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AT&T Admits New York City iPhone Service Sucks
RevWaldo notes a post up at The Gothamist on AT&T's admission of its poor cell service in New York. "AT&T has realized that the first step towards recovery is admitting it has a problem. The phone giant has confessed that its New York City iPhone service is not up to par, according to a presentation slide published on Tom's Guide noting that the company's 3G Voice Composite Quality in the New York metro area — particularly in Manhattan — is below its performance objective. ... The slide does contain some good news for AT&T subscribers. Apparently, AT&T has had '[t]hree consecutive months of improvement'..."
I am left wondering if the improvement stated is a result of consumers switching carriers from AT&T.
Who was that pointy-eared bastard?
I rarely get 3G data service during the week. Usually it's EDGE and not very fast EDGE at that.
Weekends are much better.
Anyone thinking of getting an iPad should really think about the real value of the 3G option - will it be worth anything in your area?
Now if they can just admit their service sucks everywhere else too, then they can take some of all that iPhone money and actually improve the service.
What's really amazing about AT&T and the iPhone is that if you are in a large crowd of people (such as a festival), the service becomes overwhelmed and you can't even make or receive a call.
Even just going to LA can make the phone get pretty unresponsive as it waits for a signal from the overloaded tower, so you can't really use it for much.
Thanks for finally fucking noticing. I've called to complain to ATT numerous times over the years and every single time i was given the following bullshit excuses:
- You need a new sim card
- Your phone might be damaged
- We don't see any problems in the area
So when is ATT going to give me my money back for diminished service?
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
What's that graph supposed to represent without an y axis?
This is marketing disguised as an objective quality metric. Without showing the numbers, they've admitted to nothing, and promised nothing.
I was in Downtown Manhattan /w AT&T service a few months ago - 3G service in general (Not just IPhone) wasn't just slow it was so slow that the effective result was it didn't work at all - don't waste your time trying slow. The experience was comparable to GSM data service (14.4k) of decades past. In contrast call quality was quite good and I never had any problems there.
Thankfully outside of the Metro area all was well in 3G land. At the time I suspected all of those massive Sprint displays in times square had some sort of magical influence over my data connection :)
It sucks out on Long Island too! Hope they don't just focus on Manhattan. I mean it's ridiculous how bad AT&T service is in all facets. Sorely tempted to trade my beloved Iphone for a Nexus. I get so mad everytime I see what's his face from Old School talking about how fast their network is. Also so what if it's faster, you don't get any coverage anywhere! I mean really, I could have the fastest race car in the world, but if I can only drive it up and down my drive way it's pointless!
Yes. The U.S. is really a 2nd World country when it comes to broadband and high-speed telecom. We don't like to outright admit it, but that is the truth compared to places like Sweden or S. Korea.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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I live in Manhattan, and I own an iPhone. Believe me, I know about all the problems. I complain a lot to my friends.
But they're clearly trying to climb on top of this. They're opening up about the problems, and they had that incident a month ago or so when they stopped selling iPhones. They're trying to figure it out.
I ran a dial-up ISP in the 90's. Tons of people came on to the net, and everyone in the business was trying like crazy to grow their phone banks and their networks to handle the new people. Back then everyone complained about their ISP -- it was hard to keep up.
That's what's happening now with wireless. Everyone is starting to use lots of data. Three years ago, almost no one used wireless net access. Three years from now, almost everyone in the city will want to be able to stream video to their phones at the same time. All of that infrastructure has to be built, and all of it has to be financed. Imagine if some other major chunk of infrastructure had to be built from the ground up -- electrical wiring, or roads, or whatever. It's a big job.
The transition is inevitably going to be bloody. We just need AT&T to be open about it, and to really step up and try to keep up with the growth. When they come clean like this, it's a very positive sign. And once everyone's online, and the growth stabilizes, things will get a lot better.
(I realize that no one will buy this. But I figured I'd put it out there anyway.)
I hear NYC and SanFran AT&T horror stories all the time, and then people jump on the bandwagon and say it sucks everywhere else too.
Well, works beautifully in Boston. Recent reports show that its faster and more reliable in Boston than Verizon as well. Believe me, I was a 12 year Verizon veteran and shied away from AT&T because of the 'stories' I heard. One day, work gave me an AT&T serviced BlackBerry and I swapped the sim card into an iPhone off EBay and was astounded that I got better and faster service than my Verizon account gave me.
Dropped Verizon and went AT&T within a week. Nary a problem since.
"Where is my mind?"
Hoo boy are you confused. Let me make this easy for you:
To say the US is "second world" is absurd, as being aligned with the US is the very definition of "first world."
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
No, I'm not confused. You just didn't understand my use of the analogy.
I was talking about the state of telecommunications, specifically related to broadband availability, speed and cost. I was doing it using the same scale you defined, but in relation not to political-economic strata but telecom.
Thus, I was just breaking down the levels of telecom in the world into three segments:
The first world being marked by places like Sweden and S. Korea, where things like 100 Mbit data to your home or office is cheap and available. Where 3G or better wireless coverage is pervasive, including not only 90%+ of the population, but the majority of the landmass as well.
The second world is marked by places like the U.S. and Canada, where there are large stretches of open land where the best you can get is ISDN or dial-up. They aren't all that populated, but there are still a lot of them. The high-speed networks that are available are overloaded and overpriced (in comparison), if not a generation behind the 1st World (as defined above) in speed and latency.
The third world is where you're lucky to get a decent data connection, or they're restricted to major metro areas and priced well out of the range of the locals. Also, bandwidth to the greater Internet is in short supply, expensive and quite possibly restricted.
* * *
Your first clue should have been the phrase "Soviet Union" in your definition. Last I checked, they dissolved a couple decades back. And while there are plenty of dictators, the communist ones are fairly few and far between now.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Not that I'm backing them up, but just a measly 5 years ago, the most a phone could suck down the pipe was about 300kbps, tops. And nobody had phones that did that; a call only takes up 8-13. Now, they're sapped by phones like mine that can pull up to 7.2Mbit, and a LOT more people using data.
There's a lot of things AT&T needs to improve on, but I don't think their coverage or technology is one of them. They just need to deliver what they're capable of more frequently.
Finally a voice of common sense.
It's also true that Verizon has outspent AT&T on investment in its wireless infrastructure over the last few years. AT&T's wireless network's capital expenditures from 2006 through September 2009 totaled $21.6 billion, versus $25.4 billion for Verizon and $16 billion for Sprint (including Sprint's investments in WiMax operator Clearwire). Per subscriber: Verizon - $353, AT&T - $308
But despite this, Verizon's 'high speed service' is not real high speed. It's a shame that AT&T has been so stingy in its investment. But had the iPhone come out on Verizon it would have been a disaster with no real high speed anywhere.
Very few days go by when I don't have a call dropped on my iPhone, just sitting here in my home office. And forget about when driving. Everyone I know in LA who has an iPhone complains about the very same thing. If you want to listen to a funny conversation, eavesdrop on a conversation between two iPhones. "Yeah, it's me again. The iPhone dropped the call again. Yeah, well.... hello? Hello?"
So far their answer? "Mark The Spot", an iPhone app that they want you to switch to and register a complaint about dropped calls instead of trying to call back the person whose call just dropped off. Why don't they look at their records and see the number of times I redialed a number within 30 seconds that I was just connected to?
I've been an Apple guy since the II, and make my living on the Mac platform. But another couple of months to shake out the Nexus and I'm moving. I like Apple but not willing to continue being punked by this Apple/AT&T alliance.