect critisizm from themselves to their own customers. We are only using the product as intended and designed. Blame us, and it looks like they (AT&T) is not the blame for shoddy service. AT&T has had the worst service even before the Iphone. I have been an AT&T wireless customer for a couple of years before the Iphone came out. The service was bad even then. I was locked in a 2 year contract so I had to stay a customer. If it was not for the Iphone I would not be an AT&T customer right now. If AT&T decides to charge more or use usage caps on Iphone data plans, which, are already very expensive, I will cancel all three of my phones. Two of which are Iphones. Trying to make Iphone users look like they are greedy bandwidth hogs is wrong. Apple should wake up. We should all let AT&T know we won't put up with poor service and even more added cost to an already expensive data plan. Unlimited means Unlimited. Nuff said.

Provocative?

[Anonymous Coward]

So AT&T's inability to build a network to handle the first smartphone that customers actually use is Apple's fault how?

just another ...

[Pooch Bushey]

... at&t apologist.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[MrCrassic]

On this note, I hope that AT&T is aware that most of their customers were from Verizon, and would probably switch back in no-time when Verizon gets the iPhone (wich they will)

Here is why this will never happen...

[notmebug]

(unless someone stupid gets behind the wheel of the policy machine) ...this is like asking cable-modem users to pay for more bandwidth just because everyone in the neighborhood shares the same wire. Should we also charge higher bandwidth rates to people in high traffic areas? and during high traffic times? Let's just switch to nights and weekends megabytes. Let's also charge people extra if they access a server outside their local area. We can lump in a huge fee if their megabytes go to a server in another country, and we can force them to sign up for an international plan on top of that. Oh, but we can give them a free megabyte if that megabyte goes to another AT&T phone in their family data plan. That will make the customer satisfied.

Look people, stop complaining about your cell phone bandwidth. It will ALWAYS be slower than your WiFi connected to a dedicated land-link, and it will ALWAYS be slower wherever their are more users because that's the inherent nature of a full coverage infrastructure. No wireless service provider (including the WiFi at your local coffee shop) guarantees all your packets will arrive untouched and in order at server X in time Y. That's the nature of a packet switched network. That's what you're buying. You're buying access to the Internet, the same as anyone else. Sure some pipes are bigger than others, but there you're buying a MAXIMUM based on the technology involved in the first link, not an assured amount of data to your destination. And even the first link must necessarily be shared on a wireless platform-- there is no wire and only so much band in the spectrum. And what about total data? Well, should a rural 1000MB user pay a huge tiered price, even though the 1000 one meg users in the city are the ones actually influencing the slowdown? Fair billing under a tiered system is impossible, if fair is defined as those who cause more congestion pay more, as pegging an individual as causing a quantifiable amount of congestion (or "unfairness to others") is impossible, or at the least not inexpensively computable. Buying an Unlimited data plan means you have the FREEDOM to use however much you need. This comes as close to fair as possible, as everyone has equal opportunity, those who cause congestion are frequently punished with a slowdown by being within the congestion themselves, and prices for the unlimited plan are set based on usage by the entire AT&T customer base. As long as AT&T holds up their side of this, it stays a largely self regulating system. You are paying the cell company to do their job and put data towers where they are needed most (i.e. assuring congestion slowdowns are not overly punishing), and for your FREEDOM from the tedium of managing data. The burden for managing the bandwidth supply is best placed on the cell company-- the ones who understand it best --whereas adding a tiered system moves the burden to the consumer, where it wastes time and is managed poorly. If a person has to think about whether they really need this extra megabyte of data they are about to consume in an application, then inevitably revenue will go down as less apps are used and less contracts signed, and at the same time value to the consumer is lost because every megabyte carries an extra burden of wasted time. Lose-lose.

To go back to the first paragraph, cell companies would be more successful if they stop treating the consumer as an infinitely rational computation machine that can make sense of a 100-page bill. Yes, the lack of freedom in a tiered package would kill the magic of the iPhone, if by magic we mean convenience of a stress-free billing environment. Anyone who has taken their iPhone to another continent knows that watching every megabyte and regularly hassling with AT&T over international billing really takes the fun (and productivity) out of iPhone use. To AT&T's credit, the only customer service problems I have ever had with them were all related to International billing-- and I have been with them b

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[sunspot42]

I think that's probably true, but I'm not certain that Verizon wants the iPhone. It's way too open for them - which is saying something! Verizon is all about making money off of charging fees for the things other providers give you for free. I also think that their network performance is superior to AT&T's largely because they lock down their phones so dramatically in terms of features and aren't a leading provider of smartphones with a decent web browser. I tried a friend's Blackberry Storm on Verizon, and the experience sucked compared even to 1st gen iPhone.

