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AT&T Admits Network Can't Handle iPhone, iPad Traffic
RedEaredSlider writes "AT&T has admitted that the rise of tablets and smartphones like the iPad and iPhone has taken a major toll on its network. In its public filing to the Federal Communications Commission yesterday, the company admitted that its network has been under increasing strain as more and more high-bandwidth devices have been connected. This not only includes smartphones like the iPhone, but tablets like the iPad as well. AT&T says that in many cases tablets put a greater stress on their network (PDF) than smartphones do."
It only took them 4+ years to figure it out. I could tell what effect it was having on my bandwidth back in 2008, if not before that.
Oh, and thanks for apologizing to your customers, AT&T, for that terrible service you knew you had been providing for years.
It's disgusting how incapable corporations are of being honest with their customers.
You sign the customers first, work out the details later. Customers are committed for 2 years, will likely be on for 4 or 6. They'll be stuck with you.
Why does AT&T constantly drop calls?
I'm not asking for high speed data. I just want to make a damn phone call.
So it's the fault of the devices and not the retarded telcom that refuses to build out it's network, besides the fact that there is an obvious demand. Fuck them.
Luckily, you can call their excellent and friendly customer service, and they will be more than happy to help you in any way they can.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
It took them how long to figure this out
$3.4 billion in profit last quarter. And yet their network is garbage. I have an idea, but it's an engineer idea, not a suit idea, so... never mind.
If you did what I did and traded back your alpha iPad3 (great idea, 3D, but it sucks juice and the eyestrain gets to these old eyes) for a wireless iPad2, then you're ahead of the game, since you don't need to rely on the AT&T network or even Verizon.
Wireless-N service works perfectly fine, and everywhere I go there's free wireless N including my home (you can buy a wireless N router for around $50).
And you can even run Skype on it, so you don't need a cell either.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Uh, if all of these new devices are causing a strain on your network, how about upgrading your network infrastructure? I know, this sounds crazy. Spending money like that will just eat away at profits. Maybe if you're lucky you can wait long enough to where phones'll barely work on your network and you can get the government to subsidize the improved network.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Not so much. ;-)
We want federal tolerance of our practices in violation in FTC standards! Don't make us do anything more because we just don't want to pay for it!
For why we need larger quantities and higher quality carriers and ISPs. It's not like this is the first time hardware advances have put pressure on specific sectors to improve their services. Most providers are already giving the US some of the worst bandwidth you can get in the modern world. And now non-tech users (read: smartphone and tablet users) are becoming complacent with data plans and shabby speeds that it's becoming this pathetic norm. The one recent ray of hope is Google's Kansas City project where they're getting some of the best stuff in the country while someone in LA is sitting there twittling their thumbs with 3mpbs Internet speed. Oh boy...
Carl Sagan quotes get you an automatic +5 on all posts.
Luckily you can just take your cell phone or pad and use it on another network. Oh, wait! In the retarded US we can't because each company has its own system mutually incompatible with all others (except ATT and T-M, but that fortunately will end soon). Way to go! You are locked in for sure, unless you want to shell another several hundred $$ on a new (and incompatible with anybody else) device. !#@$!@#$
when you try to tether the device to the network.. Old fashion local storage is still the way... That, and cut back a little on the advertising..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
If AT&T is selling these phones, then they are the ones who should be responsible for supporting them, which IMO includes providing adequate bandwidth and network capacity to deal with the demands of the devices that they sell. I purchase a phone and data package. I should be able to get the capacity that I have paid for. If that is an unlimited data package (mine is), then this is NOT my problem. It is AT&T's problem in promising more than they can deliver, which in any terms is fraud.
Is to justify their purchase of T-Mobile to the FCC. After the purchase is approved, exactly NOTHING will happen to improve their network.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Of course, the solution here is obvious:
Charge everyone more for data plans in order to encourage less use of limited resources!
