AT&T's City-By-City Plan To Up Wireless Coverage

alphadogg writes "AT&T has created different mobile calling models for every major city in America as it tries to improve a network that has come under fire for poor performance as the data-friendly iPhone has proliferated, an executive said Thursday. Other carriers just use one nationwide calling model to plan for all cities, claimed CTO John Donovan, speaking at the Open Mobile Summit conference in San Francisco. The nation's second-largest mobile operator has had a hard time planning for bandwidth needs in the rapidly changing mobile world, Donovan said. AT&T has seen rapidly growing mobile data usage — and much criticism over its 3G coverage — as the exclusive iPhone carrier in the US. 'If a network is not fully loaded, it's hard to know exactly how much demand is out there,' Donovan said. 'You put all you can in the ground, and they eat it all up, and then you put more in there, and they eat it all up.'" The story notes that mobile data at AT&T has grown 4,932% over the last 3 years.

Comments

Re:Umm, what?

[AmiMoJo]

The argument still doesn't make sense. They know they need more bandwidth because their network is constantly at 100%. The only thing to do is add more bandwidth. The only question is "do I spend a little and add 100% extra or do I spend a lot and add 1000% extra?" Since the past three years have seen over 4000% growth and more smartphones which make heavy use of data services are coming out all the time it seems reasonable to expect that 100% is probably not going to be enough.

Even if you find your 1000% extra is only 50% utilised it will be 100% within 1 year.

Bottom line: you need more bandwidth and probably can't add it fast enough. It's not a hard question to answer.