If Verizon does get the iPhone, I think a lot of users are gonna discover their network isn't all that much better than AT&T's. Even if they don't get the iPhone, a new generation of smartphones is about to land from other vendors, and with their improved browsers and more advanced applications those smartphones will place a far greater strain on Verizon's network than their existing offerings. It'll be interesting to see how that network handles it. My guess is, not as well as people appear to be assuming it will.

Re:iPhone

[diamondsw]

It's the most visible because it's the only one that gets advertised by the media

It's most visible because it was radically different from other platforms and single-handedly changed the market. Go ahead, show me 3D gaming on phones before the iPhone. For that matter, look at phone interfaces, capabilities, and internet usage on them before the iPhone. The iPhone raised the bar, and very little has caught up with it yet. State of the art used to be Windows Mobile 6 and PalmOS - yes, Palm OS. Windows Mobile has blown it ever since, LiMo never went anywhere, and Google Android and Palm Pre very likely would not have been developed if the iPhone hadn't radically changed the market. It gets recognition for that, and it's well-deserved.

sales figures show a different story

Really? It's at 23% in the US, and 14% worldwide. And it only came out two years ago, with its famously limited capabilities at the time.

Personally I'd much rather to see a future that continues with multiple companies (of which Apple can be one), with choice, and most importantly, compatible standards so that I can release an application that Just Works on all phones

Yeah, that worked out so well on Windows and the PC world. Multiple vendors never makes things Just Work - it's the antithesis of it. Protocol incompatibilities, inconsistent hardware support, no platform direction.

Look at Apple. For example, they want to support something like OpenCL. They make sure their hardware has the proper GPU's, the OS supports it, GrandCentral is created, the compiler toolchain adds blocks, and oh yeah, they've been working on LLVM/Clang for years. NONE of that happens when you have a heterogeneous environment and no one is coordinated. Apple wants to get rid of legacy ports and bus systems - so they do it. In two years, Apple abandoned floppies, SCSI, ADB, serial, NuBus, etc. Here we are over ten years later and PC's STILL have PS/2 ports and serial ports, right next to USB 3.0. Such progress.

Note that all phones can run so called "apps". Running applications on phones has been common on all but the most basic phones for at least 5 years, and note that the market of Java smartphones is estimated at two billion.

I'm sorry - you can't possibly compare Java Midlets to iPhone applications. Nice that it has two-billion phones. I'd bet that a fraction of a percent of those users have ever cared that it's there, and those that have used it (like I used to on my PalmOS Treo - KMaps and Opera Mini) can easily see what crap it is. Ugly, slow, non-native, battery-hungry, low-performance - that's Java on a phone, and one of the reasons it's not on the iPhone. Ditto for Flash, really.

Sadly, the only thing in your post that made any sense was that Apple should be more open. And it's "should", as in it would be nice. The market has shown that they certainly don't "need" to.

Missing the point

[hejish]

Apple negotiated the current AT&T customer contract concept for the iphone - not an easy thing to do. It has brought AT&T millions of new users, and brought smart phones into the hands of millions of new users, redefining the "smart phone market". AT&T has so many new expensive data plan users to whom it was unable to sell before. People are not leaving the platform much due to problems. Yes it is expensive to run, but this whole discussion of reasons this is bad is missing the point. It has been a phenomenal success. As much as some people like to say AT&T's reputation is being ruined, I applaud them for moving forward as they have. AT&T's reputation has improved by offering such a service with such a great device. However, If I could not have an unlimited usage plan, I would not have an iphone. If it cost more than it does, I would not have bought a second phone for a family member. Requiring the data plan for the phone means AT&T has some users who pay and do not actually use the plan much. If AT&T made me pay more for higher use, and then I had problems, I would be incredibly upset and would refuse to pay for what I was not getting anyway. As a side note I have found it interesting that AT&T has not been willing to make tethering available for the iphone at any price - there are people who would pay much for it, and I can tether on a separate device with AT&T for $60/month.

