A Possible Cause of AT&T's Wireless Clog — Configuration Errors

AT&T customers (iPhone users notably among them) have seen some wireless congestion in recent months; Brough Turner thinks the trouble might be self-inflicted. According to Turner, the poor throughput and connection errors can be chalked up to "configuration errors specifically, congestion collapse induced by misconfigured buffers in their mobile core network." His explanation makes an interesting read.

Comments

First Time

[pilsner.urquell]

Wouldn't be the first time, except maybe for AT&T.

Re:First Time

[Fluffeh]

Wouldn't be the first time, except maybe for AT&T.

I don't think that it's limited to just AT&T - I am in Australia, so have never even had to deal with them, but I am finding that in the vast majority of Australian companies as well, simple back to basics work quality is plummeting. Everything seems to be about making everything as cheap as possible - whether or not it even functions the way it is supposed to. That also goes for the majority of customer service dealings as well.

It seems that the "Do it once but do it properly" mentality is limited to very few people and businesses. I work as a business analyst and the amount of arguing I have to do with each project to get extra money spent to do things properly (the majority of the time it saves money in the long run anyhow for other projects - I am not even taking into account the maintenance and support savings into that equation) yet I seem to always have to fight the same battles over and over.

Re:First Time

[MichaelSmith]

I know somebody who works on network infrastructure for Telstra. I suggested to him that a lot of traffic which currently goes through wireless and wired LANs will soon run through the cellular networks. He was horrified at the idea. Apparently TCP/IP traffic from 3G cells has to go all the way back to the internet backbone, so anything resembling P2P still saturates the links between the base stations and the back end. Thats a minor issue just now but in addition the links to the 3G cells are only just keeping up with demand right now.

I pointed to the European environment where 3G data is much cheaper and more bandwidth is available. He says that we don't do that kind of investment here. So at the end of the day its a money problem. Lots of profit being taken while they can get away with it.

Re:First Time

[rubi]

I think that what you are seeing is just the result of how business is conducted these days and how the money is allocated. currently I have the same perception about things where I work and I believe the change came when the company hired several "genius" executives that had degrees in finance, administration and such from reputable universities.

They came with the current trends in economic analisys "pre-programmed" (to be truthful, that is what is being teched at most universities now) and this type of mentality views projects just as a cash-flow problem, so any money spent "doing things properly" is money spent now, not in six months or two years or longer, so the calculate that a project finished early that just needs "tweaking" in a future date is better and cheaper than a project done the way it is supposed to be done (but taking longer). I see things like that every day and have been "bitten" by that kind of analisys in a couple recent projects.

Sorry if this seems like rambling, I tend to explain too much.

Re:First Time

[Fluffeh]

any money spent "doing things properly" is money spent now, not in six months or two years or longer, so the calculate that a project finished early that just needs "tweaking" in a future date is better and cheaper than a project done the way it is supposed to be done (but taking longer)

Yup, that's exactly what I am talking about, and I find it very frustrating. The time between project end and the final "tweaking" implementation where the project deliverable finally works as it is supposed to is both frustrating for the users, has a high support cost from a systems point and the "tweaks" normally end up adding much more to the cost itself than just doing it properly the first time.

I am reasonably lucky that these days I am involved in the early stages of some of the projects that I work on, and I start on the offensive for the most part, and ask for detailed analysis from project managers that I work with on the cost of the "cheap" and "proper" solutions over the space of a year or two if the project looks like it is trying to cut too many corners - and take that analysis to the program office - it's coming out of their pockets after all or on occasion directly to the business that is footing the bill for the project. While it works for the majority of the time, it's still amazingly frustrating to have to fight the same damned fight each time so that things are done properly. In my eye's it's up to the project managers to be ensuring that their projects are done properly and not end up as massive drains on support/systems.

Sadly, few of them see it that way. It's all about being cheap and cost cutting and meeting budget KPI's rather than arguing that the budgets are set too low.

Re:First Time

[zoloto]

You're one of the few and I'm glad there are more of us around. It brings a little sense of peace to my world.

I've worked in the aerospace engineering and IT industries (both non-military/military companies) and it's like pulling teeth from a hippo to make sure some things are done properly. Only _one_ engineer understood this "do it once or don't do it at all" (verbatim, his words) philosophy. it was a quality you could see in his 45 years as a professional.

"They don't build them like they used to" was an old homage my grandfather always said. I'm starting to see what he might have meant.

Re:First Time

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting Anonymously because I don't feel like being associated with an unpopular viewpoint:

Sometimes 'good enough' really is the best option for the business as a whole.  Techies and engineers often have a hard time accepting this until they've actually run a department, but it's true.

If we have $10m today, we might benefit more by doing 10 $1m projects 'pretty well' than by doing 7 $1.4m projects 'perfectly', for a number of reasons.

It could get something to market faster...  it could be that the marketplace cares deeply about some features, but doesn't care quite so much about initial quality, it could be that it's just better to run 10 experiments and see which pan out well enough to put extra money in them later... it could just be that nobody is happy, but there's simply not enough cash to do what's really wanted.... so it's do it 'good enough' now, or not doing it at all.

I mean... there are shitloads of valid business reasons to purposefully do things a bit half-assed.  Especially in very competitive markets, where there just isn't enough margin to pay for doing things "perfectly", or in markets that aren't meaningfully differentiated on quality.

I spend my life fighting with people like you... people who think I don't understand, or I'm shortsighted, or I'm just a robot.  But here's the thing: I think *YOU* are the idiot.

I think you're too stupid to realize that something is better than nothing... and that's often the choice.

I think you're too stupid to realize that if customers aren't willing to pay for quality, then we likely won't have the budget to pay for it.

I think you're too stupid to realize that if we aren't sure what's happening to a product in a 5 year horizon, we'll take a lot more risk with it, on purpose.  After all, if we think it might be going away, it's going to be the step-child.  And we're not going to tell you in advance that it might be going away.

I think you're too stupid to realize that we're not idiots.  We have reasons for our decisions.

And fortunately, not all techies and engineers are like you.  Some are eminently reasonable people who understand that occasionally I just have to say "your budget is cut by 8%.  Make it work."  And that when I do so, I fully grasp that this will incur a number of tradeoffs... but there just isn't enough money.

But whatever...  it doesn't matter.  Because at the end of the day, the techie nerds will continue to have no respect for management... and then they'll wonder why they're treated with no respect in return.

Re:First Time

[bertok]

Wouldn't be the first time, except maybe for AT&T.

I don't think that it's limited to just AT&T - I am in Australia, so have never even had to deal with them, but I am finding that in the vast majority of Australian companies as well, simple back to basics work quality is plummeting. Everything seems to be about making everything as cheap as possible - whether or not it even functions the way it is supposed to. That also goes for the majority of customer service dealings as well.

It seems that the "Do it once but do it properly" mentality is limited to very few people and businesses. I work as a business analyst and the amount of arguing I have to do with each project to get extra money spent to do things properly (the majority of the time it saves money in the long run anyhow for other projects - I am not even taking into account the maintenance and support savings into that equation) yet I seem to always have to fight the same battles over and over.

There's a simple reason for that: money is trivial to measure. Quality is much harder to measure. For example, failure rates like MTBFs often don't directly correlate into straight dollars and cents, but a small percentage chance that it might cost a large but unknown amount at some point in the future. This kind of thing confuses people, so they stick to the simple stuff. In an Excel spreadsheet, the solution that costs fewer up-front dollars is just "better" in the world view of most people.

I've had a conversation recently with the CIO of a major business who didn't quite understand why backups were worthwhile. He said something along the lines of "how does this help the business sell more widgets?".

I see the same thing, but often much worse, in big government or big bureaucracies. Project management is complex, so to simplify things, they just ignore the rest of the business or potential future requirements like they don't even exist. In the past, I've tried to point out that, say, with an additional 10% spend on one project they could halve the cost of a dozen future projects, but that's basically crazy talk to a project manager that has to minimize the cost of this project, right now. I've given up trying, and I bet a lot of other people have too.

Re:First Time

[bertok]

I know somebody who works on network infrastructure for Telstra. I suggested to him that a lot of traffic which currently goes through wireless and wired LANs will soon run through the cellular networks. He was horrified at the idea. Apparently TCP/IP traffic from 3G cells has to go all the way back to the internet backbone, so anything resembling P2P still saturates the links between the base stations and the back end. Thats a minor issue just now but in addition the links to the 3G cells are only just keeping up with demand right now.

I pointed to the European environment where 3G data is much cheaper and more bandwidth is available. He says that we don't do that kind of investment here. So at the end of the day its a money problem. Lots of profit being taken while they can get away with it.

Yeah, I love the lack of forward planning by Telcos in Australia.

Some years ago, there was talk of building some huge fiber-optic ring around the Pacific, connecting a bunch of countries. The only telco in Australia at the time that could afford to buy into the project was Telstra. One of the VPs of Telstra was quoted as saying "we have sufficient bandwidth right now". Think about it: the VP of a telco couldn't quite understand the need to maintain exponential growth in bandwidth right when broadband was taking off. Thanks to morons like that overpaid suit, Australia has been bandwidth-starved for a decade, which is why you don't see that many truly "unlimited" plans or free WiFi access points like in other countries.

Re:First Time

[cgenman]

I believe we need to change the "They don't make em' like they used to" mentality.

They cut corners and cheapened out on stuff in the past too. It's just, none of those survived. So sure we can disassemble radio transmitters made in the 40's, see the craftsmanship that went into each one, and sigh that our equipment isn't made nearly as well. But there were a heck of a lot of transmitters and things made in the 40's that simply didn't survive because they were cheap junk.

It's not helpful to go to the upper management and say "they don't make them like this anymore." That's not something which is actionable. What can change decisions is "Look at this thing which has been making money for this company for 70 years. Now look at the others which all died in the 60's. It is worth it to make 'em like this."

Re:First Time

[jyx]

Oh noes, I'm feeding the trolls again.

But whatever... it doesn't matter. Because at the end of the day, the techie nerds will continue to have no respect for management... and then they'll wonder why they're treated with no respect in return.

So you think the techies that have taken the time to explain all the reasons *why* something needs to be done are stupid.

But you can sit back and say 'loose 8% from your budget - go do it'. No reasons, no explanations just a demand. (Brillant!).

I'm guessing your also the same arsehole that screams at the 'stupid' techies for not being able to restore that sales contract from two months ago that you accidentally deleted - Forgetting about that replacement broken tape drive you refused to pay for last quarter.

As a manager you have got to be the conduit between the workers and the directors. Here's a tip, how about try talking to your techies. No seriously, talk to them. Show them your budget, show them your overheads. Ask them to provide assistance in setting the priorities instead of telling them to get stuffed.

You may end up *earning* some respect from the people who are actually keeping your company running and who don't play musical employers when things start getting to hard.

Re:First Time

[snorris01]

Another phrase I've heard thrown around is "we don't have enough time to do it right, but time to do it over again" there was a time I thought it was funny, until it became too true.

Re:First Time

[MadKeithV]

So you think the techies that have taken the time to explain all the reasons *why* something needs to be done are stupid.

What percentage of techies take the time to explain the reasons why something needs to be done, in a way that a non-techie or less-techie can understand? Usually a non-techie with more bacon on the line than the techie themselves?
In my experience, without guidance or training, the percentage is way below 10%.
I can understand the troll GP's position - though it really serves no purpose to call people who are doing their best to deliver a quality project "stupid".
In my experience the techies that "won't listen" or "won't explain" aren't being stupid, they are usually just being myopic failing to understand that they have to make their case a little more solidly than "because we have to!" or "because I say so!". Anything that potentially costs extra time or money in a business project needs to be justified with a business case. A good tech manager knows what to listen for with her techies, and how to coax the right info out of them, but there needs to be some push from the techies themselves.
Techies: your manager simply can't take your word for granted until you make a solid business case for what you want to do. After a while, you may build up trust that just your saying so is enough, but you'll have to put some work in the first few times.

Re:First Time

[dkf]

Techies: your manager simply can't take your word for granted until you make a solid business case for what you want to do. After a while, you may build up trust that just your saying so is enough, but you'll have to put some work in the first few times.

Remember, the manager doesn't understand everything (if he did, he'd be a techie rather than you) but you should be communicating with him to help him understand the key details. On the other hand, it's also important for you to understand the fundamentals of the constraints he's operating under too.

Think of it like an extra set of optimization parameters to work with on the overall problem; solving just the technical side is leaving the whole undone and any engineer worth his salt will appreciate the importance of doing things within budget. If you insist on not taking into account the business side, then you're going to have to provide a range of options with very careful descriptions so that those who do know the business side can see what the drawbacks of a particular decision are.

Re:First Time

[Angostura]

I'm not so sure that attempting to measure quality is necessarily the way forward when having the discussion with that CIO. Perhaps an alternative approach is to talk more about the value of the data which is being backed up. It can be quite illustrative to go through the data that is being backed up and work out the cost that went into generating it: "That took those staff 3 person-weeks to generate, their average salary is X" etc. It's fairly easy to get a notional cost of most data. Then you can look at the length of time that it would took to re-generate that data.

The answer to the "how does this help the business sell more widgets?" actually becomes fairly clear: 'N Employees of the company spent X hours and approximately $y generating this data, it is necessary to have for the company operate effectively, so when something happens to the data storage those N employees will have to spend X hours regenerating it, rather than working on their primary task of selling widgets. I cannot tell you exactly when the data storage will go bad, but I can tell you that given a mean time between failure of Z, it is likely to happen within the next T years.... Oh and there this data here, which we wouldn't have any practical way of generating. If that were to be lost, the impact on the business would be.. I"

and so on and so-forth.

Yes it sounds like a painful process, but the clarity introduced can be useful for all concerned.

Re:First Time

[MrNemesis]

Best thing our new management has done was to open the budgets. We all got an email telling us the expenditure for the previous year and expected expenditure for this year - the bosses were going to ask the managers to get the techie types, like myself, to go over each item and see if they were neccesary... but before they could organise a meeting they were already inundated with "this contract expired two years ago!" and "we can totally negotiate a better price on this!" messages from the front lines.

A management that understand and engages with underlings will result in a mutually beneficial relationship - I get to do the most techie work I can do and get away with minimal paperwork, simply because everyone from the top to the bottom understands the process and none of us want to waste time with redundancy. Management that don't understand their serfs and refuse to engage will continually create counter-intuitive, expensive and demoralising practices that will eventually cause all the gives-a-shit workers to leave for a management that cares... leaving the pencil pushing jobsworths to help run the company into the ground. This is true of all professions, not just computing - it's just more acutely observed in computing due to techies generally not being trustful of a (frequently closed) hierarchy.

