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AT&T Wireless Data Still Growing At 1000%
jfruhlinger writes "AT&T's wireless network came under a microscope when it seemed unable to handle the massive data use boost that came when the iPhone arrived on the scene. The company has since put money into its infrastructure, and that growth rate has slowed somewhat, but it's still gone up 30 times over the past three years."
Still poor coverage out by me...
"30 times over the past three years."
That would make it obviously 1000% per year.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
Are more realistic, in that I have few bars and few signal.
I had an older edge-only, edition and I don't know how I could have ever used it, leading me to conclude that ATT data rates have fallen to edge levels.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
This is Apple's Achilles Heel. When demand outstrips the AT&T bandwidth, an iXxx will no longer be as desirable.
That's not surprising. Considering all of the new media streaming apps there are it will only grow. The official Netflix streaming app alone must use a significant amount of bandwidth if used regularly.
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
No, 1000% per year compounded over 3 years would be an increase of 1000 (1000% is 10 times, year 0 = 1, year 1 = 10*1 = 10, year 2 = 10 times year 1 = 100, year 3 = 10 times year 2 = 1000);
For a 30x growth in 3 years that would be an annual growth of 310%.
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I just asked my friend who works with Verizon, he says if AT&T data usage was at 1000 GB, 1000% more is just (1000GB + 1000GB/1000%) = 1001 GB, so I don't see what the problem is.
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Your sig makes your post even more awesome!
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
30x in three years? That's 1000% every 2.031 years.
There are 2.71828 kinds of people in the world. The kind that understand exponential growth, and 1.71828 kinds that don't.
Yes.
Seven of each.
I hope that clarifies things.
Somebody forgot about compounded growth.
1000% growth over three years (compounded annually) would have them grown a thousandfold over three years. Compounded continuously would be ridiculously large.
If you assume continuous growth, the actual growth rate would be ln(30)/3, or about 113%. If you just want a number to quote as the annual growth rate that would give a thirtyfold increase over three years, go with 211% since (1+2.11)^3 is about 30.
Can I get that in football fields or Libraries of Congress?
Sure. If you took 1000% of football fields and covered them with 1000% of the books from the Library of Congress you would find the single book that had the secret formula on how AT&T calculated their increased data growth rate. Your mission is to find that book so you can decode the ISBN number to be used as an RSA key to decrypt the 11 herbs and spices of the original Kentucky Fried Chicken recipe so it could be posted without payment on Cooks Source.
I mean imagine offering to sell people something, and then have them show up, give you money for it, and then expect to use it! What kind of crazy system IS that?
Can we stop reprinting AT&T press releases that show they continue to be completely baffled by market economics?
It's good to know that AT&T is at least trying. I've avoided cancelling my service with them due to the fees and the fact I still have an unlimited data plan. On the flip side, you can probably count me as part of the problem too. My HTC Pure is currently running Dutty's ROM just so I can have an easier time using it as a wireless router for my netbook when out of the house.
...we tolerate poorer and poorer cell service for more and more money. I switched from my KRAZR to an iPhone and my call quality went down by AT LEAST 30%. Now, for the princely added sum of $30 per month I can have dial-up internet response. Such a deal!
Why did I buy this thing? My wife and kids insisted!
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
We had an earthquake here in Central Oklahoma a couple of months ago. Not a biggie, just a "rattler". The cell lines (voice and data both) went down from overload, as did the AT&T *land lines*. I'd hate to see what happens when the next "Big One" hits (whatever that event is...).
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
GP is talking about a rather well known story about verizon's billing math. There is an entire blogspot about it. http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/
The total data volume over the nationwide network went from 1 billion megabytes per year to 30 billion megabytes per year. Or from roughly 900TB/365days or 2.4TB/day to 28,610TB/365days or 78TB/day.
Divide that by their 100 million customers and on average each customer uses not even 1MB/day.
If you want to be an ISP and you cannot carry more than 1MB/day, you should not be an ISP.
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Who has editors?
We have anyone who wants to scribble into a text box, and anyone else who wants to fumble-finger a fancy radio button, and a few people who get paid by the click to forward on the things that get fumble-fingered the most.
If these jerks think they have the right to own the internet they should at least have the courtesy to give us all the wireless data we want.
Actually, annual growth would be just over 200%. An increase of 200% is equivalent to tripling, just as an increase of 100% is equivalent to doubling.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
No, 1000% per year compounded over 3 years would be an increase of 1000 (1000% is 10 times, year 0 = 1, year 1 = 10*1 = 10, year 2 = 10 times year 1 = 100, year 3 = 10 times year 2 = 1000);
For a 30x growth in 3 years that would be an annual growth of 310%.
To calculate a yearly increase of some initial amount A at a rate of r, you would use A(1+r)
You don't just multiply the rate of increase by the initial value to get the value at the next iteration. A 100% yearly growth rate implies doubling each year, whereas in your calculation a 100% growth rate implies a static state
.