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
They made $3.5B last quarter (net profit). If they only invested half of that, maybe their network wouldn't be under so much strain and the economy would prosper. How much people can YOU employ for $2B? I would say at least 40,000 people that would then be able to reinvest their money in you know, $500 cell phones and $120/mo data services.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Maybe their capital expenditures on their network should have gone up the last few years instead of down. They have been squeezing their customers for profits at the cost of their network. Now they want the FCC and the T-Mob acquisition to bail them out of mba bonus engineering.
Small wonder they dropped the "unlimited flat rate 3G" plan a month after the iPad 3G was introduced.
Makes me wonder how far the gap between the wonder and the reality of "cloud computing" is. Sounds great to keep all your data/music/video in the "cloud", but throwing around that much data grinds any capped data plan into the ground.
(Advantage to the early adopters: some of us still have that glorious "unlimited 3G" plan. Yay! FYI: they're transferrable.)
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
The future of ALL computer communicati- oh crap my call dropped again, gotta restart my file upload, again.
...comments are right in saying why did you give the contract and not the goods. Yet that's what the business does every time in these cases. Play catch up. It's todays business model.
"I'm taking this loop off." - Jack O'Neill
Its a cop out.. so they can acquire T-Mobile.. they will say anything to get what they want.. Duh
Okay I start a lawn mowing service and get a 100 customers. I only have time to mow 10 lawns so to be fair I only mow 10% of each lawn. Hey everyone gets part of their lawn mowed so what's the problem?
If you want to make phone calls, why are you using AT&T?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
iPhone is a phone, iPad is a device designed for heavy multimedia consumption. No shit it uses more data.
The spectrum belongs to all of us, not just to AT&T. Services that can't operate in the bandwidth allotted need to be eliminated.
High bandwidth internet and internet applications need to be kept on the landlines.
I've called Qwest before, and they put me on hold w/o music until I disconnect (the IVR, not the reps). I've heard AT&T's business support is great though, but I've never experienced it (or Qwest for that matter, when I've called for small businesses I used to do support for, they always skimped and managed to get residential service to their business :(... ).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
So much for calling it 4G, just to show they can "keep it up" with the competition (which is not, of course).
Man comments on story that has no impact on him, wants attention, news @ 11
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
But I don't live in hipsterdouchebagville with all that population density and all those poor people that use their iphone/ipad to stream netflix or tether for bittorrent because they won't pay the man for cable. I live in the burbs. I probably have the cell tower all to myself
Thank you for that insightful post. Feel free to rant about other technologies that make you nervous.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
I heard once that capitalism is effectively a race to scarcity. We all know this is a crock, just decorating every-bodies heads for when they jack up the price and charge by the byte.
Smartphones are like cars. If you don't own one, you can certainly get along just fine, but you don't really know what you're missing. Once you have one, you wonder how you lived without it.
As for the carriers, if you have a phone they're raking you over the coals anyway. My wife and I have smartphones, and they cost about $80/mo combined (effectively $40 each). There are places where the network is slow (there are rural areas around me) to non-existent, but for the most part I get 3G speeds in most of my town, and since I don't stream movies over the internet, I rarely notice it.
Now, if you live in NY or LA or SF with the rest of the lemmings, then you probably have connectivity issues. That sucks, but its still better than if you lived in the countryside 150 miles outside of DC, where there is no service from any carrier at all, and they're still on dialup for internet.
As for contracts, where the f am I going to go? There are two carriers with even remotely decent coverage (ATT & Verizon), and the smaller players who are likely to get bought up by them soon. I can't take my phone even if it was unlocked because few of the carriers use the same system, and those that do use them on different frequencies. Hell, AT&T foots $400-$500 on the cost of a new top-of-the-line phone for me every 18 months, and in return I pay them for $700 for service during that time. They pay so much of the phone that I can resell the damned thing on eBay for more than my share of a new phone. So for $40 a month (which I guarantee for 2 years, or have to pay them back just over half of the subsidy they gave me) I get a new phone every year and a half AND more voice and mobile data service than I use.
