“De la Vega repeated that message in comments yesterday during UBS Investment Bank’s annual Global Media and Communications Conference. He said that 3 percent of smartphone users—which de la Vega was quick to point out were mostly iPhone users—are responsible for 40 percent of the traffic on AT&T’s mobile wireless network,” Foresman reports.
“If merely watching video—which is optimized for mobile delivery—is causing problems, wouldn’t transmitting video via 3G only exacerbate those problems? It seems like enabling streaming video transmission could quickly lead to users sucking up network capacity in an ‘inordinate fashion,’ as de la Vega described it,” Foresman reports. “Despite de la Vega’s dire warnings of network issues being caused by heavy data users, AT&T reported that it earned a 39 percent margin on wireless service for 2009, and expects to push that to the mid-40s going forward.”
Read more in the full article here.