Build infrastructure using profits

[aJester]

Before iPhone, my cellphone bill was $29.99/month + tax. I used the phone for emergencies only. After I got an iPhone, my cell phone bills is $75.00/ month + tax. So in effect, I am paying 2.5 times as much per month MORE than I used to... AND I signed a 2 year contract with AT&T. Where is all this money going? If AT&T is paying the CEOs and the senior executives a BIGGER salary and HUGE bonus,... or distributing it to the shareholders, this is THEIR mistake. They should instead use all the profits they are making by the massively new HIGH PAYING customers and build a lot of infrastructure. If they have to double or triple their network capacity, they should. I thought that was the reason for the iPhone exclusive deal and consequently getting the ability to poach customers from other networks. If AT&T failed to capitalize on this and build their network, it is the mistake of the executives and they must all be fired...

Re:It's really NOT even about the 3G network anywa

[Anonymous Coward]

I attended an AT&T sponsored "lunch and learn" session on "The future of wireless", several months back. (I got a free invite from our AT&T business sales rep. at my work. It included a free lunch at a nice hotel, and it's not often AT&T gives you ANYTHING free, so I figured "What the heck?" and went.)

that's pretty funny. I WORK for the company, in a wireless department, and don't even rate FREE coffee. I hope you ate them out of house and home.

A better Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe a better solution would be for AT&T and Apple to realize that this exclusive aggreement is not really a good thing.
Sure, it looks good at first, but it's hurting the non-iPhone users as well. AT&T is putting a large portion of their cellular revenue
at risk in exchange for short term profits.

If people could take their iPhones to other carriers, without hacking them, the load would be shared amoung many different
carriers. This would provide competition for rate plans and would also improve the performance of the non-iPhone users.

In the end, it would help AT&T, help Apple and even help the consumers.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[quarterbuck]

CDMA has twice the radius as old-style GSM. That said, 40 mile radius seems stretching it. The rule of thumb I heard was 20 Km diameter for GSM and 40 km diameter for CDMA for a South African company. That's about 25 miles diameter for CDMA. And this is over relatively flat land. In New York you probably need a tower in every building.

Re:400 MB? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

p0rn, and lots of it!

Not really a solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Arguing that AT&T should institute tiered pricing as a solution to iPhone users overcrowding the network only works if we assume that the extra money will go to beefing up the network. That isn't necessarily the case. Also tiered pricing probably won't deter most iPhone users, as they are already somewhat used to paying a premium for the phone and the service. It may make a dent, but it isn't going to make them cut back to the levels of other smartphone users. AT&T is unlikely to invest any extra revenue that it would gain in this ploy into the network, as they didn't adequately invest the money they gained by the millions of new subscribers attracted for the sole reason of having an iPhone.

wtf?

[Anonymous Coward]

So the idea is pay more money for the same shitty service? Are you kidding? ATT is protecting its network with its exclusivity contract.
Once verizon and others can sell the iphone, ATTs network will become irrelevant.

Noone is investing heavily in cellphone networks. Its a dead end. ATT will just take the extra money and pocket it.

Re:400 MB? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have this iPhone for a week and already used over 500MB.
It's not really that hard. Pc I use only to download some heavy stuff
over couple gigs, all daily surfing I do on the phone.
My record was 18GB on 3g network alone. Boring work and net lock out
make u use cell much more. I never tether anything btw

They could not force people to have the data plan

[SocietyoftheFist]

My wife and I could save the $60 per month and just use WiFi when we need hi speed data. I don't feel bad for AT&T.

Slashdotters love sucking apple's cock

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Even more slashdotters sucking the cock of Apple as time goes by. Funny how y'all hate on Microsoft for being a monopoly, but practically jizz yourselves when Apple drives to do the same thing with the ipod and iphone. Fucking hypocrites....

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[nine-times]

you've taken away 100% of their compensation, and added 1/10 of one percent of the towers needed to blanket the nation

Cool. I'm fully willing to make that trade.