In the words of Bre'r Rabbit - don't throw me into that brier patch!
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
AT&T are morons. If these devices are creating such a strain then they need to stop selling iPhones and iPads for use on their network. What has happened is that AT&T are indiscriminately selling every device to consumers who want them and then they're turning around and complaining about their networks not being able to handle. I have a suggestion, either stop selling the devices for use on their networks or upgrade their current network. They cannot continue to sell these iPhones and iPads and then turn around and complain that their putting a strain on their network. It's either one or the other, numbnuts.
Here's a thought: AT&T should upgrade their network.
That may be a costly endeavour but the mobile market is very lucrative and it can only give them a greater edge in the future.
This whole maximizing-profits by reducing costs thing is making tech companies underperform. It's short-term thinking and exactly how our public corporation system isn't working as well as it should. Can't they start thinking beyond the next financial quarter or two?
In other words, they're being cheap and short-sighted.
Sell beyond capacity. I've seen that movie. It's called "The Producers." Those guys went to prison for fraud, though.
Get off his lawn!
If only these poor souls had some cash on hand to build up their own network.
Now that there is no regulation that requires it, *all* the carriers were shorting the expansion of the networks to accommodate future need and pocketing the cash.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
although taking the place for granted/wrecking it, might make unchosen ones wonder how/where the bunny, & jesus, will be able to conduct their chosen holycostal business as usual, on a poisoned population, black hole, earth day.
I know I'm posting against the prevailing opinion here, but I think AT&T might be doing the right thing. Consider that communication technology gets better and cheaper every year. Upgrading now not only cuts into profits, but it also means buying capacity for more money than the competition who doesn't upgrade for a few years.
The sign of a well-managed telecom is that its network is just at the point of being so crappy that folks are leaving. Any more capacity and they're wasting their dough. Erring a little to one side or the other is probably understandable too.
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
Awww sad face. Does bitching make you feel better?
Gotta love the subliminal attack against Apple.
1 - they aren't the problem the network is
2 - they are not the only game in smart phones.
For some reason i have been getting the feeling that AT&T wants to kill the iphone market off. I suspect its so they can introduce more android phones that they can control with an iron fist and not have to deal with Apple's wishes at all.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Now they can justify raising rates to... recapitalize for infrastructure upgrade, and includes several hundred million to... retain... talent in the... company managerial class. Frankly I would be surprised if nobody saw that one coming.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I am forced (stupid enough) to pay extra for 4G serves on my HTC EVO when there is no 4G server in my area (Louisville, KY) and the 3G server that was once king is now almost unusable...coupled that with the fact that Sprint is ditching WiMAX in favor of LTE so my phone wont work on the 4G if and when it ever gets here in the first place.
Once in a while you can get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right. -Hunter/Garcia
But fortunately for the service providers, most of the devices are locked in to their service, even if the devices themselves are technically capable.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I have 5 bars of signal and get connection errors on both my samsung phone AND my iphone. Things that used to work flawlessly 5 months ago now complain about "slow network" and "server not responding".
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Verizon and the EU rejoice!
I'm with ya brother! There's a lot of things we can give up to liberate ourselves from the shackles of the rat race.
For instance, I don't own any pants. I don't intend to either. I save hundreds of dollars a year. Images the TSA saves from me on their backscatter x-ray devices are hardly a concern anymore. I never suffer the humiliation of realizing that my lost car keys are, in fact, in my pocket. It's great!
As a bonus, i don't have anything to undo when nature calls. I can afford to push off rushing to the bathroom by 2 or 3 seconds. Over a lifetime of not wearing pants that amounts to hours. That's HOURS people are wasting buckling and unbuckling their pants just to take a dump!
Your suggestion won't work (as in will-never-happen) because it's a technical solution to a psychological problem; namely that top officers of large company are sociopaths that not only are indifferent to the sufferings they inflict on others, but in fact thrive on it (and yes, they're getting rich off it too.) They're not going to ask for a new hand when they're holding all the cards.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
You sign the customers first, work out the details later. Customers are committed for 2 years, will likely be on for 4 or 6. They'll be stuck with you.