Re:First Time

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anonymously to protect the innocent.

I'm a techie who is often chided by coworkers for my willingness to compromise on solutions in order to meet dates. I understand the business case. Shipping is a feature. However, what I cannot understand is being told to implement a partial solution and then being called on the carpet for it some time in the future as support volume goes through the roof. The business makes a case for a cheap phase I product, but never seems to plan for phase II and ongoing support, and acts surprised and mislead when it those become an issue. Everyone wants it done fast, cheap, *and* perfect the first time (techies included) but just as there are limitations to the budget, there are also limitations to just how much planning, deliberation, implementation and testing can be done, under pressure, with few requirements, little time, and an undersized workforce. If a techie could see phase II and III on the project plan, and see the budget and time allocated for support, and knew there was a plan in place to handle the fallout of the phase I compromises, I'm sure there would be no issue. But that's not often the case; phase I rolls out and the next project is started before the deluge of support calls start to roll in. Then the techie has to juggle the same high-pressure workload of a new project in addition to the support load of the old project, with no end in sight.

That being the case, is it any wonder we fight for robust solutions?

Re:First Time

[umghhh]

I was on the other side of the divide than you number of times and I must say I can understand the trade-offs well enough for an idiot techie. I have great doubts that this is the same on your time of the divide though.

I make it simple for you as you are obviously on the other side. There are basically 3 basic ways to save money while doing a project and consequently 4 different decisions you can make:

• not doing a project at all. In absolute terms it is a bummer - no costs! It has a disadvantage of not having a product at the end
• doing the project good enough for a management i.e. saving too much to have a working product. The good thing is you have a product. Bad that you do not have a product for which you can honestly claim any money.
• doing the project good enough for both sides of the divide i.e. techie and manager idiots. This is as said good enough on the level all others deliver.
• doing the project well. This has disadvantage of being costly but may have an advantage of being possible to ask for a premium for a good product.Another advantage is for projects to come so in simplistic vision visible for a simpletons that make decisions usually not visible at all: design base is good so you save on design costs.

OC last option does not work on a market where nobody is willing to pay that premium and where consequently there is nobody delivering this better quality so nobody even knows that one can do better. That is especially true in situations where customer does not care as long as the product KOW (kind of works) and its inadequacies and suffering they cause is by somebody else while at the same time barrier to entry is high enough to prevent real competition. What is really appalling is that people do not understand consequences of their actions choosing suboptimal but cheap product and wondering why it does not work.

Bottom line is a definition of where the point of 'good enough' is - neither financial nor technical expertise only are sufficient to make a good decision, consequences are usually hanging on techie necks after bonies have been consumed by managers though. Justification for direct action at least in some cases one may think.

Re:First Time

[peragrin]

Backups are easy to explain. Backups are like accounting book keeping. Storing records of not only today but also the last ten years in case of Fire, or worse an audit. Daily backups serve as a safeguard of a janitor taking out the trash and losing that important contract.

The hardest thing to do is to help some one understand something. The easist way to do it is to bridge the gap by showing them in ways they can relate too. Hence why data is stored in LOC's. It is why techies can't understand managers. Why jocks can't figure techies.

Re:First Time

[umghhh]

you of course have a point but I have seen enough of managers whose eyes went glassy before the first sentence of the explanation has even been completed. It is difficult to explain things to people who are managers either because they were technically incompetent, too agressive to work in a team or jump to frequently between companies to have any idea what the one in which they work currently actually does. Obviously the MBA courses consider the actual work beyond financial success as an uniform mass that can be sliced, transported etc without any difference on the end product - something that is evidently not correct albeit this may be avoiding perception as it is difficult to see things clearly in ever changing world of saving cuts, bonuses that they induce and position hops (made to avoid consequences).

Re:First Time

[umghhh]

I may have reservations about the ideas like scrum or generally agile methods but if done well they apparently involve technical people in decision and budget work as a matter of principle which is good as it enriches the perception engineers have thus enabling better understanding of constrains that one has to work with.

Re:First Time

[Snowhare]

I've had a conversation recently with the CIO of a major business who didn't quite understand why backups were worthwhile. He said something along the lines of "how does this help the business sell more widgets?".

I got the message of why we needed both on and offsite backups through to the CFO of my company by putting it bluntly: If we had a fire in the server room both of us would be looking for new jobs the week after if we didn't have them.

She signed off on them.

Re:First Time

[Macgrrl]

I've had a conversation recently with the CIO of a major business who didn't quite understand why backups were worthwhile. He said something along the lines of "how does this help the business sell more widgets?".

Hence JSOX and other governance requirements being legislated to make businesses take their accountability and audit trails seriously.

Re:First Time

[Fluffeh]

Hello Anon,

You might think that you hold it high and mighty over techies, but there does seem to be a lot that you don't understand in my post. For a start.

Sometimes 'good enough' really is the best option for the business as a whole. Techies and engineers often have a hard time accepting this until they've actually run a department, but it's true.

Totally agree.

If we have $10m today, we might benefit more by doing 10 $1m projects 'pretty well' than by doing 7 $1.4m projects 'perfectly', for a number of reasons.

Yes and no. It's not that simple. If doing 10 $1M projects doesn't raise support costs drastically, then yes, it's great. My problem is when you run 10 $1M projects which then cost a half million each to get to an acceptable level. As a business that means $5M less next year to spend, it might mean having to hire more support staff, or it might mean that the development budget is smaller next time round due to a tighter overall number. You are so close to my point actually, it's almost funny. If you did say do the 7 $1.4M projects and didn't have to spend the huge increase in support, yes you would be three projects down on the possible, but you would be $5M up, which at your same estimate of $1.4M is around 3.5 projects. That's a net gain. This is my point and why I often argue with the program office.

It could get something to market faster... it could be that the marketplace cares deeply about some features, but doesn't care quite so much about initial quality, it could be that it's just better to run 10 experiments and see which pan out well enough to put extra money in them later... it could just be that nobody is happy, but there's simply not enough cash to do what's really wanted.... so it's do it 'good enough' now, or not doing it at all.

I mean... there are shitloads of valid business reasons to purposefully do things a bit half-assed. Especially in very competitive markets, where there just isn't enough margin to pay for doing things "perfectly", or in markets that aren't meaningfully differentiated on quality.

I work for a multinational retailer, and the projects I am involved in are mainly system tweaking dealing with improved measurement of stock, forecasts, reporting and analysis of our data. Yes, it's important to be able to get to new opportunities quickly and take advantage of new information, I actually sit within the business side, so I totally understand this, but not if it comes at the cost of other failures of other systems which are unintentional or unexpected. I am surrounded by business users (who are funding these projects for the most part) and while they *understandably* want to have cheap and efficient projects but they don't want to lose functionality of current systems or have projects so poorly implemented that the gains are far below project expectations.

I spend my life fighting with people like you... people who think I don't understand, or I'm shortsighted, or I'm just a robot. But here's the thing: I think *YOU* are the idiot.

The funny thing is that I don't think you are shortsighted. Yes, I don't think you always see the implications of poor implementation, which in some people's eyes will term you short-sighted. However, I look at all the projects that come within our area with a fresh set of eyes. If the project is sound, then great, roll with it, if it's going to be a headache for everyone from the business through to IT support, then no, re-budget and look at it, or keep the business informed of the shortfalls within the project plan manage expectations to the point where the business is well aware that it will be a rough ride. You thinking I am an idiot honestly doesn't help anyone - especially if you are actually trying to be productive for the company you work for. If you are not as technical as people giving advice and explaining things, it's not a bad thing, it's a different set of s

Re:First Time

[MadKeithV]

Maybe my vision is coloured because I'm a techie who's been a manager, and went back to an intra-company consulting role to act as the translator / mediator between the techies and management.

Management here actually has a clue, or rather, they know that technically they don't have a clue and will defer to the people who *do* know.

AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[bertoelcon]

This is not really news at all. They spend little to nothing to keep their network up to the devices they have on it. This misconfiguration of buffers (if that is really a cause at all) is probably because they might not hire people with any knowledge of what they are doing to keep costs low.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

They keep cost and quality low because that is what their customers actually want, or at least, that is what they are willing to pay for.

Let's face it. The western consumer values one thing above all else; price. The cheaper the better. The public has shown repeatedly that it will value cost above quality. AT&T's customers are still with it after all. Why should AT&T attempt to improve the quality of its network if people are a) willing to pay for what they currently have, and b) won't pay for any attempts AT&T will make to improve quality. In the telecoms business, ordinary people can and will jump on the cheapest package available.

It's been a race to the bottom in more industries than this one. So we really can't complain when such shocking lapses in quality occur even in the largest companies.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[dziman]

I don't believe AT&T is the cheapest provider.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[socsoc]

They are far from the cheapest. MetroPCS and those other all you can eat plans are the cheapest, now they even include international calling.

One reason people are still with AT&T is of course the iPhone, but also the locked carrier status on phones in the United States in general.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[MojoRilla]

The public has shown repeatedly that it will value cost above quality.

Then why are people flocking to AT&T for the IPhone? It certainly isn't the least expensive smartphone out there. Perhaps it is because it is the best smartphone out there, and people are willing to put up with a crappy provider to get the device. Perhaps quality does sell, at least for devices.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[c0lo]

This misconfiguration of buffers (if that is really a cause at all) is probably because they might not hire people with any knowledge of what they are doing to keep costs low.

Connecting to other topics: would you trust them to manage better the traffic shaping or would you consider that the network neutrality is the cheapest?

• when is "cheaper" coming from the provider's pocket (and is passed on to the customers) and when is "cheaper" coming actually from offsetting the provider cost on the expense of you customers (thus the quality sucks)?
• is this self-infliction accidental (they don't know better) or is it deliberate (making you wait results in taxing you higher)?

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[forand]

Europe has a vastly superior cell network than the US and on average consumers do not pay significantly more than US consumers. Furthermore US consumers are locked into a contract which ensures a steady income for the service providers. The major difference being populations density but this should not be an issue since the cell providers are given a subsidy to build out into rural areas. I think that the real issue is not the Western consumer but the US corporation which extracts every last cent of value from the current consumer to give it to investors and or executives with little to no thought towards how the company will make money in the future. So while the US consumer may strive to keep prices low (as they should in a free market) the US corporations are taking the profit they have and investing nothing for the future.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[Kenja]

Which totally ignores that elsewhere you get higher quality for lower cost...

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you think ATT is cheap? Seriously? Do you even live in this country? ATT has average price plans and higher than average data rates. Their prepaid service is the single most expensive of all the carriers. God forbid you send a text message on it.
 
Meanwhile, there are a half a dozen carriers that offer unlimited plans at 50$ a month while ATT still doesn't have a fully unlimited plan of any kind. And the closest you can get is about 130$/mo, and that STILL doesn't include unlimited txt messages.
 
ATT prices themselves as the "top teir" service, and then provides sub-standard service. The only thing they have going for them is they have by far the best standard coverage on the west coast. However, both Tmobile and Verizon are catching up rather quickly, and exceeding ATT in web access in most areas. G3 is worthless in beaverton/hillsborro areas during rush hours, as the network is so overloaded you might as well find a hotspot instead. (luckily, those are plentiful).

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[rubi]

How true!

The best example is tourism. The current model is to have many "all-included" cheap packages to some resort facility with everything in it so the tourist doesn't have to even venture out of the complex during the whole vacation. LOW PRICE IS KING.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[rubi]

One reason people are still with AT&T is of course the iPhone, but also the locked carrier status on phones in the United States in general.

The locked phones come as a consequece of people wanting cheap phones (subsidized, they call them).

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[Anonymous Coward]

So we really can't complain when such shocking lapses in quality occur even in the largest companies.

Er... Yes we can. As a matter of fact that's the feedback that tells companies that better quality is desired. And AT&T isn't the cheapest people can get, and as has been pointed out, people on AT&T are buying iPhones. And even excepting all that, with an outfit the size of AT&T, well paid engineers will easily pay for themselves by making better use of the existing equipment.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[wickerprints]

Not as it applied to the iPhone. Remember, people were lining up to pay $500 for the iPhone when it first came out--and yet it was exclusively on AT&T. Only the 3G models were subsidized.

You can't simply ignore the fact that there are a large number of iPhone users who would not choose AT&T as their carrier, but are willing to sacrifice the quality of mobile service for the convenience and features of the device. For a significant proportion of iPhone (and hence, AT&T) users, the issue therefore is not directly about cost. Many of them are capable of paying $100/month for service. $200 off the price of the phone is nothing in comparison to the cost of a 2-year contract. If it means better coverage and more flexibility, they would have no problem paying the unsubsidized cost of the phone in exchange for not being forced to go with AT&T.

As for non-iPhone devices, yes, your statement has some merit, but this is only true to the extent that handset manufacturers have traditionally provided similar devices to multiple carriers. Because of the runaway success of the exclusive iPhone+AT&T arrangement, competing handset makers are now seeking to copy that model, which ultimately does not bode well for the consumer. It is my longstanding hope that Apple will soon terminate their exclusive arrangement with AT&T, because it is not only good for them (as it increases their reach and provides them more leverage with the various carriers), but it is also good for the consumer.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[coaxial]

They keep cost and quality low because that is what their customers actually want, or at least, that is what they are willing to pay for.

[CITATION NEEDED] You'd have an argument if AT&T was the lowest cost provider, but they aren't. MetroPCS is. Also this doesn't make sense from a market perspective either. You have the leading smart device on arguably the worst national network, yet AT&T continues to get subscribers almost exclusively due to iPhone sells. This makes a scarce resource -- AT&T's network -- even more scarce. Supply and Demand tells us that customers would be willing to pay more to access that network, especially given that demand isn't just steady, but steadily growing.

To quote Red from Shawshank Redemption, "I do believe you're talking out your ass."

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[obarthelemy]

Until I see reliability data that proves otherwise, I don't think Apple is about quality/reliability. At least, not in my experience.

Aplle is about design, ease of use, and trendiness. My in-laws iPhone broke after 2 months. My brother's iMac, after 2 years, several thing in a row (CPU fan, HD). And let's not get even close to the Mighty Mouse I got suckered into buying in for a bday.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[obarthelemy]

Your statement seems to indicate laziness / lack of adventurousness ?