It is not a solution unless it benefits AT&T

[Anonymous Coward]

Manjoo argues that a tiered plan would reduce congestion. But how would this benefit AT&T? A tiered plan would give customers incentive to reduce their use, which they would do by using WiFi more often (sometimes simply keeping an eye on the icon to make sure they connected), reducing downloads, et cetera. So customers would move from the $40 tier Manjoo proposes to the $10 tier, and then AT&T would be collecting less than the $30/customer it collects now. If AT&T projects it will lose more revenue than it will gain in goodwill, then it will not adopt this scheme.

A solution to the problem has to be attractive to the service provider as well as to the customers.

Re:iPhone

[AdamInParadise]

In theory, Java Midlets are not so bad. The problem lies in the complexity of the ecosystem:
1) Lots of J2ME phones means lots of incompatible implementations.
2) The committees in charge of defining the technical specifications moves at a glacial pace.
3) Provisionning and payment systems are outside of the scope of J2ME, so everyone had to build their own.
4) The list goes on and on.

J2ME failed but I'm not sure that it ever had a chance to succeed. But don't blame Java. Blackberry phones are 100% Java (except the kernel) and they are doing OK. Why? Because a single company designs the phones, the OS and the APIs for the applications and came up with a relatively simple way to application developers to make money. Humm, it reminds me of someone, but who?

400Mb a month?? hahhahahaa

[JohnnyComeLately]

I use over a gig a month, every month. I guess the "average" user hasn't discovered....never mind...

All I hear is WAAA!

[itguy01]

All I hear out of the people saying the iphone is strangling the ATT network is WAAA! As an iphone user, I rarely ever go over around 100-200MB a Month. Tiered pricing will not work because it's kinda like the gas pumps, you're pumping gas and you get distracted and you go a penny or two over the dollar amount you wanted.... Do you think that gas station is going to give you a break and knock those pennies off especially if you pay by card where it is automatic. I for one would be upset if I used .5 over 100MB and they charged me an additional $20 because you know it will be some ridiculous number like $19.99 to make it sound good. The solution is to use some of those mega profits they get and improve infrastructure. What about that nationwide wifi plan that was supposed to happen.... iphones can use wifi, put up wireless access points that only ATT phones can access and that would reduce the amount of traffic.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are you getting 6361 square miles per tower? That implies an effective radius of 44 miles for each GSM tower, which doesn't seem right.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_site

"In practice, cell sites are grouped in areas of high population density, with the most potential users. Cell phone traffic through a single cell mast is limited by the mast's capacity; there is a finite number of calls that a mast can handle at once. This limitation is another factor affecting the spacing of cell mast sites. In suburban areas, masts are commonly spaced 1-2 miles apart and in dense urban areas, masts may be as close as ¼-½ mile apart. Cell masts always reserve part of their available bandwidth for emergency calls."

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[drmerope]

No. The real problem is that FCC has only made a very small, very expensive allocations to GSM use. The equipment can support many more channels but the frequencies are legally limited in the US. Thus why bandwidth is bad here and much better elsewhere. Ditto for cost concerns. Wireless carriers have paid a lot of more at auction to the US Government than similar allocations cost in other countries.

See for instance this recent article at the wsj

The FCC has approved a threefold increase in available spectrum in recent years, but projections for data traffic show a 30-fold increase in demand, Mr. Genachowski said. "That's a 10-to-one gap," he said. "It's a very serious challenge."

...

Wireless industry lobbyists have spent months trying to persuade lawmakers to pass legislation that would require the government to do an inventory of the U.S.'s airwaves and how they are being used. The U.S. government controls much of the available airwaves, which are set aside for military and other official uses. Rights to airwaves are auctioned off to companies to use exclusively.

Mr. Genachowski said the FCC would look at ways to promote secondary markets for airwaves, which would give people who hold licenses for airwave usage the right to lease those licenses to others. He said the agency would also try to clear obstacles for wireless companies trying to install new networks, including speeding up approvals for new cellphone tower construction, which often are met with community resistance.

unlimited data, unlimited text...bah

[Anonymous Coward]

With my old Sony phone on AT&T, My unlimited data plan (which included unlimited txt) was $19.99. I got an IPhone which came with a forced unlimited data plan of $30, which does NOT included unlimited text. They made me pay an extra $20/mo *just* for unlimited text!

Generalization?

