NYT: AT&T’s Love/Hate Relationship With The iPhone
Posted on 03 September 2009, at 10:30 am, by Dan Cohen
I love when old media gets its technology reporting right, as the NYTimes did in their article on A&T and the iPhone yesterday.
The article says it all in the second line of the piece- “It’s a data guzzler.” How much so? Well think of it this way: the iPhone is sucking so hard on AT&T’s data pipeline that the entire system gets slowed to a crawl. The end result is that ALL devices on the system slow down, drop calls, or just connect in an evermore glitchy manner.
Sound familiar??
There are a few key points in the article which, while nothing new, pull it all together in a way that makes it easier than ever to think maybe AT&T wasn’t being a total idiot when preventing applications like Slingplayer from using the 3G pipeline.
The standout points…
–the average iPhone user uses 10 times the network capacity than the average user
–there are more than 20 million smartphones on the AT&T network but it is the 9 million iPhones that are sucking the majority of data
– Due to its increased speed and resulting ease of use iPhone 3GS users have, on average increased their data usage by 100%
–The majority of the nearly $18 billion AT&T will spend on its networks this year will be diverted to trying to catch up with demand.
–Mobile data traffic is expected to double every year through 2013
And even AT&T is starting to admit the problem.
As John Donovan, the chief technology officer of AT&T put it, “It’s been a challenging year for us. Overnight we’re seeing a radical shift in how people are using their phones. There’s just no parallel for the demand.”
As the article states-
The company has also delayed bandwidth-heavy features like multimedia messaging, or text messages containing pictures, audio or video. It is also postponing “tethering,” which allows the iPhone to share its Internet connection with a computer, a standard feature on many rival smartphones.
That’s all good and well but, as the Hebrew expression goes- זבש”ך (zebashcha) זאת הבעיה שלך “that’s your problem”.
The responsibility still falls on AT&T. No one forced them to sell the iPhone and if they can’t keep up with the demand placed by devices they sold that is their issue not the end-users. Unfortunately, it is the end user who ends up suffering, especially in crowded urban areas where the connection can slow to a crawl. But even with that AT&T is still changing the same price for monthly service even when their data pipe at times makes the devices close to unusable.
The good news here??? “AT&T says it has no intention of capping how much data iPhone owners use.”
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September 3rd, 2009 at 4:21 pm
To play Devil’s Advocate, AT&T can’t just place towers willy-nilly to gain more capacity. There is planning, purchasing, permitting, etc., etc. Also funny that the same day that this story runs, there is another story (I think I saw it on Apple Insider) that AT&T has just added a bunch of capacity in the NY Metro area – the NYTimes backyard.
September 3rd, 2009 at 6:49 pm
doogald- would you do me a favor and point out where in the post or in the NYTimes article anyone suggests they can or should “place towers willy-nilly”?