AT&T Admits It Wasn't Ready For The iPhone

[vansau]

AT&T Admits It Wasn't Ready For The iPhone

AT&T wants you to feel sorry for it, because it wasn't ready for the demands the company's iPhone monopoly put on its network.

Anyone who's been an AT&T iPhone user during the past few years can testify to how bad the company's service can be at times. This is particularly true in remote areas like Flagstaff, AZ, where I've been attending school for the past few years, but AT&T's service is often notoriously bad during conventions (like GDC in San Francisco) where too many iPhones overload the cell towers and nobody can actually make a call. Now, after years of complaints from the public, AT&T has finally fessed up to the fact that it was caught with its pants down when the iPhone was released, and it's been struggling to play catch-up ever since.

This information was revealed via an abbreviated version of its official request to the FCC to buy T-Mobile. In the press release, AT&T explained how much stress iOS devices put on its network:

A smartphone generates 24 times the mobile data traffic of a conventional wireless phone, and the explosively popular iPad and similar tablet devices can generate traffic comparable to or even greater than a smartphone. AT&T's mobile data volumes surged by a staggering 8,000% from 2007 to 2010, and as a result, AT&T faces network capacity constraints more severe than those of any other wireless provider.

Apparently, AT&T expects the problem to get worse in the future: The company stated that it believes its network will have to carry more data in the first five-to-seven weeks of 2015 than it did in all of 2010. Accordingly, the T-Mobile deal will supposedly benefit consumers by "reducing the number of dropped and blocked calls, increasing data speeds, improving in-building coverage, and dramatically expanding deployment of next-generation mobile technology."

While it's nice to see AT&T (finally) admit that it hasn't been serving its customers as well as it could, this definitely feels like a "too little, too late" scenario, given how cruddy the service has been for so long, not to mention how expensive the company's phone and data plans are.

Source: Geek

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[killamanhunter]

I get 0 service here in Valley Forge, that is unless you stand in a specific spot at exactly the right time of day...

 

[Plurralbles]

Because it'd be too hard to not give your CEO a billion dollar bonus and buy out almost every business you can get your grubby little hands on and instead invest in your customers' satisfaction. There's a wallstreet guy who invested based on customer satisfaction and made billions in the trust he set up. If that isn't an important lesson that everyone in the business world has taken to heart, that's just silly.

 

[AvsJoe]

...it was caught with its pants down...and it's been struggling to play catch-up ever since.

Sorry to go off topic here but putting those two expressions together makes for an ugly mental image. I do not want a pants-less anything playing catch-up with me.

 

[vansau]

...it was caught with its pants down...and it's been struggling to play catch-up ever since.

Sorry to go off topic here but putting those two expressions together makes for an ugly mental image. I do not want a pants-less anything playing catch-up with me.

You have a filthy mind and clearly shouldn't be a part of our forums...

¬¬

 

[FaithorFire]

I absolutely hate this company. They worked to get themselves an iPhone monopoly, then weren't competent enough to improve network speed tech to keep up.
Their Internet providing services are becoming shittier, so their solution is to create data limits to charge more money for their same crappy service rather than start planting Fiber Optic cables and upgrading servers.

I'm hoping the free market eventually pushes this shitty company into bankruptcy and failure.

 

[AvsJoe]

...it was caught with its pants down...and it's been struggling to play catch-up ever since.

Sorry to go off topic here but putting those two expressions together makes for an ugly mental image. I do not want a pants-less anything playing catch-up with me.

You have a filthy mind and clearly shouldn't be a part of our forums...

¬¬

lol sorry.

OT: there are a few reasons why I have never owned an iPhone and AT&T is one of them. But then again there isn't such a thing as a good phone company; you're basically trying to decide which is the least bad one.

 

[Onyx Oblivion]

OT: there are a few reasons why I have never owned an iPhone and AT&T is one of them. But then again there isn't such a thing as a good phone company; you're basically trying to decide which is the least bad one.

Isn't that true of cable and internet companies, too?

I still need to get an iPhone. my current 4-year-old phone is AT&T, and the only place with bad service is...my house.

Apparently, Secret of Mana is on the iPhone, making my decision piss-easy.

 

[Icehearted]

Too little too late is about right. Maybe coming forward sooner and being honest about the issue might have spared their reputation from the beating it's taken over the last few years. Whatever the case, this would worry me if I were a T-Mobile user.

