The author makes a good point. Once iPhone moves to Verizon, the problem of congested traffic is sure to follow.
CNET blog:
Blame the iPhone's 3G network woes on you, me
Lots of apps means lots of data.
(Credit: Matt Hickey)There's been a lot of talk lately of AT&T customers--especially iPhone users--getting fed up with the quality of service they're getting with AT&T. Issues include dropped calls, shoddy coverage, and slow data speeds. People are upset that they have a fancy device that loses much of its usefulness when the network drops out. I can feel their pain.
Indeed, I saw the effect myself this last weekend. The Penny Arcade Expo (PAX), one of the world's largest gaming conventions, took place in Seattle, where I live. Thousands of the world's nerdiest nerds were here, and, as you'd expect, many were using iPhones, meaning many were using AT&T's 3G service.
PAX, which opened Friday, also had a handy guide on expojunkie.com for convention goers made especially for the iPhone. It featured maps, agendas, and other quick reference information to make PAX a better experience. The side effect was thousands of visitors using Seattle's 3G coverage at the same time--in addition to the thousands of locals who already use it. Service slowed to a crawl.
By Saturday, the service was back up-to-speed for most of Seattle. AT&T may have hit a switch and turned on more towers. It has a team that monitors areas with major events and tweaks the network when one causes problems. Whatever the company did fixed it.
The blessing and the curse
But here's the question: what are we to expect from AT&T when Apple sells millions of units of a revolutionary product that depends on its network and then provides millions of apps that put a huge burden on the same network? Do we really expect AT&T to be able to handle that much data?The easy answer is, "Yes. We pay for the service, we want it to work correctly." Which, of course, is a fine answer. Users of the iPhone pay more for their data than other AT&T smartphone customers (we're leaving regular phone customers out of the debate, even those who use data, for simplicity's sake).
But iPhone users also use far more data per device than other users, even those on the same network. One technology analyst, Chetan Sharma, estimates that while the typical wireless subscriber consumes 120MB per month, typical iPhone owners use four times that. That's 480MB, or almost half a gigabyte.
So let's take that data at face value and then consider that AT&T has 11.8 million smartphone users and more than 9 million iPhone users. So there are almost as many iPhone users as standard smartphone users, but each uses four times more data than the smartphone users.
Sure, there are other smartphones out there. And most have downloadable, third-party apps. And many of those are data-intensive. But here's the thing about iPhone users: they actually use their apps. Smartphones have been around for quite a while, but iPhone users actually stream video, browse the Web often, and get directions. It could be argued that nobody has ever done as much with a device as iPhone users do. And that's the blessing and the curse.
Simply put, because of iPhone users, AT&T simply has far and away more demand for data than its competitors. AT&T currently has more capacity as well, which is why the iPhones work at all. If not for the rapid deployment of system upgrades--it has spent billions over the last two years to try to keep up with the 350 percent increase in traffic--then the million of iPhones on AT&T simply wouldn't work at all. [Read more]
posted by: gqpartner
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