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[RudeIota]

To be fair, MojoRilla's argument was it's one of the "best smartphones out there", not the highest quality and certainly not the most reliable.

The iPhone has managed to put itself in the hands of many people who've never had a very nice phone, so I think the iPhone is far better quality than a large portion of its user base is used to and comparable to other phones in its class.

For what it is worth, I believe Apple's selling points are in this order: Features, quality, price (the last two are very close, for better or worse). On the flip side, I feel many computer manufacturers are price first, features second, quality third. But of course, most companies have 'cheap' and 'expensive' lines of computers, so that varies. One thing I can say though, is Apple support is far superior to any support you'll get from another computer manufacturer these days.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[Anonymous Coward]

People are willing to put up with a crappy provider because they are shallow and insecure about themselves and the iphone fixes that.

  The iphone's true function is to impress others and to make you feel good about buying the coolest. product. ever. Your argument is kind of like saying that American cars must be better because people flocked to buy hummers/escalades. People are morons.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[sjames]

Just how expensive is it to trim the buffers? Hiring one routing genus could solve all their problems.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing I can say though, is Apple support is far superior to any support you'll get from another computer manufacturer these days.

Fact: Everything I say is fiction.

I don't know what your getting at but I think Apple has support that does damn good job at keeping that reality distortion field up.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[dUN82]

Totally agree ! Have being lived in 3 countries for some considerable time and as a mobile phone user in China (9 yrs), UK(5yrs), and the US(3yrs), I have to say: US has the worst cellphones selection, worst cellphone call quality + coverage, highest tariffs, lengthiest contract, and most unfair contract. I have to settle with AT&T when I arrived in the US since I have my own GSM phone which keeps out of Sprint/Verizon, and honestly speaking, I am glad I brought my own phone, because there really isn't anything that you can choose from until the iphone came out, I do not want to start on comparing different phone brands, but I do want to have a phone that run on its original OS from the phone company, and is unlocked or at least unlock it after the contract, which apparently is too much to ask for in the US. I will also not blame the poor network coverage since low population density etc, but I pay around twice as much for the same mins I pay in the UK and do not let me start comparing the cost per min in China, further, how on earth can you still charge people for receiving text msgs and answering phone calls? Even state owned duopoly or future tri-poly Chinese mobile provider dumped that policy, and it would be a total joke to UK and EU customers. 2 year contract is one of the worst, and I think they started on 18 month contract in the UK about 2 years ago, but they still give you the option to do a 12 month contract if you choose to pay a bit more for the handset, just imagine a situation that you might not even be in US long enough to finish the contract, what should you do then? The worst part is nothing seems to change or getting improved. Finally, the issues or rotted with US has the worst telecommunication business model, capitalism really suck shit and just does not work for the people!

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[Alpha830RulZ]

Europe has many more customers in a much smaller geographic area. I wonder if it isn't a lot cheaper to service them.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[darkpixel2k]

Furthermore US consumers are locked into a contract which ensures a steady income for the service providers.

There's a challenge for you. Go and buy an unlocked cell phone. Then go to any of the major carriers and try to signup for service without a contract.

I tried this a few years ago and not a single carrier would sign me up without a two year contract. (What's the point of buying an unlocked phone if you can't take it from network to network without locking in to a contract. I might as well get the damn subsidized phone.)

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[sjames]

Let's face it. The western consumer values one thing above all else; price. The cheaper the better.

That's a natural reaction to the nearly complete lack of truth in advertising enforcement and corporate cost (and quality) cutting. When every purchase is a crapshoot for quality no matter how reputable or unknown the brand, consumers will naturally buy the cheapest every time on the principle that if they're going to get screwed, they might as well get screwed for the least amount possible.

Unfortunately, unless or until strong consumer laws start nailing the liars to the wall, a company wanting to compete on quality will have a hard time staying in business. The few that do provide quality mostly do so because their leaders can't stomach throwing morals and ethics out the window.

Consider, ISP A figures they can provide service capped at 750GB/month for $30 or 250GB/month for $20. They will clearly lose business to the other ISP advertising "unlimited" use for $25 even though they actually cap it at 250GB.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

The public has shown repeatedly that it will value cost above quality.

Then why are people flocking to AT&T for the IPhone? It certainly isn't the least expensive smartphone out there. Perhaps it is because it is the best smartphone out there, and people are willing to put up with a crappy provider to get the device. Perhaps quality does sell, at least for devices.

I think a fundamental problem with discussing this here is that there are (at least) two different perspectives at work. There's the Slashdotter who has read "AT&T network problem" time and time again over the last few months and then there's the iPhone customer who, rather than basing his decision solely on these headlines, knows several people with an iPhone who have never complained about the network. Somebody who has made up their mind that they don't want to touch it at all cannot understand the decision made to do it, who did their research in a different manner.

I'm probably jinxing myself here, but since I'm both a Slashdotter and an iPhone customer, I can tell you what it's like. I've only really seen a network problem once. I went to a party at Venice Beach on the 4th of July. We all got full bars and were trying to call people to help them find their way in. We found that we couldn't make calls! Full bars but no calls? I discovered that if we turned 3G off, the phones would suddenly work. My theory, which is wholly unscientific, is that so many people in the vicinity had iPhones that the tower was effectively DOS'd. That's my whole 'network outage' story in the 11 or so months I've had the service.

I do occasionally get dropped calls. I have not had this happen any more often than it did with Sprint or any other carrier I've had. Most of the time when it does, I've already been on the phone like 2 hours. I think one night it was particularly bad. Like the call dropped 3 or four times. That was unusual. With the exception of the silliness on the 4th of July, it has never made me say "wow, this is the worst service I've ever had!" Given how radios work, I'd be surprised if I ever had a service that had a once-a-year dropped call or something like that.

Most of my coworkers have iPhones. The only ones I've ever heard complain about reception were the ones that bought the original ones. That's not a huge surprise, they don't support 3G (AT&T is shifting resources at the expense of the EDGE network) and they have the metal plate in the back that is suspected of lowering signal quality. Beyond that, everybody's been happy. Word of mouth spreads, more and more people get iPhones. Frankly, nearly all of the complaints I've heard about AT&T and/or the iPhone come from Slashdot.

Maybe AT&T has better service is Los Angeles. I don't know. I'm not claiming to have the answers, here. I don't think 'fashion' has much to do with the people I know having iPhones. I think it's because they know that when they get a phone they're stuck with it for two years, so they want one other people are happy with. That's why before the iPhone, everybody I knew had Treos. (Blackberries and RAZRs being second and third place, respectively.)

I don't think many people are really fighting with AT&T's network. I'll concede, though, that it's difficult to generalize about millions of people.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[SheeEttin]

Then why are people flocking to AT&T for the IPhone?

Uh... They aren't. They're flocking to the iPhone. AT&T is incidental.
If it had been Sprint, T-Mobile, or some other provider, sales would be nearly identical. (Actually, given the amount of bitching about AT&T, sales would probably have been slightly higher.)

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[beej]

My German friend gets some-number-of-megabit tethering on his phone for something around $40/month. It's positively criminal.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[mveloso]

1. the US is much bigger than Europe, with multiple overlapping jurisdictions. It's easy to cover any of the European countries, because they're small and there wasn't a technology transition.

2. there isn't as much rural subsidy for cellphones. Universal service was for landlines, mainly.

3. the problem is cost vs coverage. You can build out rural areas, but you make less money because there are less people. For urban areas, you start running into interference problems. Plus, you have to constantly build out your infrastructure (see AT&T's infrastructure problems).

Europe has it easy. It's not evil corporations (which, to be frank, is a retarded and simplistic view of how things work) - it's pure cost/benefit.

Example:

France: 211,207 square miles
Texas: 268,601 square miles
US: 3,537,441 square miles

If AT&T only had to operate in Texas, it would be able to do pretty well. AT&T's footprint is national, however. Do you develop Texas completely, or do you cover Michigan and Texas? How about extending to Missouri? etc etc.

Then that's current coverage; what about LTE? How about maintaining that infrastructure?

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[bruce_the_loon]

It's amazing how in a developing economy like South Africa we can manage subsidized handsets (down to $8 on some), have no incoming call/sms costs and still have fairly reasonable rates. Without network lock-in.

USA, you are being royally screwed. And I should know it, it is a daily occurrence down south.

And before someone comes flaming with the recent articles about reducing interconnect costs, I know.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[cgenman]

Let's face it. The western consumer values one thing above all else; price. The cheaper the better.

DSL was cheaper than cable, but it became marginalized because the network was unreliable and slow.
Dial-up is now a fifth of the cost of most high-speed internet connections in the US. But it's not even considered an option now for most people.

I agree with the sentiment, but don't forget that the western consumer is also lazy and impatient. Combined with cheap, these three things form the legs of the crippled turtle that is our modern telecommunications system.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[drtsystems]

My own personal anecdote: AT&T is HORRIBLE. I switched to AT&T for the iPhone and am getting the hell away from it as soon as my 2 year contract expires. I will switch to (in my opinion) an inferior phone (the Droid/Sholes/whatever they are calling it now) looks promising, to get away from AT&T. I absolutely love my iPhone, but it does me no good when I can't access the internet or make/receive calls when I want to.

The difference from Verizon is astounding. I can count on two hands the number of times I didn't have service on Verizon. And most of those times were things like camping trips in the woods. I NEVER had a dropped call or iffy voice quality in a place I normally have service. The only time I ever experienced a dropped call on verizon was when I drove/walked out of a service area. AT&T on the other hand is COMPLETELY different. If I tell someone to call I don't count on receiving that call. Even in downtown Columbus Ohio, which AT&T has supposedly full 3G coverage (and I have 5 bars all the time). I went through a period of time where I only received about 50% of calls. Quality is TERRIBLE (sometimes I have weird echoing issues, voice dropouts, etc.) I have gone through multiple SIM cards and iPhones. Others with AT&T report the same issues.

I have noticed that people who have never had verizon (or probably sprint, can't attest to their network, but I hear its pretty good and roams to verizon in most places) seem to have a different outlook on cell phones. They assume the poor quality and dropped calls are normal. Its funny, the AT&T fewest dropped calls commercials really only resonated with AT&T customers. As a verizon customer at the time I would always think who ever has dropped calls? I don't live in a rural area.. my mom (a verizon customer also) once asked me so what is a dropped call? Yet if I had AT&T since the dawn of ubiquitous cell coverage, I would be thinking to myself, wow dropped calls I hate those, I'm glad I'm on AT&T.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[bruce_the_loon]

Be careful of equating land area coverage with the size of the networks. There's nearly twice as many people in the EU than the US, and even ignoring the possibility that a greater percentage have cell phones, (Finland had 100% penetration) that's almost 100% more customers on the network.

The European providers have to manage greater customer density than the US ones do. It's harder to do, making sure frequencies overlap properly, reducing interference etc.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[_merlin]

That excuse comes out all the time, but it really doesn't add up. The big US cities have massive population density, and very poor mobile service.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[jcr]

The western consumer values one thing above all else; price.

If that's what you believe, then you should never try to run a business.

-jcr

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The public has shown repeatedly that it will value cost above quality."

Not so, I think. The problem is that markets aren't transparent. I don't have perfect information about coverage, quality, alternatives, etc. If I go looking for a cellphone plan, there are some things that are easy to compare (# of minutes/month, price) and other things that are hard (who has good coverage in the places I go, quality of customer service). Usually, the best you can do is compare a few different plans, check a few reviews online (and hope they're accurate, and not a corporate shill or someone with a grudge) and make a decision. All other options being equal, yes, I probably will decide on price. What else are you going to base your decision on? Am I going to get six cellphones from different carriers, and test each one?

For many products, "you get what you pay for" just isn't true. Generic drugs, most supermarket-branded generic products, gasoline, bottled water, USB flash drives, DVD discs - paying more doesn't necessarily get you something better.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[Anonymous Coward]

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Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this depends on how you look at it. For those who buy into Apple it is their own stupidity and they deserve it. We SHOULD be taking money from those who don't deserve it.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey troll, can you not tell low cost from "lowest cost"? He never said AT&T was lowest cost, did he? NO, nor was he trying to argue that.

Do you not understand that something can be low cost without having to be "lowest cost"?

Either you are a troll, or you have no sense -- of logic, or common.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[jimicus]

What you have described is a very shortsighted view of cost. Not that I think it's inaccurate - I'm sure a lot of companies work that way.

Let's say it costs $X to have your network run by a team of smart people who really understand what they're doing, who configure things so these errors don't happen. It costs $X * 0.666 to have your network run by a team of people who don't really understand what they're doing and so these errors to come up from time to time.

The argument in favour of taking the cheap route basically states "... but our customers are prepared to put up with the occasional inconvenience and it reduces our costs so it's all good". Great. But there's another side to that argument. Phone companies charge according to data and calls going across their network. When there's a fault which results in significantly less going across it, they can't charge as much. Yet their staff don't all go home and earn $0 the minute that happens. The electric company doesn't stop billing them the minute that happens. So as soon as there is a major issue it costs real money.

I would like to believe that someone's actually done the arithmetic to figure out precisely how much each minute of downtime costs and, more to the point, how much it costs to avoid each of those minutes. But considering how your average telco seems to operate these days, I doubt it.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[dkf]

1. the US is much bigger than Europe, with multiple overlapping jurisdictions. It's easy to cover any of the European countries, because they're small and there wasn't a technology transition.

There was a technology transition, and there most certainly are overlapping jurisdictions. Just because you don't see them from your perspective doesn't mean that they aren't there. What there is though is more of a willingness to do something about it.

2. there isn't as much rural subsidy for cellphones. Universal service was for landlines, mainly.

Who cares about the boonies? Why is there such bad service in US urban areas? You'd think that there'd be plenty of people there to pay...

3. the problem is cost vs coverage. You can build out rural areas, but you make less money because there are less people. For urban areas, you start running into interference problems. Plus, you have to constantly build out your infrastructure (see AT&T's infrastructure problems).

Yet Europe is more urbanized and yet manages to solve it with more companies in the market. It can't be an insurmountable problem.

If AT&T only had to operate in Texas, it would be able to do pretty well. AT&T's footprint is national, however. Do you develop Texas completely, or do you cover Michigan and Texas? How about extending to Missouri? etc etc.