 

[nipsen]

"While it's nice to see AT&T (finally) admit that it hasn't been serving its customers as well as it could, this definitely feels like a "too little, too late" scenario, given how cruddy the service has been for so long, not to mention how expensive the company's phone and data plans are."

..um.. the most interesting thing about the statement is probably that they associate increased data-traffic with "smartphones". This is a very strange idea on it's own. But like you say - they've actually sold these iPhone specific data-plans, and not actually delivered on it.

Then, instead of saying: "this is a large market that we would love to expand", they literally say: "sorry, but we're just fine with limiting data-traffic, and selling the data-plans we can't cover until at least 2015 and a couple of years".

Point is, they're not owning up to anything. The statement reveals that they haven't delivered even on the limited data-plans they've actually sold (for a relatively small number of customers).

Meanwhile, there's nothing stopping the service-providers from delivering solid data-plans for all mobiles sold nowadays, smarphones or not. Either as modems, or for use with, say, opera mobile, or other freely installable java software (or other proprietary solutions). Other than, obviously, willingness to actually treat data-traffic for normal users as an interesting service people would buy.

Funny thing is that the technology exists. Has more or less been that way since the 70's. What's not there is the infrastructure, along with the phone-providers accepting that they will have to give up on the "internet portal" thinking.

 

[trooper6]

I'm a T-Mobile user and I'm really, really bummed to hear that the irritating AT&T is buying my provider. I suppose I'll just have switch over to some other provider. But who? I hear bad things about Verizon as well.

Sigh.

 

[sneakypenguin]

I'm a T-Mobile user and I'm really, really bummed to hear that the irritating AT&T is buying my provider. I suppose I'll just have switch over to some other provider. But who? I hear bad things about Verizon as well.

Sigh.

Sprint, if you can deal with being stuck at 3g speeds for another year or two until they switch from WiMax to LTE. Pretty much any company gets a 15% discount with them My bill for unlimited text and data, and mobile works out to 63 dollars a month.

 

[Digikid]

its AT&T....we NEVER feel sorry for those crooks.

 

[RvLeshrac]

I'm a T-Mobile user and I'm really, really bummed to hear that the irritating AT&T is buying my provider. I suppose I'll just have switch over to some other provider. But who? I hear bad things about Verizon as well.

Sigh.

Sprint, if you can deal with being stuck at 3g speeds for another year or two until they switch from WiMax to LTE. Pretty much any company gets a 15% discount with them My bill for unlimited text and data, and mobile works out to 63 dollars a month.

LTE won't give you "4g speeds." Verizon, AT&T, and Spring will all be throttling the hell out of LTE. They haven't even built out a tiny fraction of the capacity necessary to do a full LTE rollout.

Even when they *DO* finally provide full LTE speeds, it won't matter - having LTE speed just means you'll reach your cap 50-100x faster.

 

[trooper6]

I'm a T-Mobile user and I'm really, really bummed to hear that the irritating AT&T is buying my provider. I suppose I'll just have switch over to some other provider. But who? I hear bad things about Verizon as well.

Sigh.

Sprint, if you can deal with being stuck at 3g speeds for another year or two until they switch from WiMax to LTE. Pretty much any company gets a 15% discount with them My bill for unlimited text and data, and mobile works out to 63 dollars a month.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll check them out! But I'm really sad about the T-Mobile thing. I've been with them since 2002.

 

[Jaker the Baker]

AT&T is the reason I never got an Iphone, and I doubt I ever will.

Apple is the reason I never got an iPhone, and I doubt I ever will.

 

[mattaui]

I hate to tell people this, but the only way this is ever going to get better is realistic caps on data usage for mobile devices of all kinds, at least the way the spectrum currently is. It also doesn't matter how many towers you've got handling your service if it all gets crammed into the same narrow pipe, too.

I'd prefer to have reliable and useful service when I needed it, rather than continue to pay for a service that works adequately at best. It's going to take both governmental and commercial changes in the way spectrum and the internet in general is allocated. It isn't just AT&T, it's something all mobile carriers struggle with under the same circumstances.

The idea that AT&T (or any other company) is just doing this out of sheer incompetence and/or greed is a pretty strange one.