Yeah, and?
When the iPhone first came out and had to be used with AT&T, I just shook me head. AT&T is at the bottom of the list of carriers in most markets according to Consumer Reports. Unfortunately, people buy the handset first and then the service which is totally backwards. You should buy the service and THEN choose a handset. But no, folks just HAD to have the iPhone. And I actually know someone who was honest about the iPhone, "It's a great PDA and data device. I just wish it was a decent phone. It's like the phone feature was an after thought."
Now, Verizon has the iPhone now and they're eating AT&T's lunch.
$3.4 billion in profit last quarter. And yet their network is garbage. I have an idea, but it's an engineer idea, not a suit idea, so... never mind.
Watch $3.4 billion turn into $1.4 billion, and AT&T Engineers will play the Verizon card in front of AT&T suits as their bonuses evaporate. Hey suit, can you hear me NOW?
Hell, AT&T foots $400-$500 on the cost of a new top-of-the-line phone for me every 18 months, and in return I pay them for $700 for service during that time.
Which means AT&T comes out $600 or more ahead, since their actual cost for the phone is almost certainly less than $100 more than you paid for it.
If only AT&T had had the foresight to charge money for their data plans. Then they'd have had additional revenue streams from all the new subscribers these devices brought to them. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess.
I know an AT&T executive in Texas. He was hired mainly because his _father_ was an AT&T executive in Houston - his dad called a co-worker in another division to hire his son. Both father and son bitch about how the "good old days" are gone, yet the company would be better off without either of them.
Anyway, it seems AT&T is a welfare state for some employees. They only care about salary and their pension, not their customers.
"I don't own a smartphone. don't have any plans to, either. saves me $100/mo, give or take; and no privacy to be taken away. no searches by cops/tsa/anyoneElse. no history to grab from me. no location data, either."
Sure there is if you have a regular "dumb" phone.. call logs, text logs, GPS information (either on the phone or from the cell provider's records) even if the phone doesn't have an actual GPS receiver.. they can figure out based on triangulation from the towers in the area.
With wired networks "Just build more," is basically always an option. Connection too slow? Upgrade the equipment to faster signaling. At the max signaling? Upgrade to fiber, or to better fiber. Have the most out of one connection you can? Lay more fiber and run it in parallel.
That isn't the case with wireless. Providers have a defined set of frequencies they can use. They can't just use more because it is licensed. Transmission power is also regulated and of course noise is out of their control. So that means bandwidth and SNR are fixed, which means the throughput you'll get is fixed (as per Shanon's Law).
Also, since it is wireless, everyone on a given cell shares what you have. If the technology and conditions allow for, say, 5mbps you get 5mbps to split among everyone. If there's 1 guy, he gets 5mbps to himself. If there's 100 people they split it and get much less each.
Only solution is to build out the cell towers, make them more frequent so each cell is smaller. Well and good but cost aside, people whine, they don't want to see them, they don't want them near their houses. That makes for a problem.
There is no magic solution for this. Better technology and new frequency licenses (LTE and WiMax and all that) will help a lot (of course it costs a lot to roll out since all radios have to be augmented with new ones) but you run in to physical limits.
This will unquestionably be bad for all consumers. Not only from the obvious potential for ever-increasing prices, but an almost certainty that service quality will decline. AT&T has a long running history of not building out their infrastructure as they should. Demonstrably, T-Mobile has been able to despite their lower ranking in the market place and their presence has been a a limit on customer abuses by all wireless carriers.
Letting T-mobile get absorbed will not bring this "great quality" to AT&T. AT&T is an extremely powerful and capable company. If they wanted to improve their infrastructure, they would. They would rather provide less service and abuse customers for cash. This sort of operation should be discouraged and even inhibited given that they are given the "right of way" to use the government (by the people?) licensed air waves in exchange not only for money, but with the promise that they will provide a benefit to the people and the nation. They are consistently failing in much of that and clearly where it comes to keeping their infrastructure in an improving and developing state as they should.