Oh for goodness sake! Stop rolling out that "Oooh we've got a big land area" apologist BS. If Texas and Michigan were next door to each other, it would take an almost identical amount of equipment to provide service to them as in their current arrangement as cellphone towers simply don't cover that great an area anyway; the only difference is the requirement for a long-distance call infrastructure between them which already exists. Gee! Guess that means it's not a technical problem that's holding you back.

I reckon that the problem is one of a failure of regulation that's allowed the build-up of large monopolies that feel no need to compete. No (real) competition, so prices are huge and service poor. After all, you're not going to do anything about it as you've got no choice. Either beef up your regulation or get the lube out and bend over...

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[TheRaven64]

What problems? AT&T is pushing hard against network neutrality, demanding their right to shape or drop traffic in arbitrary ways to reduce network congestion. If it turns out that there is no real congestion, then their arguments disappear. It only becomes a problem when they are losing more money from customers leaving than they are getting through encouraging legislation to let them milk the customers that they have. And, given that they have a geographical monopoly in a lot of places, it seems that it will be a long time before this is a real problem. From AT&T's perspective, anyway. Of course, if they get their legislation then these problems will probably suddenly disappear and they will claim that it was the introduction of filtering that fixed it.

And no, I don't think they caused the problem intentionally, I just think that they chose not to fix it intentionally.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[kannibal_klown]

In terms of price?

Nope.

At the very least T-Mobile is cheaper, though I don't know about Verizon + Sprint.

T-Mobile's coverage by me stinks, otherwise I would've gotten a Google Android phone from them around the time Apple released the iPhone 3GS.

So far I'm not having many problems with AT&T, save for a week about a year ago when a cell tower near me was misconfigured and not allowing incoming calls to any cellphone. But almost 10 years without any real issues is pretty good.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[Voyager529]

I hear that a lot. But given that my coverage has gotten consistently better over the past five years I've been a T-Mobile subscriber, I wonder how many other areas of the country this is true for. It seems to me that T-Mobile has been doing a pretty good job of trying to correct their image of people never getting service. If you're happy with AT&T, then more power to you. But take a second look if your last experience with them was a decade ago. You might be surprised. And no, I don't work for them. Just a happy customer.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[Andy Dodd]

Second most expensive after Verizon. In general, you get what you pay for, although Verizon's quality of service compared to their price has suffered over the past 2-3 years.

T-Mobile and Sprint are dirt cheap but have horrific networks. T-Mo in theory has a roaming agreement with AT&T, but in reality that agreement seems to fail so badly that putting a T-Mobile SIM into a phone will cause that phone's IMEI to be blacklisted with the local AT&T tower even after an AT&T SIM is put back into the phone. (I tried this back when my ex had T-Mobile and couldn't get service anywhere near my apartment/work - I put her SIM in my unlocked phone and had no service where I had 4 bars before. I put my AT&T SIM back in and the phone couldn't get service for 15-20 minutes!)

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[jc42]

Finally, the issues or rotted with US has the worst telecommunication business model, capitalism really suck shit and just does not work for the people!

Well, that's just silly. Capitalism isn't supposed to work "for the people". It's supposed to work for the shareholders and top management. If you're working for "the people", you're a socialist, which is a theory that has been firmly rejected by the American political system. If you've been reading slashdot long, you should have read about a zillion explanations of this by now. Anyway, stick around, and eventually you'll reach enlightenment, and it'll all make sense.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[Andy Dodd]

At least as of Feb-March of this year, T-Mobile was waaaay behind the ballgame. In theory they have a roaming agreement with AT&T so that T-Mo users will at least have voice service in AT&T areas, but in reality, a T-Mo SIM will frequently result in your phone's IMEI being blacklisted by an AT&T tower for 15-20 minutes, even if you swap an AT&T SIM back into the phone. (That's why my ex switched to AT&T. Her phone didn't work at all anywhere more than 1-2 miles from her home, and nowhere near where she worked/frequently spent her time.)

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[sjames]

The thing is, nothing in network neutrality says you can't shape traffic, just that you can't shape it based on the destination's willingness to pay you (double dipping) or in order to push your own services over a 3rd party service.

Simple shorthand, traffic shaping cannot consider the destination IP.

My personal preference for traffic shaping where necessary would be to use a fair queueing system that honors customer set QOS bits and at the customer's option tags packets w/ QOS based on the service.

ISPs oppose that because it would then be easy for customers to find out how small a percent of the gazillion megabits they were promised is actually available on demand.

Of course it's hard to say what their game is given their disinformation campaign's attempt to confuse the FCC and Congress into thinking that unless they're allowed to create a confusing web of cross billing and double dipping, the entire internet will collapse.

My personal preference would be to remind them that the people could just take most of their network in return for payments already tendered in the form of grants, special dispensations, and tax breaks. Especially since they have yet to fulfill their obligations.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[Anonymous Coward]

The European providers have to manage greater customer density than the US ones do. It's harder to do, making sure frequencies overlap properly, reducing interference etc.

Sure it might be harder to do from an engineering standpoint but it doesn't cost that much. The problem in the US is one of number of towers == high cost.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if consumers paid higher monthly fees to AT&T, the company still would not upgrade its network because they are in the business of making money, not providing a quality service. During the 1990's, all the telecoms begged & pleaded with Congress for deregulation. Why? So they wouldn't have to upgrade their networks. They told Congress that deregulation would free them up to make continuous improvements to their networks, but what it actually freed them from the requirements to make their networks better.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[kannibal_klown]

If you're happy with AT&T, then more power to you. But take a second look if your last experience with them was a decade ago. You might be surprised. And no, I don't work for them. Just a happy customer.

I don't think T-Mobile was a contender around me 10 years ago... I think the closest was VoiceStream which got bought out by T-Mobile in 2001.

Still, I've talked to some people in the area and they admit that T-Mobile stinks by us. Then again I know some people a few towns over that swear by it, but they never come to our town.

Where I live Verizon has the best coverage, but I'd rather go with a service that uses SIM cards for the convenience. AT&T's coverage is quite good by me and like I said, only 1 big problem in 10 years is pretty good in my book.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[Alpha830RulZ]

Yes, but the carriers still have to pay for the coverage over the rest of the country. The cities are dense, but Nebraska and Montana aren't.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[metamatic]

Well, I can only assume you didn't try T-Mobile or AT&T. They've both connected me using a bare SIM card in an unlocked cell phone. I'm on T-Mobile with no contract and an unlocked phone right now.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[dgatwood]

The locked phones come as a consequece of people wanting cheap phones (subsidized, they call them).

If that were the case, you could easily buy unsubsidized phones in the U.S. At least on Verizon, that isn't even an option. They won't sell you a phone without moving to a new contract, often at a higher rate with fewer minutes or reduced features. That's why I ended up on AT&T. Similarly, if the high cost were due to people wanting cheap phones, we would get a rate cut after the subsidy period like they do in Europe.

The locked phones come as a consequence of the cell service providers seeing an opportunity for customer lock-in and taking advantage of it to the maximum extent possible. Nothing more, nothing less.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[dgatwood]

It depends on where you are. My CDMA phone on Verizon was dropping three and four calls per night. After switching to AT&T, I drop calls only in a few dead spots.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[rantingkitten]

I'm tired of the "US is large" and "population density" arguments. Fine, I get it, the US has a huge amount of space and getting cellphone or broadband access out to Nowheresville, Wyoming is hard. But that doesn't explain why service, pricing, and general offerings are still so terrible in major American cities.

Saying "they have to deal with interference" is nonsense -- Japan and Europe manage fine, with, as everyone keeps pointing out, a higher population density. So, why can't we, in Atlanta, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, or any other highly-populated city, get insanely fast and cheap internet access and cell networks that can handle anything we can throw at them?

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[Anonymous Coward]

Europe has many more customers in a much smaller geographic area. I wonder if it isn't a lot cheaper to service them.

A cell tower can service a fixed number of users, in a fixed area. In the US (suburbs and exurbs), you have the problem of covering a large area, but generally speaking not many users.

In European areas, you don't have to worry about as many large open spaces, but you'll have more people to cover in a given area. So in the American country side, you might need two towers to cover the large area, but in the European country side you could need two towers to be able to service all your customers.

There could be an advantage in Europe as you might not have to drag the back haul fibre as far to reach a urban(-ish) area as you would in many places in the US.

This is of course just a hypothesis / guess on my part. Curious to know what kind of numbers / stats you'd need to confirm / bust this.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[chihowa]

But that doesn't explain why service, pricing, and general offerings are still so terrible in major American cities.

While there is much less of an argument for the lack of cheap local broadband options, there is a fundamental issue with the expectation of local mobile phone service providers: lack of mobility. In fact, there are cheap local mobile phone service providers and I assume that they're doing alright, but I imagine few people are interested in a cell phone that doesn't work (or becomes extremely expensive to use) outside of the city they live in.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[iroll]

1. the US is much bigger than Europe,

European Union:
1.7 M sq mi
500 M people

United States
3.7 M sq miles
280 M people
Oh, and WITHOUT the unserviced arctic wastes of Alaska:
3.1 M sq mi

So a "European" cell provider like T-Mobile realistically covers 2/3 the area of the US. Wow, what an advantage for them. And somehow they manage to cover the US as well, without collapsing upon themselves in a singularity.

with multiple overlapping jurisdictions

Are you smoking crack? The US has *one* jurisdiction that regulates cellular communications: the whole damn thing, by way of the FCC. Cellular service doesn't come under nearly the same local regulation that a landline company comes under, because cellular services are not granted local monopolies.

The Europeans were the ones at a disadvantage, thanks to their "multiple jurisdictions," and they managed to hammer out universal guidelines.

Seriously, do you think that a French cellphone on Orange (T-Mobile) suddenly stops working when you cross the border to the UK or Germany?

Because much like my phone hasn't died at the state line since about 1998, pan-European cell phone companies cover the whole continent through their own networks or through agreements with other regional providers.

You're right on one account: it's not "evil" corporations. It's corporations that are optimized for the regulatory environment that we have here in the states. If we did the simple things that the European regulators have already done, like mandating unlocked phones, our corporations would optimize for THOSE conditions and continue making billions of bucks. Ta-da.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[Longstaff]

TMobile Even More Plus.

TMobile is very friendly to unlocked phones. If you buy one of their subsidized phones, they will unlock it for you 90 days from purchase. They even have a gray market phone support department; they support the phones they don't even sell...

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[darkpixel2k]

Well, I can only assume you didn't try T-Mobile or AT&T. They've both connected me using a bare SIM card in an unlocked cell phone. I'm on T-Mobile with no contract and an unlocked phone right now.

I didn't try T-Mobile, I'll give them a shot next time. I did try AT&T though and they said they couldn't get me signed up without a two year contract. Period. (That was their response in-store. I didn't bother calling their customer service though.)

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[darkpixel2k]

TMobile is very friendly to unlocked phones.

Wow. I just checked out their site. For the same price as an AT&T unlimited plan, I can get a family unlimited plan. Now if they only had the HTC Hero subsidized... ;)

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[dUN82]

I do get the part that US is a deeply capitalized country, just look at the news, politics still debating what sort of medical reform should take place where millions of people is suffering, the same as the education system. I am not suggesting capitalism nor socialism will totally solve every problem and work for the people, but time after time, we will be hit harder and harder each time capitalism system simply fails ! The US gov is just facilitating capitalism, and let it get it way through yet another financial crisis, but it just does not seem to have any effect what so ever to Corporation America.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[Mr Z]

Hmm... My wife's clamshell iBook worked right up until the day she put it away because she moved from Mac OS 9 to OS X. Our Blue & White Mac G3 is still going strong. Ok, we needed to replace the hard drive after 4 years, but that wasn't made by Apple. Oh, and the monitor died after 6 or 7 years. That's a pretty good run for a CRT anymore. The machine itself is 10 years old now.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[Longstaff]

Not yet...maybe soon...Part of their whole Project Dark thing is for them to start carrying high-end handsets. Rumor is that they'll have the Nokia N900 in Q1 '10.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[jc42]

The US gov is just facilitating capitalism, and let it get it way through yet another financial crisis, but it just does not seem to have any effect what so ever to Corporation America.

Oh, I dunno about that. A year or so ago there were lots of big companies facing a disaster, and they were talking about firing much of their top management. Now those companies are reporting huge profits, and the top management is getting millions of dollars (per person) in bonuses. And it was all paid for from donations by the US Government.

Seriously, analysts have reported that those billions of dollars that went to corporations who were "too big to [be allowed to] fail" went mostly to 1) officer bonuses, 2) stockholder dividends, and 3) purchasing smaller companies. Hardly any of it went into investment in capital resources or infrastructure. It went straight to the bank accounts of people running the companies (and the smaller competitors who were bought out). This doesn't sound like not having "any effect what so ever"; it sounds like a major job of propping up some large companies and their top people (and helping them get rid of small competitors).

At least that's how it's being reported by much of the US media. It's interesting to see which parts of the media present this as a case of "welfare for the rich, nothing for the poor who are still losing jobs", and which parts frame it as the government heroically saving the leaders of the corporate world. It's pretty easy to find both attitudes. But nobody seems to think that the government has done nothing significant.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[dUN82]

I agree with you , i think i may have miss the word, 'positive' in front of 'any', do excuse my english... I firmly believe leading eu countries such as uk, france, germany etc have a better business practice and the gov is their to serve the people and governing a open, just and free market such as the telecommunication market in eu; they also have a way better social welfare system...this is a bit off-top but it's such an irony when you consider majority of the 20th technologies and business models, theories was invented in the US, but found a better practice elsewhere

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[rubi]

Not so much laziness as unwillingness to spend much more on a vacation. Remember that most of those taking these all-included trips are working lower-middle class people that can't spend too much on a vacation. The important part, and I'm sorry I left that out, is that the model does not generate as much economic wealth as advertised to local populations because the trips have to be as cheap as possible without sacrificing a certain degree of quality. The local population only receeives a minimum-wage income and the price (cheap) of food/services acquired by the resorts.

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[rubi]

// deleted //

USA, you are being royally screwed. And I should know it, it is a daily occurrence down south.

// deleted //

Not only USA. In my country we have just implemented number portability and they will charge a one-time fee to every client, even if you never use the portability service!

Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted?

[Anonymous Coward]

golly gee how many wireless providers merged to re-form ATainT? what coverage areas did each have?

Hm

[Anonymous Coward]

His explanation makes an interesting read.