[gottabeme]

I don't use anywhere close to 400 MB a month. My iPhone spends more time on WiFi than 3G or EDGE. When I am on 3G or EDGE, it works fine. No, I don't live in a big city. What about all the other people that don't?

thats the way to do it

[Anonymous Coward]

YES PLEASE Pretty PLEEEEAAASSSSEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE !!!
Re Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING that is EXACTLY what i AM DOING

idiots

why not throttling?

[neongrau]

In Germany where T-Mobile runs the iPhone. They give you 1GB per month at 3G speeds (or 4GB for the highest priced subscription) everything above gets throttled to GPRS speeds (64k max). I'm sure AT&T could find a proper rate to get their network stable.

Re:400 MB? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

You stream? Really?

64000 bits per second for 8 hours a day 5 days a week for a four week month is 4,394 MiB. Thats something of an extreme example but 300 MiB only averages to 22 minutes per day of 64kbit/sec streaming or 11 minutes per day of 128kbit/sec streaming.

Less confused now?

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[AuMatar]

Its an auction. If they paid more in the US, it's because they bid up the price on each other. If they didn't think it was worth the amount they paid, they wouldn't have made the bid.

Re:It's really NOT even about the 3G network anywa

[Anonymous Coward]

So there you have it folks, just continue to use our increasingly overloaded 3G network for 2 more years and then we'll have a shiny new network ready for you to use. We promise we won't shaft you again.

Oh, and everytime you use "air quotes", a douche gets its wings.

its not fair

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally object paying for unlimited data storage when 99 percent of my usage is wifi. I object paying the extra 10 bucks a month (data price between first gen iphone and 3g iphone) for 3g service that is not in my area and I am never in an area that has 3g available. Finally I object to the fact that unlimited service is not unlimited service - imo that is false advertising. .

It is all about fairness - but then what is fair in life.

instead

[Anonymous Coward]

open iphones to work on any carrier

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[imroy]

According to Harold Welte, some African operators are setting up their GSM equipment to skip every second TDMA time slot, resulting in an almost 70 Km (~43 mi) range at the expense of halving the capacity of a cell. It's an interesting "hack", although not the best solution for high-population areas.

And when you say "CDMA", you are presumably meaning IS-95. CDMA is just a multiplexing method that is used by IS-95 (2G), CDMA2000 (3G), and UMTS/W-CDMA; the 3G evolution of GSM. It's also used by GPS.

stupid idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I am already twitching to dump ATT which last offers last decades bandwidth at 10x the price. Ditched my analog line 10 years ago for the same reason. Plenty of money to be made by smaller companies that don't have monopoly protection and can give me cutting edge bandwidth at a fair price. EG 500Gb/mo flat rate would be more reasonable at ATTs current prices. Any idiot can solve local congestion and edge caching has been around forever. Where is my HDTV upload app?

My Sprint mobile broadband usage

[name_already_taken]

I know I've exceeded 100GB on my Sprint Mobile Broadband card. For a while I was using it as my main connection at home and everywhere else, and with two people and a lot of downloading it was easy.

The best part it's a Business Unlimited account and for $59.99 a month it actually is unlimited. They don't put 1,000 place separators (commas) in the "Bytes transferred" number on the bill, so I was pretty amazed when I marked the places and figured out I'd transferred that much data. Sprint's network didn't have any problems at all, as far as I can tell.

One More Reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

Stellar idea with the tiers - stellar. It's just one more reason when the 'sole-source' contract is over AT&T will experience the largest egress of customers any wireless carrier has ever seen.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[wmguy]

The maximum range of a cell tower is only useful if you are in the middle of nowhere where you don't expect many people to be using their phones. The real limitation is that a tower can only support a limited number of simultaneous connections. In order to solve this problem, the carriers adjust the radius of the tower, by adjusting the downward tilt of the antennas and probably the transmitting power as well. In very high density areas the radius will be very small, so that they can install lots of towers to support the large number of users. This means that calculating how many towers you need is not a simple mathematical problem, but has to factor in population density, subscriber density, and knowledge of which areas are currently experiencing problems--as I am sure that are lots of areas where data speeds are just fine.

In what country?

[tepples]

I'll simply switch to another phone on another network that isn't heavily oversold and underserved.

Did you mean "I'll simply switch to another phone on another network in another country"? Or what U.S. network are you talking about? (The article is on a U.S. site and about the U.S. market.)

