AT&T Wireless Data Still Growing At 1000% 137
jfruhlinger writes "AT&T's wireless network came under a microscope when it seemed unable to handle the massive data use boost that came when the iPhone arrived on the scene. The company has since put money into its infrastructure, and that growth rate has slowed somewhat, but it's still gone up 30 times over the past three years."
Apple's Achilles Heel (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Not a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
He's very, very good at Verizon Math. He also made it clear that he was practicing Verizon Math.
Do note that Verizon Math is very different from traditional math.
Re:Not a problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Whoosh [blogspot.com].
Read the post (Score:4, Insightful)
The total data volume over the nationwide network went from 1 billion megabytes per year to 30 billion megabytes per year. Or from roughly 900TB/365days or 2.4TB/day to 28,610TB/365days or 78TB/day.
Divide that by their 100 million customers and on average each customer uses not even 1MB/day.
If you want to be an ISP and you cannot carry more than 1MB/day, you should not be an ISP.
Re:Crap title (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Apple's Achilles Heel (Score:2, Insightful)
No one else could have handled the iPhone bandwidth demand back in 2007-2009 period any better than AT&T did.
Verizon could have handled it better than AT&T.
The Achilles heel of Apple may be when they release a CDMA iPhone for Verizon and people suddenly realize half the stuff they used to do on the iPhone does not work on CDMA where you get Talk OR Data.
Verizon is supposedly working on a way to rectify this problem. There was a story about it here or on BBR a few months ago. Here's one link [slashgear.com] that talks about the upgrade to CDMA.
I'm curious to know if this is really a big issue for a significant number of people? I've had my Android phone now for five months on Verizon and I really haven't had a problem with this. I do have the option to use wi-fi while I'm talking on the phone but I've rarely exercised it.
They've had plenty of time (Score:4, Insightful)
Smartphones have been available for at least 10 years now. If AT&T and other carriers had started investing in their data networks then, they wouldn't be having this problem now.