I'd like to think that's a given, considering it's a news story. At any rate, from TFA:

The bottleneck link is the over-the-air link, i.e. the connection from radio access network or UTRAN to the Mobile Statation (MS) in the above diagram, therefore the critical buffers are those at the UTRAN. In practice the UTRAN includes both the basestations (called Node-Bs) and the Radio Network Controllers (RNCs) which coordinate handovers between basestations (among other things). Because of hand-overs, the amount of data buffered at the Node-B is relatively small. It's the buffers at the RNC that must be large enough to deal with the delay variations in the radio network and yet small enough to induce packet loss when the network gets congested.

I am not a network engineer, but how exactly could 8 second ping time be not noticed by the AT&T engineers who set up, configured, and monitored their OTA link? I would think that we're not talking about some dude's set of bridged dd-wrt linksys routers, but some serious heavy-duty RF equipment. I'm thinking on the order of several zeros...

Re:Hm

[zoloto]

incompetence

Re:Hm

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they don't monitor it. They don't even send a guy to check on it unless several people on the same cell log a complaint, something which may take several calls to customer service.

Re:Hm

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the key word you assumed was being followed is "monitored". They setup the network and walk away and never monitor. I just upgraded my ATT DSL service but tested the speed before I submitted the change request. After the request was fulfilled, the speed remained the same. I called and 20 minutes later they had "corrected" the problem. Set it and forget it is the problem.

Re:Hm

[mikep554]

Maybe some PHB equates packet loss with dropped calls, and told the engineers that packet loss would also equate to job loss. Not the first time a person in authority forces a bad configuration choice based on a complete misconception of a situation.

Re:Hm

[phantomfive]

I don't have an iPhone and don't have experience with this particular problem, but in general there aren't automatic monitoring devices for mobile networks out in the field, so if AT&T wants to know what is happening on the devices, they have to send a team out with tools and monitoring devices to check. If this is a problem that only happens when several iphone users get together in an area at the same time, then the problem may have gone away by the time a team comes out to check (if they come at all).

Re:Hm

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy... they aren't monitoring their OTA link... or just about anything else on the network. AT&T has cut every single function of their business to the bare bone. Even if they wanted to monitor this, they don't have the manpower, and those they do have do not have the talent.

Re:Hm

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly, I suspect it's because they still use "T1"/telco based connectivity and just aggregate T1's to provide bandwidth to a majority of the sites. Most of them get 1 or 2 T1's to feed all the data needs for a given site.

This is impossible, I've seen the buffer settings

[Anonymous Coward]

You see, most blokes, you know, will be buffering at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your buffer. Where can you go from there? Where?

I don't know.

Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?

Put it up to eleven.

Eleven. Exactly. One more buffered.

Software Robustness

[dziman]

I find it just as problematic that applications software on Windows Mobile and other similar mobile OSes do not handle large network delays gracefully.

There is often very little feedback to the user of the software that actual progress is being made in attempt to communicate over the network. Sure, we can use the fuzzy "bars" indicator on the device to help diagnose what may be the cause of our trouble, but that doesn't indicate actual network conditions due to capacity. We also have animated indicators that web browsers and other applications use, but these still don't indicate any kind of actual success to communicate. In web browsers we get text alluding the DNS lookup, and connection attempt, but when you combine 'Connecting to...' with a simple spinning indicator or progress bar, that often doesn't convey that the message reached any destination or how long until you can expect any response from your local network based on its operating conditions.

The writers of the software may not fully understand the implications of being on a network with high packet loss or long round trip times. So they timeout or have errors that could be resolved by more delay or retry. In a mobile OS we should probably take this into account at the OS level, and opt out of this behavior only when the programmer or user specifies (if that's exposed).

Re:Software Robustness

[Com2Kid]

Having the OS deal with large network delays is not a trivial issue to solve.

If a mobile app waits too long to tell the user "oops connection failed" the app risks looking unresponsive. I have one mobile app that retries for a good 4 or 5 minutes before popping up an error dialog, the entire time the app is just sitting there twiddling its thumbs when it is obvious to me that it needs to restart the entire connection process over again.

On the other hand, if apps don't wait long enough, they risk resetting a connection when in fact the bytes being waited for are on their way.

Given how cellular network latency can vary so much, there isn't really a "right" solution. Is 30 seconds too long or too short? I have seen network latencies of that length before...

Re:Software Robustness

[Techman83]

Some advanced info would be handy in apps, but the people that generally benefit from that information can find it out in other ways or already understand the nature of the Internet. Most people would either glaze over or swear at their machine regardless of the information presented.

Re:Software Robustness

[kaiser423]

Blackberries are awesome about this with the bi-directional communication arrows. When I'm with friends in an area of low reception, they're all walking around randomly trying to call every two yards, and waiting 15 seconds before determining that its not going to work. I walk around until I see an incoming arrow. I freeze and then make a call. Works wonderously.

Re:Software Robustness

[harmonise]

I walk around until I see an incoming arrow. I freeze and then make a call. Works wonderously.

And what does the outgoing arrow mean? A call is a two way conversation so I don't see what point you are trying to make.

Re:Software Robustness

[Anonymous Coward]

I walk around until I see an incoming arrow. I freeze and

people and cars crash into me

Re:Software Robustness

[nick0909]

The arrows show data traffic as well as voice traffic. It is very nice to see a whole lot of up, down, or both arrows flashing when an app is sitting "unresponsive." You know data is flying so nothing is wrong, just wait and the app will respond when it has the data it needs. The arrows (at least on my 8330) are large for the faster network, and thin for the slow network so I even know when it will take longer because of poor network coverage. I used a Windows Mobile phone for a week and it drove me mad not knowing what was going on with the network data.

Re:Software Robustness

[ratboy666]

TCP/IP completely shields the application from the underlying transport.

A call is made to resolve a name (dns), a connection is opened, and... data flows. Or not.

So, your speculated "connectivity feedback" information has to come from a lower level than the application. It has to be in the stack.

Some platforms do incorporate this feedback from the stack. It just isn't an application responsibility. Even on platforms with good feedback (Blackberry), the applications are not aware.

And the application layer programmer should DEFINITELY not be making these decisions. If the application wants something other than TCP, the developer does have the option of using UDP.

Re:Software Robustness

[Anonymous Coward]

I walk around until I see an incoming arrow. I freeze and

people and cars crash into me

It's worse if you're driving and slam on the brakes the moment you get an incoming arrow.

Re:Software Robustness

[Anne Thwacks]

How hard is it to pop up a dialogue box saying "It looks like your carrier has gone in to liquidation. Try another? [yes] [no] [Oh, Wait]"

Re:Software Robustness

[BodeNGE]

On Windows Mobile you can reduce the MTU to help on long-thin networks (high delay, low bandwidth). Sadly, it is about all you can do...

Re:Software Robustness

[TheRaven64]

This information does percolate up the stack. Packet loss causes data to queue up in the kernel's send buffers and when these get full then calls to send() on a blocking socket will block, and on a non-blocking socket will return EWOULDBLOCK or will only read a small amount of the data. If you see this happening a lot, then an application may be able to switch to a less-chatty mode. Even a browser-based app can get some feedback. If you put the current time in the closure that you pass to an asynchronous HTTP request, then you can tell how long it took to complete. If it's taking a very long time, then you may want to batch a few requests together, or eliminate some of the less-important ones.

Re:Software Robustness

[smoker2]

Well that's funny, because on my WM5 phone, when I connect the network symbol changes from just bars to a 3g symbol, and when I am in a high speed area the symbol changes to an H. And the browser still shows locating, connecting, transferring data, just like a desktop browser. What else do I need to know - if things seem to be taking too long, I simply disconnect the network (touch the network symbol > click disconnect) then reload the page and try again. Hardly difficult. What annoys me are the apps that assume that if there is no network activity, they can just complain and shut down - Google Maps, I'm looking at you.

Re:Software Robustness

[natehoy]

I think the point is that the Blackberry shows arrows (completely independent of the application you happen to have in the foreground at the time) that show real-time network communication, and whether that communication is currently happening in a "slow" or "fast" network (which in the case of my older Blackberry means "GPRS" or "EDGE", since I don't have a 3G phone). So if I'm running my browser, I get "connecting", "transferring data", etc, but if the network indicators stop I know something is wrong (which may or may not have anything to do with getting a cell signal). So if I see "transferring data" but the network indicators stop, that means the site is probably slow and I can move on to something else while it finishes loading. The best analogy is the little network traffic indicators you get in Windows XP - "das blinkenlights" means you have some form of network traffic going on. It's not a HUGE difference, there's plenty of information available without it, but it's handy information to have.

I'm confused about your comment on Google Maps. Even with no network connectivity, it starts up just fine for me. It does show an error, and of course if I don't happen to have any local maps in the buffer it just shows placeholders, but I can fire up the GPS and track my location down to three meters on a grey featureless screen if I feel some compelling need. Of course, if I happen to have some map data in the buffer, GMaps will do its best to display what it's got. That may be a difference between the implementations of Google Maps on the various platforms - some may be more dependent on data signal than others (especially, of course, if GMaps isn't implemented as a "native application" but as some sort of web app).

safari sux

[peterflat]

it doesn't help that the safari client that the iphone uses will double load a page. Even if the user closes safari for a couple minutes, when reopening the browser the current page will reload. lose lose for everyone.

Re:safari sux

[Anonymous Coward]

Warning: This will go slightly on a tangent away from AT&T since the unnecessary reload topic was brought up:

I used Opera from about 2001 to 2006. My version installs were 5 and 6, about 2 numbers behind the standard back then. I'm not sure if this has changed because I've moved away to FF, Chrome and Safari on windows, but page reloading is a problem in 2 ways, and Opera beautifully gave you cached pages until you tried to reload. You could force more frequent loads if the default behavior screwed with your news sites though.

2 big things:

1) If you have 30 tabs open from a whole week's browsing session, and the browser reloads ALL of them at startup, you'll choke your DSL connection for a couple minutes, and also peg your processor with these "modern browsers," except maybe for Chrome's multithreaded load.

Some graphic boards have high-transit forum sections that auto-disappear in 20 minutes. If you were reading a long discussion and couldn't finish, closed your browser and reopened it past those 20 minutes, the page would just be gone when you returned. I prefer the cache behavior that lets me see the page there for weeks until I try to hit "Refresh" to see if new data has been posted.

Plus, browsers like FF tend to load everything into RAM, forget about your hard drive cache (I know there are settings to move things around, but they don't seem to do anything even with just one or two tabs open.) If you are looking at 20 1MB jpegs pictures that should easily be stored in your HD, and try to restart the browser, the session will start downloading all the images again. Us low-bandwidth DSL users can't afford to waste time like this.

I think FF 3 is a bit better at caching and reloading less by default. Remember, you and I can figure out how to go in and try to use a very, very large HD cache. If the browser logic does some weird stuff ignoring you anyway, then imagine what this does to average Joes who don't know why the pages are taking so long to display?

Re:safari sux

[Anonymous Coward]

That's probably because the memory is too low. On a 3GS I can switch back and forth between and Safari keeps the pages loaded. But if I free memory manually, all my tabs reload when I reopen Safari.

Re:This is impossible, I've seen the buffer settin

[base3]

Whoever modded that down is a humorless dick.

Zero packet loss = epic fail

[Anonymous Coward]

How can you expect to have zero packet loss on a wireless network? That's just stupid.

Please fix this ATT!

(I'm not holding my breath... )

Re:Zero packet loss = epic fail

[MBCook]

Wow. This is kind of amazing.

Nothing on this page (as I type) talks about zero packet loss, except you. That means you read the article.

Of course, the article says that AT&T has set their buffers large enough to prevent packet loss due to congestion in transit, not that they expect no radio packet loss. The problem is that TCP/IP needs packet loss to tell it when it's going too fast and AT&T's decision causes this to fail spectacularly at times.

The trolls read the articles. Weird.

Re:Zero packet loss = epic fail

[TheRaven64]

You can have zero packet loss on a wireless network, as long as you have large enough buffers. You generally can't have zero frame loss, but if you handle retransmission at the data link layer then the only packet loss you see is caused by packets being dropped after the wireless part of the network. Due to the relationship between latency, packet loss, and throughput with TCP, it's much better if you can retransmit dropped frames over the wireless part of the network and keep the IP packets buffered and slightly delayed at the receiving end than if you just drop them and require the remote server to send a packet back requesting retransmission.

Re:Zero packet loss = epic fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Trolls reading articles on Slashdot?

It's... The Twilight Zone!

Re:This is impossible, I've seen the buffer settin

[Anonymous Coward]

When did you last meet an unfunny penis?

Why am I not surprised

[Constantin]

Every time I deal with AT&T I am amazed that anything works at all over there. My phone almost always shows five bars at home, yet frequently calls don't cause the phone to ring - they go to voicemail after pretending to ring. The jaded amongst us could suspect a deliberate misconfiguration of phones and signal strength monitoring. Similarly, it would not surprise me if AT&T data networks weren't about as reliable as the signal strength indicator on my phone. The recent alleged blurb from an Apple "genius" in NYC that 1/3 of all iPhone calls get dropped seems to point in that direction.

That a cell-phone won't work everywhere and perfectly every time is a given. However, wouldn't it be nice if the companies that stood behind these networks would actually be held accountable for some of the advertising statements they make? What it comes down to is that we're dealing with an oligopolistic market, where only a few carriers can achieve the scale and the coverage to satisfy most mobile customers most of the time. On the flipside, that also means that said carriers can be truly dismal when it comes to customer service, back-end efficiency, etc. since consumers don't have many choices. Considering the ongoing consolidation in the industry, the only way out seems to be a trust-busting activity on the part of the DoJ to regulate the industry.

Not sure that is the better alternative... nor what the best structure for a regulated market would be.

Re:Why am I not surprised

[socsoc]

Not sure that is the better alternative... nor what the best structure for a regulated market would be.

There's a map for that.

Re:Why am I not surprised

[Not_Wiggins]

I presume you have an iPhone. A friend of mine that has jailbroken his phone pointed out to me that the bars represent the 3G signal strength, and not necessarily the regular network strength. I was considering AT&T because the T-Mobile strength in my house is terrible. He had 3-4 bars on his IPhone, but when he turned off 3G and went to EDGE only, it averaged 1-2 bars. Point is, I don't think the signal strength always means what we think it means. 8/

Re:Why am I not surprised

[socsoc]

Cause they aren't necessarily the same tower? Your scenario makes perfect sense. Except that jailbroken has nothing to do with it and if you are getting 3G signal, that is your "regular network strength." It only degrades to EDGE if you can't get a 3G signal (which for my major metropolitan area, is nearly any building you walk into).