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[mhollis]

Everyone here is looking askance at AT&T. And their policies may be problematic. But AT&T has incentive to build more towers and that incentive is called "Verizon." Of course in the iPhone-only world, there is no incentive but AT&T actually sells more than just the iPhone.

Their contract with Apple ends next year, unless the two companies want to renew. Problem is that since Verizon uses different signaling than does AT&T, if you want to switch to Verizon, you would have to purchase a different, Verizon-capable iPhone. Winner here is Apple, because they pocket the money for the phone.

I grew up in an era when all telephone calls, local or long-distance cost money and AT&T was the only telephone company. You had to rent your phone from the phone company and you had to pay for every call. That system tended to cause people to use the telephone for messages, not to chat. AT&T dropped local calling rates in the 1960s and stay-at-home moms everywhere started to carry on long conversations on the telephone with their neighbors. Long-distance remained a medium of message.

What changed? I believe that AT&T realized that there was pressure from their subscribers (nearly everyone in the US) to change. You still had to pay per call, but you didn't have to pay per minute. And the cost per call was pretty cheap. So long conversations over local calls became the norm. I don't recall hearing that the infrastructure was, somehow, overloaded.

I'll bet the real reason for this change was an overall computerization of the system. Since AT&T had introduced some pretty killer automation on their system, it was cost-effective to do this. When telephone companies started doing VOIP, the cost of long-distance came down and the era of unlimited long distance calling was ushered in. They're still using the same lines, folks, they're just packing the data in better.

The deal with radio signaling is that the costs are decreasing all of the time. Back when the government proposed digital television, there was no way that stations could broadcast a full high-definition signal in the bandwidth allocation offered by the FCC. Television companies immediately came up with encoding schemes that would compress the signal so that it would fit within the available bandwidth. In fact, it was discovered that the spectrum offered by the FCC was a real boon: Television stations could actually broadcast three separate stations within the digital bandwidth allocation and Congress had to come down on the Networks to require that they broadcast a 16x9 HD signal when the Networks announced that they had no specific plans to transition to HD and that they might use the extra two channels to make their O&Os more money.

Sure, the radio spectrum is limited. But digital compression keeps getting better and that opens up those limits. A great example is how cable systems are able to send many more channels (and many of them HD channels) over the same coax cable as they used to use when it was limited to some 90 channels (all standard definition). Additionally, they're also able to do high-speed internet at the same time over the same cable. Frankly, I think the bandwidth is more limited on that coax cable than is in the spectrum for cellular telephony. So I think arguments about lack of bandwidth are missing the point. Also arguments about building more cellular receivers and towers are, likewise missing the point. AT&T wants to compete with the other cell phone companies

The iPhone is a real money maker for AT&T (as well as Apple). AT&T keeps adding subscribers and pulling them away from other carriers because of the iPhone. If your iPhone suddenly cannot connect, or data slows a little, you will eventually get it, so AT&T can "throttle" data and keep happy customers. Additionally, Apple might have a s

No thanks

[yabos]

I pay out the ass for data(Rogers Canada) whether I use it or not, so I usually stay on 3G and use what I pay for instead of using wifi. Yes 3G is a little slower than wifi but I don't get anything off my bill if I don't use the network so I'm going to be using the network instead of wifi.

Bad Idea

[Nato2k]

I would hope they don't switch to tiered pricing. I listen to broadband radio for about 4 hours every day and usually have over 2 gigs in usage every month. If they switched it I don't know what I would do.

Boo fucking hoo

[Anonymous Coward]

"it has also hurt the company's image because all of those customers use their phones too much, and AT&T's network is getting crushed by the demand. "

How about using some of that exorbitant monthly rate to upgrade infrastructure and attract even more customers instead of paying marketing douches to figure out how to piss off users by disabling features like laptop tethering?

Many people already nailed this

[weave]

• AT&T will do nothing that would reduce monthly revenue. Hence all those iPhone users at $30/month for data, if half of them fit into a lower tiered plan, they'd be out major bucks. It just won't happen.
• AT&T's only option under the OP's plan therefore is to leave the $30/month plan but set a limit to it and then charge higher rates for people over it. That is the only way their revenue would grow with same base, and that's all they care about.

In summary, original poster needs to eat rat poison and die a horrible death for suggesting it!

There are already workable solutions...