1000% Per year. never compounded.
So, when ISPs invest in their infrastructure, they can offset even huge data transmission bottlenecks, like, in 3 years ?
then why the hell arent they just investing in the internet infrastructure, and just shutting their mouth about 'two tiered internet' and whatnot ?
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yes, they're making money from the iPhone. unquestionably.
but this massive increase in data is also a huge increase in cost, which they'll have to recoup over several years. the iPhone may actually have put them under water temporarily.
or they could just unload some of that data, you know, stop holding the iPhone as being exclusive to AT&T
The world is how you make it
...decrypt the 11 herbs and spices of the original Kentucky Fried Chicken recipe...
Futurama has told us that the Colonel's secret recipe is:
Chicken
Grease
Salt
(And 11 is binary for 3.)
An ISP that cannot handle their customers getting 100MB/day is not worth being named an ISP imho.
We are talking Wide Area Wireless Network here. You know, there are laws of physics that prevent you from achieving 100MB/day/user in a limited spectrum with cells covering 5 square kilometers.
Comparing mobile wireless network with fixed fiber or cable is simply silly.
Learn to use WiFi on top of a fast fiber/cable link.
And yes, I do wireless network engineering for living.
Or any telco, but especially ATT. When the iPhone/ATT first earned its reputation as a horribly unreliable phone, ATT said they were going to invest $15 billion in the next year to fix the issue. A year later, they boasted that they'd spent $2 Billion in the last year, yet somehow it still wasn't enough. Huh. Pretty sure the ball got dropped somewhere between engineering's requirements and yacht hookers for executive yachts. Just like when the US government handed out tens of billions for infrastructure upgrades that the telcos translated into record profits and third world Internet speeds. Telcos and cable companies enjoy taking the money, see, but the part about investing some of it seems pointless, given their government supported monopolies.
Wait... why is this under the "Apple" category...?
I started my current job 3 years ago, about the exact same time I got my new phone, for those 3 years my phone has been sitting in a dead zone or as I like to call it, my office
I get a growth rate of about 115.5% per year. Which means the size will multiply by 2.155x each year.
Think "rule of 70" to make this easy. Given that growth rate, the size will double every .6 years. In 3 years, the value will double nearly five times, for a total of 30x over 3 years.
We seriously need to be more precise with our terms, or we get confusion like this!
At least the moderators got the joke.
A woosh and a wrong correction all in one. How would you feel?
Smartphones have been available for at least 10 years now. If AT&T and other carriers had started investing in their data networks then, they wouldn't be having this problem now.
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I'm just not able to trust AT&T on anything after seeing these stats:
http://gizmodo.com/5428717/att-has-spent-less-on-network-construction-and-capital-expenditures-every-quarter-since-the-q4-2007
Indeed. If something grows 30-fold in 3 years, it's growing at an average rate of about 211% per year, because (1+2.11)^3 = 30.
Apparently the author doesn't understand the difference between linear and exponential growth or the terminology used to describe them. I think that percent-per-year growth is almost always a confusing way to describe growth when the percentage is more than 10-20%. That's because people assume x% growth in one year corresponds to 2x% growth in two years. Which is pretty close to the mark for a small growth rates (say 5%), but way off for larger growth rates. It's easily seen in the Taylor expansion of the exponential function, e^x = 1 + x + (x^2)/2 + (x^3)/6 + ..., which is nearly linear for values of x1 but highly nonlinear for larger values.
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Growth rate percentages over 100% are often confusing, because it's ambiguous whether they refer to the change from the original value or the total final value.
In the usual convention, 310% growth per year would mean a quantity that increases by a factor of (1+3.10)=4.10 per year. So 30x growth in 3 years would actually be an annual growth rate of 210% per year (because (1+2.10)^3 is about 30).
For this and other reasons, percentages are a horribly confusing and unintuitive way to describe high growth rates. It seems much clearer to me to say that AT&T's data traffic is approximately tripling every year.
My bicyles
WTF are you talking about? This is a trivial exponentiation problem and you're coming up with some crazy, imprecise and dead wrong solution.
Growth rate of 115.5% per year gives growth over 3 years of: (1 + 1.1155)^3 = 9.46
We want 30-fold growth in 3 years. That's 211% per year, since (1 + 2.11)^3 = 30.
My bicyles
30x in three years? That's 1000% every 2.031 years.
Funny indeed, but you've made the same off-by-one error as nearly every other posters here. 1000% growth every 2.031 years... what does that give us in 3 years?
(1 + 10) ^ (3/2.031) = 11 ^ (3/2.031) = 34.5
30x in three years is actually 1000% every 2.115 years, because:
(1 + 10) ^ (3/2.115) = 30
There are 2.71828 kinds of people in the world. The kind that understand exponential growth, and 1.71828 kinds that don't.
As far as I can tell, when I entered this thread, the number of people who actually understand that percentage growth represents the difference between the initial and final values rather than a multiplicative factor... that increased by 50%. (Previously, it was bunratty and some AC.)