Re:Why am I not surprised

[drtsystems]

It doesn't help that Apple's "answer" to poor 3G signal in one of the early 2.x was to inflate 3G signal strength to the point of irrelevance. Its basically either full bars 3G or none. I rarely see anything in between. And even if I do chances are less than full bars means I won't be able to make/receive calls or use data. Hell even with full bars chances of being able to successfully use AT&T's network is probably only about 50%.

Re:Why am I not surprised

[drtsystems]

See my previous post. One of the early 2.x updates for the 3G ridiculously inflated 3G signal strength. Because apple's customers got mad that the phone had higher indicated signal strength on EDGE network (even though they did due to AT&T's 3G network having poor coverage and in many places running on the inferior-penetrating frequency of 1900mhz (or 1800 whichever it is) instead of 850mhz that they had their EDGE network.

Re:Why am I not surprised

[Mr_Silver]

The jaded amongst us could suspect a deliberate misconfiguration of phones and signal strength monitoring.

There is actually no standard scale for signal bars on a mobile phone. As such, the mobile phone manufacturer implements a scale pretty much however they want. The upshot of this is that when the signal strength is the same, one model might show 4 bars but another only 2.

Years ago Nokia was notorious for showing a stronger signal than other phones did - meaning that when people sat around and compared the number of bars they had, the Nokias always looked the best - even though the actual strength was the same. I'm not sure if that is still the case.

Re:Why am I not surprised

[natehoy]

I gave up on using bars as soon as I discovered that, if I held the ALT key and pressed the NMLL keys in sequence on my Blackberry, I got signal loss in dB instead.

Correlating the signal loss to "bars" (by switching back and forth between the modes) has demonstrated to me that the range where I get "5 bars" of signal is pretty significant, and the lower bars each cover an increasingly small range. Anywhere north of about -80 is considered "full signal", and about -110 is "lost signal". It maintains "2 bars" down to about -100, which is just barely enough to make a call and a clear sign that the signal is almost gone. At "one bar", I'm at about -105 and I'd be lucky to be able to make a call at all.

So, yes, the "bar" system on AT&T seems to be inflated (and yes, I know I'm basing that statement on a single, older AT&T Blackberry 83xx Curve, but at least using actual signal strengths rather than random call drops). If I use the "bar" system, I'd really want to find an area with at least 3 of 5 bars to make a telephone call unless it was an urgent call. Much below "three bars" and you start getting noticeable static and other artifacts and you run a real risk of the call dropping.

However, a "missed call" can be caused by factors other than measured signal strength. Your local tower may have too much load to connect the call, there may be a glitch in your phone, etc. My mother-in-law had that problem with a new AT&T phone and they ended up swapping out the phone, after which everything worked perfectly.

Why? Because they care...

[SuperKendall]

The public has shown repeatedly that it will value cost above quality

Right, that is why Apple laptop sales have tanked in the downturn. Oh, wait.

Why should AT&T attempt to improve the quality of its network if people are a) willing to pay for what they currently have, and b) won't pay for any attempts AT&T will make to improve quality.

Because those people if they dislike the network enough, will leave eventually. That is the motivation to improve on what they have now, never mind they want to stop the customers bitching who are losing them new customers right now. They have plenty of reasons, they even have plenty of money from the influx of iPhone people. There's more than enough motivation, it's more a question of execution now.

People will pay for quality. For some the cost is financial. For others, the "cost" is that they will not buy an iPhone while the AT&T network has issues.

I know this first hand

[NynexNinja]

I worked for AT&T in several parts of the country on their core networks, and in the early 2000's they had misconfigured all of their Solaris boxes and I worked with the infrastructure group to implement a startup script on Solaris to tune all the ndd settings for performance. The problem with Solaris is that by default all the TCP, UDP, Ethernet, etc settings are set for a Desktop workstation, not a server. Most system admins know to tune these settings, otherwise in a lot of cases a multi-CPU box will perform as slow as a 1 CPU box. Anyway, at specific companies I worked with (AT&T Broadband / Worldnet in St. Charles, MO was one big one), all the servers were configured without the proper settings for a server, so we had all kinds of issues as a result, a big one is that the tcp accept queue is not set high enough and so connections to daemons will drop after a low number of connections, making it appear that the box can't handle the connections...., As a result, they had spent millions on numerous servers (in one situation they had over twenty 12-cpu servers just for smtp...

These changes seem small, however, changing "ndd" kernel parameters on a Solaris box is not a single task, it is an infrastructure-wide task, and therefore requires the coordination of dozens of different groups, it really took a long long time to get this script implemented. It was called "S99nddfix" and it had all the ndd tunable parameters in it. Later when I worked at a different AT&T group in a different state, I noticed my script had been implemented on all the Solaris servers in the 200+ server environment.

Re:I know this first hand

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked for AT&T

...

and didn't sign a confidentiality agreement?

Re:I know this first hand

[Kumiorava]

I haven't worked for AT&T but at one point I tried to see what traceroute from San Diego to Finland would show me because ping was really slow. The traceroute I run jumped from west coast to east coast twice before going over the atlantic. I suspect that routing rules might need some fine tuning as well. It doesn't really matter if you have very fast network if the data keeps on jumping between servers creating extra traffic, I can imagine in my case the packet could have reached the destination with much fewer jumps.

Of course that visual traceroute I used might not really give accurate locations of the servers.

Re:I know this first hand

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh...AT&T broadband/Worldnet has never been managed out of St Charles, MO. It has been managed out of Bridgeton, Mo(12976 Hollenberg Dr, specifically) since at least 98 when I started working there. Please don't make things up.

Re:I know this first hand

[Anonymous Coward]

The traceroute I run jumped from west coast to east coast twice before going over the atlantic.

How else is it suppose to go through the NSA secret closet?

Re:Why? Because they care...

[hitmark]

quality, and fashion, one not having to be the other...

Re:Why? Because they care...

[MBCook]

Because those people if they dislike the network enough, will leave eventually.

This is the problem. Thanks to the competitive barriers (such as the inability to move phones between all but two of the top four networks, and none of the top 3) moving can take a long time (2 year contract must expire) before someone can move networks unless they want to pay a large fee.

And then, you probably lose your phone. So even if you like it, you have to buyer either a different phone from the new provider, or the same one in their version. Both will cost you even more money, unless you're willing to be stuck on another 2 year contract.

The US system is very well setup, as far as carrier lock in goes.

It's rather amazing how many people go to AT&T for the iPhone. I think they said about 1/3 of their iPhone customers are coming from other networks. I wonder how many more people would get iPhones if it wasn't for their current contract? That's a big reason for many people I've talked to. The rest who want an iPhone are in the "I'd love it but I'm not touching AT&T again" camp.

Cool Story

[dirkdodgers]

Brough

Good defaults are essential

[QuoteMstr]

That's why to the greatest degree possible, libraries, programs, and algorithms should be auto-tuning. You can provide all the knobs you want, but people won't actually touch them. They'll choose which library, application, or operating system they use based on the default settings, so you'd better damn well make sure the default settings are good --- or even better, that you don't need settings at all.

Re:Good defaults are essential

[Anonymous Coward]

"knobs are for knobs" Various OpenBSD dev's quote that often

Re:Good defaults are essential

[cerberusss]

That's why to the greatest degree possible, libraries, programs, and algorithms should be auto-tuning. You can provide all the knobs you want, but people won't actually touch them.

I've seen a push for a pluggable process scheduler in the Linux kernel, starting almost two years ago. To this date, Linus has refused to include it in his kernel and I have to say I agree to that.

Re:Good defaults are essential

[TheRaven64]

Irrelevant to the grandparent's point. End users won't pick a scheduler, but people producing distributions will. All schedulers make a trade between latency and throughput. On a heavily loaded server, you want the bias to be towards throughput. On a typical desktop or laptop, you want it to be towards latency. Someone creating a desktop-focussed distribution will pick one option, someone creating a server-focussed distribution will pick the other. The end user won't care in either case, they'll just pick the desktop or server version of their OS. Lots of policy decisions in an OS depend a lot on the type of the workload. Assuming one size fits all is a mistake.

Re:Good defaults are essential

[greed]

And, of course, distributions are STILL free to put whatever scheduler they feel like maintaining in Linux. Linus doesn't have to accept it for a distribution to include it.

That's the great thing... and sometimes the worst thing... about Linux. You can bolt in anything you're prepared to code, and it doesn't MATTER if the "vendor" doesn't want it. That just means you have to handle merges and testing on your own when new kernels come out.

Fashion is transient

[SuperKendall]

quality, and fashion, one not having to be the other...

Indeed, and that is why many companies built atop the foundations of showy fashion are gone now. Fashion is transient and fickle. Apple however delivers a quality product that delivers new customers through loyalty and word of mouth. If this were not so Apple would not be a tenth of what it is now.

It doesn't hurt that it is fashionable, too. But that is not why I and so many other people buy Apple products.

Re:Fashion is transient

[hitmark]

apple was on the death bed, until the ipod got fashionable (partially thanks to those white headphone wires, as then people could tell a ipod user from a million other dap users at a glance), making the logo a fashion brand.

but then this also depends heavily on where in the world one lives. USA seems basically saturated with apple (and thanks to the majority of the tech blogs being run out of USA, that gives a "interesting" slant on things), while europe seems to be mostly wintel, with apple machines showing up in media companies (tv, newspapers, music and similar) and the education courses related to those business areas. My guess is that this is more legacy then quality, as the people doing the education cut their teeth on the earlier apple products running photoshop and similar. And so is maintaining a brand mostly out of habit, as they are teaching rote actions, not true understanding of whats done.

there is however the "new market", that is unix geeks that basically use osx for its bsd kernel and shell. Sadly, with microsoft using strong arm tactics on the resellers of their os, so that unless your only selling windows on x86 boxes the oem price goes stratospheric, apple is the only company in the position to push a unix box on supported hardware.

i would say that if HP or dell really took a good look at linux, or even one of the BSD's, they could match apple on quality. But microsoft keeps them on a short leash, just watch how HP dumped their customized linux offering when windows 7 launched.

Re:Fashion is transient

[obarthelemy]

I'm not sure Apple products are of better quality than your average branded PC. They are more of a pain to fix, that's for sure, and don't seem that well built. Anyone got real maintenance data ?

Re:Fashion is transient

[Rakshasa Taisab]

Sorry, but the thing about Europe is bullshit. The macbooks are so popular in Norway that pretty much _everyone_ in university has one. And I'm not saying 'everyone' as in 20%, but literally almost everyone.

Re:Fashion is transient

[cgenman]

The iPod was popular in no small part because Apple realized a 2.5" HDD based player wasn't worth the extra 40GB of storage if the darned thing didn't fit in your pocket. So they made the first Hard-drive based portable MP3 player that *actually fit in your pocket*. And people paid a premium for the expensive 1.5" drives, both in cost and in capacity. But they could actually carry the damned things, and still carry a lot of music with them. The distinctive earbuds and solid ad campaigns helped the cultural iconography. But if iPods didn't actually fill a need, they wouldn't have won out over Archos or other MP3 players of the time.

Apple *gets* usability. Compare the iPhone to the multi-million dollar junk that was flooding the market at the time that it launched. I remember trying a friend's latest Motorola smartphone that had built-in flip-out 2 MP camera with real integrated lens system. We both had to futz around with it for about 10 minutes until we found the "take a photo" option. Eventually we found it buried seven or eight menus deep under "User Options" of all things. It was a total pain.

The usability of a lot of Apple's consumer electronics is underappreciated simply because, when done right, it's just the way that things are supposed to work. If you're browsing the internet and get a call, of course a pop-up should come on-screen and ask if you want to answer it, then immediately switch to call mode. Every phone since the iPhone does this. Of course, my phone before the iPhone had the ringer go off, and forced you to navigate away from the internet to the main menu, where you could then enter phone mode and answer the call. Seriously, it's amazing just how mentally crippled the development of cellphones in the US was before the iPhone.

A lot of people in the US are willing to pay a premium for electronics that they don't want to throw through a window in frustration. I'm not sure why this is such a hard concept, but people would rather buy devices that don't piss them off.

Re:Fashion is transient

[SuperKendall]

I'm not sure Apple products are of better quality than your average branded PC.

Consumer satisfaction surveys say otherwise. My own experience with multiple PC's and Macs also say otherwise...

It's also not that Macs never break, it's that dealing with Applecare is so much nicer than any other computer support agency. When I say "product", I mean the whole package and not just the hardware.

Re:Fashion is transient

[MortenMW]

University != everyone
Take a look at the rest of Norway, Apple products (except for iPhone and iPod) are quite rare. I rarely see any Mac's in any of the companies I visit. In the company I work for there is _one_ Macbook and over 100 PC's.

Re:Fashion is transient

[obarthelemy]

Declared (as opposed to observed) customer satisfaction is unreliable. There's a good chance someone who paid twice the price for something will say they're very happy with it, if only because not being happy would make them a sucker. Works for handbags, too ^^ On the other hand, some people are less narcissistic and will require more from a more expensive product. Again, objective data is needed, such as % failing within 1 year.

Also, newer products / recent purchases tend to bring in better reviews. People are more careful with their new toy, and the device hasn't had time to break.

I understand your point about Applecare. I have no anecdotal evidence for or against it, I'm a DYI kinda guy. On the purely hardware side of things, I haven't noticed Apple being any better than other 1st or 2nd-tier vendors, nor good DYI.

Re:Fashion is transient

[Anonymous Coward]

and when they make crApple their sales fall

Re:Fashion is transient

[TheRaven64]

Universities are a special case. Apple gives their biggest discounts to students - I got lower priced Macs as a student than some of their corporate customers, while most other manufacturers largely ignore this market. Students, by and large, don't have to interoperate with other software. If there's something that they need to run then there will be lab machines provided for them to use, they won't be expected to run it on their own machine. It's much easier to run a minority OS as a student than almost anywhere else.

Of course, if a lot of graduates are entering the work force with more Mac experience than Windows, then this may have a knock-on effect in industry over the next decade or so...

Re:Fashion is transient

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't hurt that it is fashionable, too.