[managerialslime]

Every iPhone today sold is an immediate drain to AT&T's bottom line, leads to deterioration of the AT&T network, and reinforces public perception that if they only had Verizon, their calls would just stop dropping.
..

Were I the CEO of Verizon Wireless, right now, I would privately do everything I could to give Apple a hard enough time that they would stick with AT&T as their exclusive US provider. I would then do nothing to dash the wishful thinking of iPhone fans who fill up slash-dot and industry logs with wishful thinking that Verizon even wants to offer the iPhone at the end of Apple's current contract agreement with AT&T.

I wish AT&T well and fell sympathy for the no-win situation they are in. They are already in the midst of a multi-billion dollar network upgrade. Whether they can build enough new bandwidth to get ahead of the demand curve in the next one or two years is doubtful.

Right now, I not only have a conventional smart phone with Verizon, I have traded in my cellular USB air-card with for one of Verizon's "Mi-Fi" (MiFi2200 Intelligent Mobile Hotspot.) http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/store/controller?item=phoneFirst&action=viewPhoneDetail&selectedPhoneId=4726

Wirelessly supporting up to 5 devices within 4 meters of my backpack where the Mi-Fi lives, it not only connects my laptop to the web, but my iPod Touch as well!

So.my cell phone works with clear calls that do not drop and my iPod Touch works as a neat gizmo that draws on the Verizon network.

Yes, it means I have to own an extra device, but geeks like me won't settle for a single device that gives crappy results.

Tiered pricing serves only 1 purpose

[nurb432]

To screw the consumer.

Re:400 MB? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I cancelled my DSL serives and use my AT&T iphone for home internet. I get 200-300KB/s download speed half that of my DSL service, but good enough for all my rapidshare movie downloading. I had Sprint before Iphone Rev A. and got 400-500KB/s but the iphone is a much better interface then the HTC Touch PRO.

On average I use ~1GB/day. Roughly ~30GB per month. Though Im not a complete arse. I try to only download .mkv movies to help at&t... Almost HD quality movies in 400MB

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[dwightk]

Welcome to unregulated "capitalism", where a bunch of slick lunatics in $2,000 suits eat all of their seed corn in the spring, then piss and moan in the fall that they're starving, before demanding that the peasants come feed them.

One of these days, the peasants are gonna wise up, and our fatted executive class is gonna find itself on the dinner plate.

Ironic turn of phrase considering Stalin's Agricultural policies. Maybe it isn't "capitalism" but "humans."

mnb Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for the fact your thesis is wrong with regards to cable television as they didn't increase the compression, but rather increased their bandwidth through the use of more frequencies and upgrading their infrastructure for the new standards.

AT&T doesn't have that option until the point in time the FCC magically pulls more frequencies out of their ass.

Don't feed the trolls

[BigMeanBear]

This guy is either trolling or is very naive about RF.

"It's not that hard to make sure one's service doesn't interfere with the next."

Give me a break.

Re:Unlimited data is necessary for REAL smartphone

[hab136]

That /would/ be the Apple way, just like OS X on laptop. "Latch on opportunistically to any Wifi network in range, regardless of any authorization to be using it or not".

OS X will prompt you to use the network before attaching, unless you've made it a "preferred network" and told it to automatically attach to preferred networks.

Some 3rd party Windows drivers will automatically connect to any available network through their helper utility, but I don't think Windows itself will do that.

What often happens is that people connect to "LINKSYS" and from then on it randomly connects to other unsecured (and unconfigured) routers, since it's now a known network.

Besides, the original poster probably meant AT&T should provide WiFi for the phones, or that consumers could use WiFi that they already have authorization for. We want to use the bandwidth we already have, not steal someone else's.

AT&T canonly blame their selves and not the us

[Anonymous Coward]

You have got to be kidding! AT&T should have beefed up their network, they are the only ones to blame on this. Don't take it out on the user AT&T was not ready for this amount of users and they can only blame there management and no one else.

