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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?
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.
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.
So when is ATT going to give me my money back for diminished service?
As soon as it makes business sense for them to do so.
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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.)