What about say companies that built there add ons for Apple? Oh yeah most of them are out of business because of the fickle way Apple treats this market.

iPod accessories are non existent now that it is a fading product line and everyone jumped to the cooler looking iPhone.
iMac accessories are ported PC accessories now. Back in the early mac and II days it was a first tier market.
Newton? Gone.
The list goes on and on of 'fashion' things that have come out of Apple. All cooler than the previous tawdry Apple junk you were using.

*MOST* people buy Apple to be cool. You are one of them. You flaunt it to others. with
But that is not why I and so many other people buy Apple products. Your 'cool' is the tech.

These days Apple is just a re-factoring of other equipment that is out there. You open them up and it is the same MB's from other companies with a slick shell. It is like buying m&m's for the hard candy shell and then saying the chocolate is the best ever.

Apple however delivers a quality product
Ask people what they think of their iPods after about 2 years. These are consumer grade products. They have a lifespan of on average 2-3 years. More if you are careful with them. I still have apple stuff from them from the early 80s and it still works. I also know people that literally keep their iPod on their desks and have been thru dozens.

In the end you are *PAYING* for cool. Don't delude yourself over the 'premium' name that they have slapped on there. Why would they do this? Because you are willing to fall for it.

Re:Fashion is transient

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to disagree here, the build quality of all apple laptops I've seen so far has been terrible. My own macbook's case is slightly bent at the edges and the screen hinges are too wobbly. The battery does not line up with the case (there's a 2mm difference) and don't get me started about the keyboard paint.

Their stuff does have quality parts, like the my mabook's screen (which is lovely). But their build quality is the worst of all other reputable manufacturers (perhaps bar Acer).

A long time is still time

[SuperKendall]

This is the problem. Thanks to the competitive barriers (such as the inability to move phones between all but two of the top four networks, and none of the top 3) moving can take a long time (2 year contract must expire) before someone can move networks unless they want to pay a large fee.

You say that like it does not matter because the period of switchover is two years. But it matters a great deal still, because many people will still leave then (or if they are mad enough pay the fee). A company like AT&T must be forward thinking in what problems now do for subscribers in future years, never mind the day when T-Mobile is also carrying iPhones (we have seen Verizon will not happen).

It's rather amazing how many people go to AT&T for the iPhone. I think they said about 1/3 of their iPhone customers are coming from other networks. I wonder how many more people would get iPhones if it wasn't for their current contract?

Probably quite a few, as I said that was a factor too. Which is why the two year thing doesn't really matter for motivation because they are losing new customers in addition to the ones potentially lost in two years.

Re:Why? Because they care...

[Darkness404]

Right, that is why Apple laptop sales have tanked in the downturn. Oh, wait.

I think that will change once Windows 7 is mainstream. Everyone hated Vista. Now it seems like everyone loves 7 and Snow Leopard only got a "meh" response from reviewers (not because Snow Leopard is bad it just doesn't have anything revolutionary, the fact that 7 runs at a decent speed is considered to be "revolutionary" in the PC world). There are two people who use Macs, people who have grown up using Macs and people who prefer Macs. When faced with Vista, a lot of people started to realize they prefer Macs.

Because those people if they dislike the network enough, will leave eventually

"Eventually" isn't very soon when you have a 2 year contract with early termination fees that are through the roof.

That is the motivation to improve on what they have now, never mind they want to stop the customers bitching who are losing them new customers right now

All 4 major carriers suck though. Lets see here, AT&T has network issues and isn't cheap, T-Mobile might have great customer service, good phones but it has a pathetic amount of 3G coverage compared to the others. Verizon might have a great network, but it isn't exactly cheap and a lot of their phones (at least used to) suck terribly with many features being stripped out of them. Sprint might be cheap but their coverage isn't great.

And none of them have a phone with as many apps as the iPhone, yes, Android and WebOS are great, but they still don't have the amount of apps as the iPhone nor as much support from companies such as game developers and the like. And don't get me started on Windows mobile.....

For others, the "cost" is that they will not buy an iPhone while the AT&T network has issues.

...And who is going to look at a few "geek" articles about the iPhone and decide not to get it? Yeah, sure, we all know about how AT&T's network is crap, but people see the iPhone and want that. They only see the network once AT&T has them hooked on a few years agreement.

Non-obvious cause

[NixieBunny]

If you take the time to RTFA, you will see that the problem with TCP management (as Mr. Turner describes it) is that you have to cause the system to drop packets occasionally when it's near but not quite at saturation, to let the TCP device at the other end know that the network is getting congested. If there are no dropped packets, TCP ups the packet rate until the network becomes clogged.

So in this case, zero packet loss is a setup for disaster instead of a desirable quality.

The trouble is that it's not an intuitive solution to a problem, the introduction of occasional packet loss. It's usually something to avoid.

Re:Non-obvious cause

[sjames]

The big problem is that it's exactly the opposite of the way ATM networks are managed. They can't seem to wrap their heads around the way it's done on an IP network.

Re:Non-obvious cause

[shentino]

I'd much rather have ECN than packet loss. If an application is told straight up that it's suffocating the network, then it can back off immediately and smoothly instead of getting stung by packet drops.

Re:Non-obvious cause

[TheRaven64]

You do not have to increase packet loss to slow down TCP connections, you just have to increase latency. You can see this quite easily if you set netgraph to add a two second latency to every packet and watch the throughput on something like an HTTP connection drop.

Zero Packet Loss

[Anonymous Coward]

Zero packet loss may sound impressive to a telephone guy, but it causes TCP congestion collapse and thus doesn't work for the mobile Internet!

I was in the standardisation group that specified the RLC/MAC layer (ETSI SMG2, later called 3GPP TSG GERAN) and our priorities were not the behaviour of TCP. We were designing the radio layer to provide a bearer service for the higher layer protocols, at that time they were X25, IP (UDP and TCP). The "problem" we were trying to solve was the tendancy of the radio layer to fade, have multipath and generally lose packets. The RLC layer was designed to deliver error-free packets, in sequence over the radio layer. Generally that is exactly what it does, and does well. If it didn't then tehre would be no mobile internet.

What we did find to be a significant performance problem was the asymetric channel. The uplink is usually the root of the TCP performance issues, UDP works much better. When the discrepancy is higher than 10, the downlink is ten times faster than the uplink, then the TCP Acks don't arrive in time and it stalls. Sadly a faster uplink is difficult and expensive to provide.

Re:Zero Packet Loss

[NixieBunny]

It sounds like the solution might be to implement a custom version of TCP that takes the asymmetry of the physical radio channels into account. Since most mobile platforms have a much higher downlink packet count, a group ack method could provide relief to the unreliable uplink channel.

Disclaimer: I've only designed one wireless packet data link system in my life, and it was symmetrical.

Re:Zero Packet Loss

[BodeNGE]

OP here. It could possibly be done between the IP stack of the device and the GGSN. The six layer stack diagram in the article does show the IP layer going between the two, but in reality it doesn't. On the mobile side there are usually two IP stacks. The GSM one to the GGSN access point (APN), and the stack presented to the client AP, or the the PC connected to it (calleed Terminal Equipment in GSM speak). If you tracert from the device you will usually see the device IP as a loopback address. The GPRS/3G part then takes over and spits our the rest of the IP connection on the GGSN side. The GGSN side may give you a public IP if you pay for it, but usually it is a pooled address, and not externally addressable. You could change the "inner" IP link between the GGSN and MS if it was implemented in the MS IP stack. You wouldn't need to implement it in the outer bearer servce between the PC and the destination IP. Other than that there really isn't much you can change/tweak in the network. Smaller buffers will cause packets to be discarded, then TCP takes over as normal. Setting the MTU size on the GGSN also helps. Optimum from the MS perspective is around 1400.

Re:Zero Packet Loss

[atamido]

It wasn't clear to me in your original message if the "uplink" referred to was at the radio level, or the backhaul from the tower. I assume you were referring to the cell device's ability to send bits to the tower, and not the tower's ability to send bits to the (central office?). Is that correct?

Re:Zero Packet Loss

[BodeNGE]

Yes, the radio uplink to the tower. A mobile device will 3 to 10 times faster in the downlink than the uplink. The tower to the SGSN is symetric too. The GGSN to the Internet connection is a regular symetric.

Re:Why? Because they care...

[SuperKendall]

I think that will change once Windows 7 is mainstream.

I don't think people care that much one way or the other. In fact studies have shown previous Windows releases increased Mac sales, and this will too - if you have to refresh a whole system, if you have to learn a new UI - why not a Mac?

I just can't see how Windows7 will have any impact at all in slowing down the Mac train.

All 4 major carriers suck though.

From experience with them all I totally agree, which is why I am not as much bothered by some people with the iPhone being AT&T only.

Verizon might actually improve if they don't tamper with the Droid much. ...And who is going to look at a few "geek" articles about the iPhone and decide not to get it?

It's not that at all. It's having a friend who complains about dropped calls all the time, or if he tries to the use the network and it's failing a lot. This kind of damage is all done at the word of mouth level.

Re:This is impossible, I've seen the buffer settin

[jmac_the_man]

When did you last meet an unfunny penis?

Probably when he met the guy that modded that comment down.

Re:This is impossible, I've seen the buffer settin

[Anonymous Coward]

When did you last meet an unfunny penis?

Just now, when I looked down my pants!

CAPTCHA: horrify

The Obious Solution

[JoshuaZ]

Is to let AT&T engage in all the packet shaping and other fun stuff they want. Down with net neutrality? Wait? What's that? You think they'd manage to screw up their network even more then and probably fuck over other people in the process? Say it ain't so!

Re:The Obious Solution

[JoshuaZ]

And once again I can't spell even with the help of the preview. I'll go back into my little hole again.

Re:The Obious Solution

[buchner.johannes]

Traffic shaping does not necessarily effect net neutrality. Also, I'd see the packet shaping techniques of yours, are the outgoing packets rounder?

Re:The Obious Solution

[Rabbitbunny]

Traffic shaping does not necessarily affect net neutrality.

FTFY, but you're still wrong.

Re:This is impossible, I've seen the buffer settin

[Anonymous Coward]

Roman Polanski.

Irony?

[OverlordQ]

"A Possible Cause of AT&T's Wireless Clog — Configuration Errors"

Oh wait, this is slashdot, we test on the live system.

Router fairness

[Animats]

TCP measures round trip time, and doesn't need packet loss to tell it that the round trip time is long. The retransmit interval will go up appropriately. TCP will behave reasonably with a long round trip time. If you're trying to do a bulk transfer, there's nothing wrong with this. The problem comes when short messages and bulk transfers are sharing the same channel. The short messages can spend too much time in the queue.

The solution is reordering the packets, not dropping them. That's what "fair queuing" is about. It may be worthwhile to implement fairness at the port-pair level, rather than the IP address level, at entry to the air link. Then low-traffic connections will get through faster.

"Quality of service" can help, but it's not a panacea. The network layer can't tell which of the TCP connections on port 80 is highly interactive and which is a bulk download, other than by traffic volume.

(I used to do this stuff.)

Re:Router fairness

[Trepidity]

I was about to post a comment on this article complaining that "TCP doesn't work unless routers drop packets" is oversimplifying how TCP works at best, partly by citing RFC 896, then I come and see the author of the damn RFC beat me to it. This discussion in the article of buffers so large that they never fill (so can in effect be considered infinite) makes RFC 970 seem relevant, also.

Re:Router fairness

[complete loony]

When TCP receives an ACK it can dump it's whole window size of packets onto the wire. A large number of TCP streams sharing a link with large transmit buffers and a small common bottleneck will saturate your transmit buffers. Yes TCP will tend to back off. But when you have heaps of streams all trying to transmit data, they collectively try to ramp up again too quickly.

I used to share an ADSL link with a neighbour of mine. I would often see the round trip latency over the ADLS link and back go up to 1 to 1.5 seconds with a bittorrent client running a bunch of TCP streams. So we put a hard upper limit on the transmit rate of his BSD router so the ADSL modem could never fill up its transmit buffer and most of the problem went away.

Re:Router fairness

[multipartmixed]

Wait, my /. uid has the same order of magnitude as the Nagle Algorithm Dude's?

Suddenly, I feel 1,337 times cooler!

Re:Router fairness

[klapaucjusz]

TCP will behave reasonably with a long round trip time.

This is simply not true. Performance of TCP suffers greatly when the RTT grows (the congestion window takes time to grow to high enough values).

The solution is reordering the packets, not dropping them.

Hmm, citing ``common sense'' arguments rather then relying on the published research? Are you a telecom person, perhaps?

Most research into TCP/IP performance of the last 20 years or so indicates just the opposite: it is better to provide indication of impending congestion earlier rather than later. Since in the absence of ECN TCP/IP only indicates congestion by dropping packets, one must occasionally drop packets even when router queues are still reasonable.

The difficult part, of course, is designing a so-called active queue management (AQM) algorithm that determines which packets exactly to drop, and does so without using up too much CPU time and memory on your router. The earliest such algorithm was called RED, and required a lot of manual tuning. Current algorithms are autotuning; my favourite is called SFB.

But all of that is beyond the wits of the telecom people who appear to be managing most of the world's routers, and hence AQMs are not as widely deployed as they should be.

Re:Router fairness

[benedict]

Autotuning is dead, haven't you heard?

Really?

[schnablebg]

His explanation makes an interesting read.

I highly doubt that.

Re:Why? Because they care...

[beej]

The public has shown repeatedly that it will value cost above quality

Right, that is why Apple laptop sales have tanked in the downturn. Oh, wait.

Macs have a 10% market share. I'm not sure that really supports the suggestion that people value quality over cost, with 9/10 people voting against "quality".

Either that, or people don't think Macs are quality.

Bars aren't everything

[Anonymous Coward]

5 bars might mean a strong signal received on both ends or just at the phone. You can also have a very strong signal along with horrible multipath interference that effectively kills data transmission.

I Can Vouch For This -

[Anonymous Coward]

When I still used SBC (which as far as I know is owned by AT&T) it wasn't uncommon for our service to drop. The yearly total for the downtime could easily be measured in days, and was part of the reason they got ditched. I found something interesting, though.

Each time I had to contact a service representative from the company, they'd give me the same old song and dance. Not only was their network fine, I was fine. We seriously had no clue why I couldn't access anything, so finally one day I did some snooping of my own. (This was back when I was really new to this stuff. Go ahead and laugh.) I learned to appreciate the tracert command afterward.

