“A 5000 percent increase in 3G data traffic,” Paczkowski reports. “That’s an astonishing figure. Seems to me it’s entirely likely that any carrier that had been first with the iPhone — including catcalling rival Verizon — would have suffered similar network troubles to those that plague AT&T today.”
MacDailyNews Take: For the umpteenth time: Take those 15+ million U.S. iPhones off AT&T and plop them on Verizon and watch AT&T satisfaction soar (especially in metro areas) and Verizon come to a grinding halt. No carrier, including Verizon, is ready for 15+ million devices that are actually used for serious data consumption. Verizon’s network accommodates inferior devices that only sip data in comparison to iPhone due to their unusable web browsers (if they even have them) and generally indecipherable user interfaces which, only benefits the carrier as they get to sell phones on features that most people will never use. Verizon’s “3G” network doesn’t even allow users to talk while surfing the Web and/or emailing! The iPhone’s ease-of-use (snap a photo or even shoot a video and send it over AT&T’s network to wherever; robust, real Web Browsing; data-consuming apps which include streaming video over 3G, etc.) combined with the vast, rapidly-growing number of iPhones would cripple any carrier. If AT&T can’t get a handle on it, Apple would do well to reconsider their exclusive U.S. arrangement and spread the wealth – and the data consumption – to other carriers, as soon as (technically and legally) possible.
Paczkowski continues, “No other US carrier offers a super-smartphone that has sold as well as the iPhone, and which people use much like a laptop… So, really, any carrier that had been first to market with the iPhone would have seen its network overtaxed — especially after Apple launched the iPhone 3G and the iTunes App Store. Those events effectively upended traditional planning models for network capacity in a way that no one was prepared for.”
Paczkowski writes, “It will be interesting, then, to see how Verizon’s network holds up in comparison if and when it gets the iPhone.”
MacDailyNews Take: It would only be interesting if AT&T lost the iPhone deal all at once (won’t happen, as the contracts run over 24-month periods) and all iPhones were then quickly switched from AT&T to Verizon. Splitting the iPhone load wouldn’t test Verizon anywhere near the same way AT&T is being tested right now by having to carry the full brunt of 15+ million U.S. iPhones. Verizon has no right to catcall since the vast majority of their users can’t even find the Web browser, if it even exists, on the shitastic devices Verizon inflicts upon them.
Full article here.
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