OK, I read the article and the related filings...
This supposedly argues in favor of T-Mobile buy?!?
Their argument is that it would take them 5 years to build out their infrastructure compared to the purchase of T-Mobile, and how they suddenly have a 30% larger network.
That works, as long as you assume that that network doesn't come with existing T-Mobile subscribers, and that assumption is wrong. According to the latest figures I could find: http://www.textmessageblog.mobi/2008/06/26/market-share-by-cellular-carrier/, AT&T has 71.3M subscribers and T-Mobile has 30.8M subscribers.
So... They get a 30% larger network, but a 43% larger number of subscribers.
How does this make things anything but worse for everyone?
-- Terry
It's pretty easy, your performance drops, you drop your price to compensate.
When you rebuild a faster network, raise the prices back up.
The marketing pressure you feel fromTelcos to drop your landline, and buy smartphones, tablets and 4G modems for your laptop is a result of the FCC's decision to encourage innovation by not regulating the technology and services (beyond requiring some basic 911 services.) The market is a potential goldmine compared to landline services. You can't complain about companies selling you service or bandwidth that isn't available because there's no one regulating the offerings. Market mechanisms don't work either, since none of the carriers have the capacity to offer quality service and broad coverage, and they've forced punitive contracts on us to prevent market mechanisms from working.
Not my problem, that's why AT&T execs are making huge amounts of money, they claim to have huge amounts of talent. Perhaps the AT&T stock holders need to sue them for salary and bonuses paid to them if they can't live up to their claims of talent and make things happen.
The sky is blue, ice is cold, and money is desirable.
They built a network of a certain size based on some rate structure that a lot of people can afford. Then they see and 8000% increase in traffic. It might not take 80x the cost to increase capacity by 80%. And a lot of this is peak load. But it's reasonable to assume that the cost of expanding require to handle the capacity at the same margins would be at least as expensive as the network they alreayd built. If they doubled the price, people would leave. if the just increced the price for the ipad owners it would not be viable.
So they are wedged and have to degrade their service to maintain a workable price point.
Competition is a bitch.
But it's not simply them being a douche to rake in profits. It's a situation where even if they erased the profit margin it would take them more than 4 years to build capacity.
On the other hand if you merger with someone with that capacity and a revenue stream to that sustains it you can expand much faster.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
We have abused our customers by failing to provide them with the services they paid for. We have sold products that we cannot support and continued to misrepresent our data services as superior to those of our competitors. We have demonstrated contempt for the concept of building out our network. We have generated record profits as a result. Therefore we humbly ask the FCC to allow us to buy T-Mobile so we can be the biggest mobile provider and do more of the same.
Thank you,
AT&T
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
It really is an odd combination of funny and sad seeing a tech site as old as slashdot is getting. It's a rare type that actually lets you see geeks getting older, and it's depressing how little being one seems to change the general terror of new technologies.
Everything will be taken away from you.
So... They get a 30% larger network, but a 43% larger number of subscribers.
Gosh, far be it from me to defend AT&T, but they're having a government problem, so I guess I have to.
It'll take AT&T 5 years to site new towers because the FCC bureaucracy makes it take that long. That's the only reason they need to buy T-Mobile. If it took 2 months to permit a new tower, this wouldn't be an issue. The FCC is directly causing a reduction in the competitiveness of the market which will increase everybody's prices.
So, by owning T-Mobile they'll have all the towers they need to build out their network effectively. Which they still won't do (see, I couldn't just leave it be).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The unlocked Iphones have been fairly consistently priced at $850-$900. given a 24 month commitment and an $80 cell phone bill, that's $1920 + $200 for the subsidised price - assuming that att pays retail (they don't), you get about $1220 over 24 months = $50/mo for service + profit. nice business to be in.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Don't most tablets just connect to a wireless router, and the wireless router is connected to a physical cable?