I was indeed online, and could, with the right information at my disposal, access some servers. What's more, my DNS wasn't down at all. What was happening was my requests for web pages were getting stuck in the net. I'd watch as my message in a bottle floated away, from Indiana to Illinois, to Minnesota, and finally through several provinces before getting stuck in a loop between two routers in western Canada and then expiring. This would go on for hours, with my Internet access crippled. Apparently somewhere along the line my normal route (which took me through Atlanta instead) was going down and the new one was taking me up north instead, to a place from which no traffic could escape. They apparently never rectified this.

Re:I Can Vouch For This -

[Colin Douglas Howell]

When I still used SBC (which as far as I know is owned by AT&T) ...

Actually, the current AT&T is the former SBC. SBC bought out AT&T Corp. in 2005 and changed their own name to AT&T Inc. to take advantage of the AT&T brand.

Re:I Can Vouch For This -

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for clearing that up. I was foggy on the whole AT&T vs. SBC debacle.

Anyway, something I neglected to add is that the kind of routing loops I was seeing, this is a CLASSIC sign of misconfigured routing equipment. Not only that, the frequency with which the problem occurred and the consistency of what I observed supports that quite nicely. It was always the same two routers in Canada, always looping. A traffic black hole that probably went (or still goes) unnoticed thanks to the sheer size of their network.

And when I said 'days', I mean it. A week or more total each year you would have downtime. This problem actually crippled my network access for four fucking days straight, during which time no service technician in the entire company had any clue what was wrong. (This includes perhaps two Americans, plus the one that visited my house to check the lines - which were fine.) Some sites would actually come through, but others were stuck in the Canadian black hole. That was quite nearly the last straw, but Insight was still looking pricey by comparison.

It's really an inexcusable state of affairs. The case for publicly owned telcos practically writes itself, especially with companies like SBC/AT&T and Comcast in charge. (Talk about bait and switch. Shortly after subscribing to Insight, which had stellar service and reasonable prices, they were bought out by Comcast. Now you can't get a service representative outside of California, and service calls take weeks as opposed to days or less. Did I mention the rate hikes and speed-cuts?)

Can't break into the Asian markets?

[ZxCv]

Really?

Re:Can't break into the Asian markets?

[obarthelemy]

really

"The sales chart in Japan fluctuates a lot on a weekly basis because every single mobile phone is a carrier exclusive and they launch new phones every 3-4 months.

It is much harder to be number 1 in the US because they count all RAZR phones from all 4 carriers in both CDMA and GSM format as a single model.

You need to sell millions of phones to be ranked number 1 in the US in a single quarter (they don't release weekly sales data). You may only need to sell thousands of phones to be ranked number 1 in Japan for a week.

It doesn't mean a lot that the iphone was ranked number 1 in Japan for a couple of weeks during its initial launch." http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/08/17/apples-iphone-3gs-is-no-1-in-japan/

show me overall consolidated sales over a significant time, not 1-week wonders at launch.

Re:Can't break into the Asian markets?

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't figure out how to track down a 3-month or 6-month report from BCNranking.jp, but I did get the month of September:
http://bcnranking.jp/category/subcategory_0010_month.html
If you'll notice, iPhone 3GS (32GB) is #2, and the 16GB is #9. Also, while posting a blog as a reference (even if it's one from cnn.com) is questionable at best, quoting one of the comments on it is even worse without reliable sources cited.

Benoit Mandelbrot had a similar problem

[j-stroy]

As I recall, the story went: Mandelbrot was a mathematician at IBM lab. The engineers were attempting high speed data networking, but were encountering data/signal loss due to some noise. So like good engineers, they made things more robust, better isolation, grounds, shielding, etc. but the darn noise was still there.. They could not get rid of it. Determined to find the cause, they went to Mandelbrot with the request to analyze the noise, to determine its cause, in order to eliminate it.

Mandelbrot examined the data and found that there were periods of clear signal interrupted by noise. He examined the noise and found that within it were periods of clear signal, interrupted by noise and so on. Hmmm... He astutely determined that "shit happens" and what was needed was a redundant protocol, not better shielding. The noise you see, was inherent in a damped and driven system.

It was from this that he began his explorations of fractals and chaos theory, and we got robust network protocols.

iPods grew initially on features, not fashion

[SuperKendall]

apple was on the death bed, until the ipod got fashionable

Two things wrong here:

1) Apple had already seen a comeback from the iMacs at this point. Jobs had been back for a few years and the company was growing steadily. They were far away from "deathbed" status at this time.

2) The iPod didn't grow because it was fashionable. I bought one of the first ones because it was literally an order of magnitude faster to load songs onto than any other player at the time - and the interface was far better. The transfer speeds evened out but I never saw another MP3 player I liked as much for just everyday use. The iPod exploded in popularity mostly because of functionality, not fashion - the first of them were too bulky to really be considered fashionable.

but then this also depends heavily on where in the world one lives. USA seems basically saturated with apple (and thanks to the majority of the tech blogs being run out of USA, that gives a "interesting" slant on things), while europe seems to be mostly wintel

Europe is more wintel, but Apple marketshare grows there as well. I just was in Budapest an an Apple store there was doing very well... marketshare is a tricky thing because it's masked by business PC purchases, so you don't know what real-world marketshare is with people that live with computers, not the computers that are handed down to them from on high.

There is however the "new market", that is unix geeks that basically use osx for its bsd kernel and shell.

There's nothing new at all about this market. This core group of users is how Apple actually grew OS X from the beginning, because these people were the technical friends people looked to for computer advice, and they told friends and family "buy a mac". In part this was selfish because they knew they would have to help the users far less, but it's also in the end better for users that need help less often.

I would say that if HP or dell really took a good look at linux, or even one of the BSD's, they could match apple on quality.

HP used to have the potential to do that but I have a lot of doubts at this point in time, mostly because HP has shredded itself. Linux does need a champion to really tighten up the whole thing and then it has a lot of potential, but I'm not sure I see the company around right now that can do that.

Signal Strength != Capacity

[Savage650]

My phone almost always shows five bars at home, yet frequently calls don't cause the phone to ring - they go to voicemail after pretending to ring. The jaded amongst us could suspect a deliberate misconfiguration of phones and signal strength monitoring.

Signal strength alone does not guarantee the ability to make/receive calls. Even if your mobile is registered in the network, making and receiving calls depends on the availability of various scarce resources, namely:

1. a "slot" on the over-the-air network (# of active connections per cell is limited)
2. a "switching path" inside your operators network
3. a "switching path" inside one or more transfer networks (owned by someone else)
4. a "switching path" inside the network the caller/callee is connected to
5. a "slot" on the over-the-air network on the others side (if the caller/callee is mobile)

In case of "lots of missed calls" in a particular area (your home) one could assume that

• your home cell is overcrowded (all slots in use) or
• there is a bottleneck in the upstream network

Note: outgoing calls should have the same problems; if they "fail less" it could be because your operator has chosen to reserve a (possibly large?) percentage of the slots/lines for outgoing calls. (Which obviously reduces the chances of incoming calls even more)

Re:Signal Strength != Capacity

[Constantin]

Thank you for the information, it makes perfect sense. Clearly, there can be a multitude of reasons why the AT&T or any other ceullar network may fail to get a call through. That said, I would prefer it if networks would be required to inform the caller that their network is overloaded and that the call cannot go through at the moment rather than going through the charade of pretending to ring the cell phone. Call it truth in calling. But I can clearly see why networks would prefer to pretend to make the connection rather than admitting that their infrastructure (or that of their roaming partner) is not up to snuff.

Multitudes of industries use similar tactics (airline flight delays come to mind) and unfortunately the only way to keep them in line is either vigorous competition combined with low switching costs to consumers (which exists in few markets) or better regulation (i.e. fraud detection that works most of the time and which is financially painful to the fraudster).

First Ring.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Some years ago, there was talk of building some huge fiber-optic ring around the Pacific, connecting a bunch of countries. The only telco in Australia at the time that could afford to buy into the project was Telstra. One of the VPs of Telstra was quoted as saying "we have sufficient bandwidth right now". Think about it: the VP of a telco couldn't quite understand the need to maintain exponential growth in bandwidth right when broadband was taking off. Thanks to morons like that overpaid suit, Australia has been bandwidth-starved for a decade, which is why you don't see that many truly "unlimited" plans or free WiFi access points like in other countries."

A good example of incompetence, a bad example however as far as a solution for your problem. A fiber ring would help little for communications confined within a continent.

Re:First Ring.

[bertok]

"Some years ago, there was talk of building some huge fiber-optic ring around the Pacific, connecting a bunch of countries. The only telco in Australia at the time that could afford to buy into the project was Telstra. One of the VPs of Telstra was quoted as saying "we have sufficient bandwidth right now". Think about it: the VP of a telco couldn't quite understand the need to maintain exponential growth in bandwidth right when broadband was taking off. Thanks to morons like that overpaid suit, Australia has been bandwidth-starved for a decade, which is why you don't see that many truly "unlimited" plans or free WiFi access points like in other countries."

A good example of incompetence, a bad example however as far as a solution for your problem. A fiber ring would help little for communications confined within a continent.

It was going around the Pacific rim, as in the ocean, not Australia, the continent.

Re:First Ring.

[erroneus]

Yeah that's what he said... I think you somehow missed that. The bad thing about slashdot is that once you make a mistake like that, it pretty much stays that way...forever. How embarrassing for you. As further proof of your misreading, just before he said "...the only telco in Australia..." he said "...connecting a bunch of countries."

Re:First Ring.

[kevinNCSU]

Yeah that's what he said... I think you somehow missed that. The bad thing about slashdot is that once you make a mistake like that, it pretty much stays that way...forever. How embarrassing for you. As further proof of your misreading, just before he said "...the only telco in Australia..." he said "...connecting a bunch of countries."

You realize you just quoted that guy (bertok) to himself claiming he misread his own post and was arguing with himself rather than the AC parent poster? Too bad this is Slashdot where that shit stays there forever, how embarrassing for you ;)

Re:First Ring.

[execthis]

That is so funny! I almost chocked on my food! LOL

Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

It is all too true.

Re:This is impossible, I've seen the buffer settin

[Philip_the_physicist]

When I saw Cowboy Neal's.

Re:Why? Because they care...

[tthomas48]

"Because those people if they dislike the network enough, will leave eventually."

and go where? to one of the other baby bells who have used their monopoly power to let their networks rot?

The western consumer values

[Anonymous Coward]

The western consumer values one thing above all else; price.

I kind of think that's just human nature (and I've traveled the world quite extensively).

I can believe it

[swb]

When I first got DSL in 1999, I paid for a premium service but performance was measurably half of what it should have been.

After a lot of back and forth (the ISP was my corporate ISP as well and I used that as leverage) it turned out they had a switch port with a duplex mismatch. And this was at an ISP that had been supplying Internet connectivity since the beginning, formed as a consortium with a university and other high tech busineses in the late 80s.

So fuckups can happen. And one can only guess they happen more and worse at behomoths like AT&T.

Net Neutrality Will Kill Us!

[Bob9113]

AT&T: Those damned iPhone users are going to kill us. Disable VoIP!

Time passes...

AT&T: Those damned iPhone users are still killing us. It is Net Neutrality's fault!

Time passes...

AT&T: Those damned iPhone users are still killing us! We need... wait, we have to configure what now? No, no, no, it's the government's fault!

Relative is accurate

[SuperKendall]

Declared (as opposed to observed) customer satisfaction is unreliable.

Except that it's relative to other satisfaction measurements using the same techniques. If more people say they are happy with a product than another, it does not matter if they are lying as long as they are lying in the same ratio.

I would also observe that humans are VERY willing to provide negative feedback for any imperfection they perceive. Proof, Internet.

Also, newer products / recent purchases tend to bring in better reviews. People are more careful with their new toy, and the device hasn't had time to break.

These surveys usually take into account long term ownership.

On the purely hardware side of things, I haven't noticed Apple being any better than other 1st or 2nd-tier vendors, nor good DYI.

I have. I had one hard drive die a few years back, Applecare shipped me a new one since I said I could install it myself. I've had no problems replacing video cards and other components in a desktop just as I would any other PC, in fact much easier since Apple designs desktops cases so well. Apple systems are just as good for DYI replacement of common components, it's really only the motherboard you can't mess with.

Again this is anecdotal, but I have two Apple laptops - one from 2001, it still works just fine and is usable for browsing, document editing, and as a VNC terminal into other stuff. The other is from around four years ago, again it is working fine. This is totally unlike any experience I have ever had with PC laptops.

Re:Relative is accurate

[obarthelemy]

It's funny how you ignore my "if you put a lot of money in it, you won't badmouth it" argument. So, apple buyers do have an incentive to declare themselves happier than eMachines, same as Prada shoes are sooo much more comfortable than other ones ^^

I looked, but haven't found a reliability survey let alone with length of ownership. I'd be happy to see the one you seem to have ?

Same with a couple of IBM notebooks bought second hand, that must be 10+ yo by now, still working perfectly to play Scrabble when my mother is bedridden, or surf the web when all other PCs are down. Proof is not the plural of anecdote :-p

On the other hand, my brother's Mighty Mouse worked for all of 2 months (got dirty and... CANNOT be cleaned... talk about stupid design, but sooo shiny), his iMac's HD failed in 18, as did his keyboard, and is CPU fan, his wife's iPhone failed in 2 weeks... I'm not impressed.

I understand why you resort to Applecare though, this things are a pain to fix by ourself.

Re:Why? Because they care...

[jtownatpunk.net]

As far as the termination fee goes, AT&T waived mine 14 months into the (non-iphone) contract because they were no longer able to provide reliable 3G data service at the location where I primarily use it. I assume the fact that I called several times a week for several weeks checking on my tickets made it clear that I wasn't going to "let it go".

The contract works both ways (in theory). While you're obligated to remain a customer for the duration, they're obligated to provide the services as described in the contract for the duration. (That's why you get a 30 day window to terminate the contract any time they make a change.) Hell, I wish it went a step further and made THEM liable for an early termination fee if their crappy service forces me to change carriers and buy a new phone. I think $500 would have covered the research that went into it, pro-rated value of my old phone, cost of my new phone, time spent moving my contacts, etc.

Non-phd conclusion

[Anonymous Coward]

a. retransmits, packet collisions and improper setup/teardown times == more latency x more users == more waiting == slower network.
b. configure your freaking TCP settings under "network settings" for your type of network (wireless)...


Isn't that what they teach you in wireless internet 101 (you don't need an advance degree to figure out why AT&T is slow if you're an AT&T service tech).