My bicyles
Yet another math fail. It's actually 966% per year, never compounded, because (1 + 3×9.66) ~= 30. It's incredible how many people make this simple off-by-one mistake.
Furthermore, non-compound interest has no bearing on any real-world financial or scientific calculation. It's a simplification that's just used to introduce students to the power of exponential growth and compounding, by way of comparison with linear growth.
Can you imagine a bank that offered 10% interest per year on savings accounts, but non-compounded? The clients would withdraw all their money every few days, and then re-deposit it and... boom! It's compounding all over again.
My bicyles
slashdot, fix a.fsdn.com
or do i have to map it to google.com or something that WORKS!!!
40 second replies is lame.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I love the way the anti-Apple trolls pile on in these discussions. FWIW, I don't own an Iphone and don't plan to get one. That said, I used to be an AT&T customer - with a Motorola cell phone. In Silicon Valley I couldn't get a signal at work or at home and it was hit or miss in other places. The mall kiosk selling AT&T phones couldn't demonstrate them because there was no signal there. I left them and moved to another carrier for just that reason - lousy signal, lousy coverage. Are they better now? I don't know and I'm not going to give them another chance.
That would make it obviously 1000% per year.
Actually, not quite. 30 times in 3 years is a growth rate of about 310% per year. Conversely, a growth rate of 1,000% percent for three years would result in 1,000 times as much data.
Like the oil industry, if you are cheap at the beginning, and later do not want to reinvest, then of course you will create a bottleneck for those using your services. The oil industry could easily use those TRILLIONS of dollars declared as profit from 1 year, and create 5 new oil refineries, so that next time a hurricane or tornado hits in texas, we are not hit with price hikes because they supposedly can not provide for us (BS if you ask me).....now the cell cos are following suit. Of course, they could easily piggy back on fiber to serve the calls from place to place using the internet and some servers, a bit like skype works, oh, wait , of course...that is called voiceoverip...and is a service being offered right now, and does not cost that much more...just figure out how to incorporate it into your services, at each tower maybe set up nodes for setting web servers to ping between each other and diminish a bit of cell traffic from being all in the air, and under the ground in wires....
oops
Nope, it is only precise to 1 significant digit. Hence 1000.
In case you couldn't tell I'm playing devils advocate, no need to get worked up about it.
Our collective experience at work, as it relates to the iPhone in Cambridge, MA (and surrounding region) is that the AT&T network still lacks (put politely). I get dropped calls, spotty coverage and customer service doesn't really care about responding to complaints.
I realize that some of this is infrastructure related and that every carrier has issues -- but really, I'm so tired of the problems that even the glitter of a iPhone doesn't appeal much anymore. I'd rather have great coverage than a fancy phone. *shrug*
You're right, continuous growth is a much more useful model for this sort of thing, but calling is "115% growth per year" is nonsensical in that case.
I still maintain that this whole mess is due to the fact that people assume percentage growth to be nearly linear (because it's so often used to describe low growth rates like 1-10% where there's no confusion), and often forget to add the initial 100% contribution (pretty much for the same reason).
My bicyles
Wellll... sorta. Significant digits are not magic. They express the relative uncertainty in a quantity.
The relative uncertainty does not propagate equally under all types of arithmetic operations (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significance_arithmetic for addition and multiplication).
This is especially true for exponentiation. If we start with the premise that AT&T's data usage grew 30x over 3 years, to one significant digit, that means that the real value is somewhere in the 25-35x range. That gives us a range of growth rates of 192% to 227%, assuming annual compounding... considerably less than one significant digit of uncertainty in the growth rate.
For linear (non-compound) growth, 25-35x growth over 3 years corresponds to 800%-1133%. That range is not easily exactly describable by significant digits either.
Significant digits suck. They are an imprecise and opaque way to express relative uncertainty.
My bicyles
Well, it's actually a growth rate of about 210%, unless you consider a growth rate of 100% to be flat year-to-year....
Program Intellivision!
Wow, you don't read so well, do you?
Here's my quote: "A growth rate of 1000% per year would mean going up 1000 times over three years, not 30 times."
Let's dissect:
"A growth rate of 1000% per year" means it grows 10 times every year.
"would mean going up 1000 times over three years" means that, after three years, growing at 10 times per year, the original number would increase by a factor of 1000.
Let's say the initial value is 5.
After 1 year, it goes up 1000%, so 5 becomes 50.
In the second year, the value starts at 50 and goes up another 1000%, so 50 becomes 500.
In the third year, the value starts at 500 and goes up yet another amazing 1000%, so 500 becomes 5000.
5000 divided by 5 is 1000. So, over three years, the initial value has grown... sit down... get ready... 1000 times!
Do you understand it yet, or do I need to break it down into even simpler terms? I can use smaller numbers if you wish, and possibly even explain how you can compute this using only the fingers you already have.