Whether a phone is locked or not won't matter soon in the US, unless you plan to travel abroad. There'll be no other network to move it to. As for CDMA networks, most carriers won't activate a phone on their network that was not originally branded and sold by them, so it doesn't matter. Device independence effectively dies with the AT&T/T-Mobile merger.
Until we revert back to 9600 baud packet radio to get information from place to place on the good ole' ham radio airwaves to avoid going broke paying for data. Of course by that time, the FCC might have sold that chunk of spectrum off anyway...
The solution AT&T has been working on is offloading as much of the data traffic as possible to their hotspot network. Traffic is typically worst in metro areas where AT&T typically has hotspots so it makes sense. For example: You can't actually disable the WiFi on an iPhone (4 at least), regardless of what the UI says. As you travel around, you are silently connected to any AT&T hotspot within range and your traffic is redirected to that. The iPhone will report its' still connected to 3G. I'm pretty sure it's the same with the iPads.
I for one welcome our
[CONNECTION LOST]
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Most new tablets - due to the fact that Apple bought out almost all the tablet screens worldwide - are in fact iPads or iPad2 - and they come in two flavors - wireless (or more precisely wireless b/g/n) and 3GS (which in fact use the 3G/4G networks and thus the AT&T data plans and coverage directly affect them).
So, in fact, it depends on which tablet you have and what you have it set to do - you can set it to only use one carrier or wireless mode, of course.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
In other words, they're preparing to announce they strongly oppose net neutrality -- so that they can charge heavy data users much more.
The public buy lies and there's a lot of competition selling it.
The issue here is the best network(s) will have the best spectrum across the US. What they are saying is that without the spectrum they can't improve their network. I doubt this is truly the case but it's hard to refute without having true analysis of their network, spectrum usage and usability. So they are saying they can't provide better service without additional spectrum that would come from the TM buyout.
Now I would say this is partly true as spectrum is in limited supply and a whole lot of demand. However, if the US Gov would have properly planned spectrum usage I don't think this would even be an issue.
On thing I can say for VZ is that they do seem to invest in more modern tech than ATT, and now ATT is hurting because of it.
Otherwise, it's not anyone else's fault but your own. They're raking in the profits and government subsidies, but don't want to build the necessary infrastructure to increase network capacity. Instead, they'd just rather buy out T-Mobile, because that instantly gives them a bigger customer base to milk.
What these telecom companies have been doing has been nothing short of criminal. Capitalism at work. Having to choose between what little competition there is, amounts to having no real choice at all.
Here's what I don't get. When there's an article like this, it's the iphone/ipad (Apple products) that are killing their network. Yet when I go into either of the local AT&T stores here, it's all about 'Droid. From the sales people to the shelf space. So what is it? Is it that:
a) iPhone/iPad refer to specific products, but at the same time have become a synonymous moniker for all like products (kind like "Walkman" in the old days was both a specific product, but also the generic name for any portable tape player)?
or
b) Despite all of the 'Droid push from AT&T, there's a larger iPhone base within the AT&T network than the explosive Droid devices?
or
c) People who buy 'Droids don't like to use the net near as much?
or
d) Droid phones suck at doing net apps relative to iPhones?
or
e) something else?
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
Verizon buys AT and nothing of value was lost.
Whatever AT&T corporate goons.
When it's in their favor that you claim their network is capable of handing traffic, such as when talking to Apple, investors etc, they say it is.
When it's convenient for them to say that it isn't, in this case for the T-Mobile buyout approval, their network suddenly isn't capable.
The only thing that I can trust is that anything they say is self-serving.
Corporations are amoral. They are not people, and because nobody is responsible for the collective actions, nobody cares if they do or say unethical or untrue things.
Sorry, but as someone who worked on the iPhone, AT&T was aware of it since very early on, so by my count, they've had 5 years already.