400MB? Bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

AT&T already does not allow the downloading of any application over 10MB "OTA", and puts similar limitations on other iTunes store downloads. I don't believe for a second that the average iPhone user is downloading 400MB of more a month in web content, email, apps, app updates...maybe 100MB? I download all apps at home, on my Wifi, because most of the apps (especially games) are over that size limit now. I think the network congestion has more to do with the *number* of iPhone and other smartphone users, which is something that AT&T damn well should have anticipated as they made every effort to drive sales of these devices. If I had any choice at all (unlocking and switching to T-Mobile doesn't count, their coverage is even worse), I would have taken my business elsewhere ages ago. But that's just the thing. There is no choice.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[drmerope]

That's a big assumption. There is a well known effect called 'winner's curse' relating to auction based pricing. Wikipedia summaries:

In a common value auction, the auctioned item is of roughly equal value to all bidders, but the bidders don't know the item's market value when they bid. Each player independently estimates the value of the item before bidding. The winner of an auction is, of course, the bidder who submits the highest bid. Since the auctioned item is worth roughly the same to all bidders, they are distinguished only by their respective estimates. The winner, then, is the bidder making the highest estimate. If we assume that the average bid is accurate, then the highest bidder overestimates the item's value. Thus, the auction's winner is likely to overpay.

Against historical trend

[tgibbs]

Once upon a time, this was the way almost all phone services were charged. You paid a per-minute fee, graduated on your usage of the system--more for long-distance and local. Yet more and more, phone companies have moved in the direction of flat-rate plans. Why? Because consumers don't like to have to keep track of their usage--they see value in having an expected no-surprises charge on their bill, and they are willing to pay a premium in order not to have to worry about it.

So yes, AT&T could do this, if they wanted to lose money--and customers, who will gravitate to companies that offer flat-rate plans.

... another solution ...

[ninjagin]

Open the iPhone to be available on multiple carriers, to spread out the congestion.

... just sayin'

Crappy network?

[Sheik Yerbouti]

AT&T sucks in pretty much every way. Most likely explanation is they have a crappy network, Sprint has the pre and Verizon has the Blackberry. The latter being incredibly popular and data intensive and their networks don't fold up under the load. News flash AT&T or Cingular or whatever they call themselves this week are super lame. They recently charged me a discount fee I hate them with all my heart.

I have learned to ignore Farhad Manjoo

[jaberwaki]

In general his editorials (which is what this article is) lack intellectual rigor and reek of fanboyism. IT is a shame that slate can't find a better technology writer. I regularly read slate and I have yet to read an article by Farhad that was truly insightful.

Absolute crapoloa

[Swift2001]

Farhad, once again, has courted "controversy" by writing something totally full of poo-poo.

Not only AT&T, but all networks, have got to realize that the iPhone may be first, but it's only the beginning. If they don't give us the bandwidth, somebody will.

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[AuMatar]

An item's value, by definition, is what someone is willing to pay for it. There is the chance that someone paid more than they're likely to make from the purchase, but that's their own fault if so- they knew at bid time precisely what they were getting. Nor is it likely to be true, there's a high demand for cellular services.

Good News BBC Hoody ,Burberry T-shirt

[Anonymous Coward]

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Slate.com

[Anonymous Coward]

What did you expect from slate.com?

Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe

[Anonymous Coward]

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iphone
21.4 million iphones sold to date, meaning 21.4 million new monthly bills coming in for at&t. i'll guess-timate an average of $75 a month per bill which is probably an under-estimate cause pretty much everybody i know who has the iphone, has a bill around $100.

That comes to $1,605,000,000 A MONTH!!!!

They can't build more towers and improve infrastructure?!?!?!?

Thanks for the stats from BEFORE the release of the iphone though...

-1 for failure to comprehend

[fyngyrz]

Having your pacemaker go haywire when driving past a tower installed by Joe-Bob's Discount Cell Depo: Priceless.

So... what part of having the FCC "taking a look at the output spectrum" prior to issuing a license did you not understand?

The best part is...

[Benfea]

The best part is that if we complain about things like this, we get accused of being communists.

Re:mnb Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of t

[mhollis]

AT&T doesn't have that option until the point in time the FCC magically pulls more frequencies out of their ass.

All ready done.

They auctioned them off last year. Verizon bought most of them.

This doesn't mean that Verizon gets them all. This means that Verizon gets first choice. And someone with a different signaling method (like AT&T) may be able to "piggyback" on the Verizon frequencies (I'm sure with proper payment to Verizon).

Today, with compression, you can fit an entire HD video stream in the same hard disk space (and bandwidth) as a regular NTSC or PAL signal used to sit. You can do the same thing with radio.