-- Terry
Sorry, but as someone who worked on the iPhone
Since you worked on the iPhone, you should know enough to understand that AT&T's pitch on buying T-Mobile is that they're saying the bottleneck is spectrum, and there's not enough new spectrum available today so the only way they can get it is by acquisition of existing license holders. This isn't about the number of towers (these would be consolidated in any acquisition anyway), it's about the depth of licensed spectrum available... especially since with LTE deeper contiguous spectrum increases the network efficiency in a greater than linear fashion.
AT&T drastically underestimated the network load of the iPhone when it first launched. The way the original iPhone handled keepalives and push messaging certainly didn't help - as you should know. ;-) Since then they have tried to make up for it, and while they have only partially succeeded, anyone with cellular industry experience knows how difficult and ridiculously expensive putting in new towers, buying new spectrum and upgrading backhaul to every tower is - and that there are no simple "duh they should just upgrade the network" answers in the real-world of wireless.
"95% of all Slashdot
I'm with ya brother! There's a lot of things we can give up to liberate ourselves from the shackles of the rat race.
For instance, I don't own any pants. I don't intend to either. I save hundreds of dollars a year. Images the TSA saves from me on their backscatter x-ray devices are hardly a concern anymore. I never suffer the humiliation of realizing that my lost car keys are, in fact, in my pocket. It's great!
As a bonus, i don't have anything to undo when nature calls. I can afford to push off rushing to the bathroom by 2 or 3 seconds. Over a lifetime of not wearing pants that amounts to hours. That's HOURS people are wasting buckling and unbuckling their pants just to take a dump!
So, basically you're saying that mobile carriers are pants?
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children. -- POSIX Programmer's Guide
Oh yes there is a magic solution: directional transmitters and receivers. With a directional signal path you can have multiple signals on the same frequency at the same time in the same area without interference. It's like billboards on the highway: you can look at one without the next one blocking your sight. We didn't have computer controlled phased array antenna's that could follow a transmitter in Marconi's time, so we had to use dedicated radio spectrum for each transmitter- and our rules haven't changed even though now we do.
Out of curiosity, what did you do exactly?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
It seems that China with the number of cell users approaching the total population of the US is able to accommodate the bandwidth issues, and give better coverage in the urban areas then AT&T. And they have multiple non-cooperating technology cellular companies, just like in US. Seems if a "third world" country can deliver, then the profitable AT&T in the USA should be able to deliver as well, without crying wolf to the authorities. This just smells like more bs to get pricing control and generate even more profits, without having to actually spend money for infrastructure or delivery services. Hope the regulatory agencies will be able to see through this "smoke and mirrors" farce.
Do you mean they've been lying when they sold us our unlimited, always-on connection. In doing so, signed up a bunch of new customers but never spend enough money on upgrading the infrastructure.
This isn't about spectrum.
You can increase bandwidth and carrying capacity of a cellular network by increasing tower density, with no change in bandwidth. NTT does this in Japan, and it works fine. This should be an obvious issue as a result of the radius vs. area bein > 1 (bein pi, in fact).
Here's a study on the issue:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fciteseerx.ist.psu.edu%2Fviewdoc%2Fdownload%3Bjsessionid%3D490881B8B7F086DD7B8C4C443124827E%3Fdoi%3D10.1.1.42.9109%26rep%3Drep1%26type%3Dpdf&rct=j&q=coverage%20vs.%20cell%20density&ei=NByzTfuANInmsQPP3djrCw&usg=AFQjCNGRRIPetr_EsDV946ldfV4E658TiQ&sig2=2AvHcX2oXQG91EcgNbNLSg
-- Terry
I can answer offline; I'm pretty easy to find.
-- Terry
How well does wireless-N work when you're sitting on the bus between home and work? Citilink in Fort Wayne, Indiana, does not offer WLAN on its buses. And how did you convince businesses in your local mall to make WLAN available to the public and not just to employees? Glenbrook Square Shopping Center in Fort Wayne, Indiana, does not offer WLAN to customers.