You sign the customers first, work out the details later. Customers are committed for 2 years, will likely be on for 4 or 6. They'll be stuck with you.

So it's the fault of the devices and not the retarded telcom that refuses to build out it's network, besides the fact that there is an obvious demand. Fuck them.

No....it took them 4 years to ADMIT it. Very different things. One makes them incompetent, the other makes them a douche.

For why we need larger quantities and higher quality carriers and ISPs. It's not like this is the first time hardware advances have put pressure on specific sectors to improve their services. Most providers are already giving the US some of the worst bandwidth you can get in the modern world. And now non-tech users (read: smartphone and tablet users) are becoming complacent with data plans and shabby speeds that it's becoming this pathetic norm. The one recent ray of hope is Google's Kansas City project where they're getting some of the best stuff in the country while someone in LA is sitting there twittling their thumbs with 3mpbs Internet speed. Oh boy...

If AT&T is selling these phones, then they are the ones who should be responsible for supporting them, which IMO includes providing adequate bandwidth and network capacity to deal with the demands of the devices that they sell. I purchase a phone and data package. I should be able to get the capacity that I have paid for. If that is an unlimited data package (mine is), then this is NOT my problem. It is AT&T's problem in promising more than they can deliver, which in any terms is fraud.

They made $3.5B last quarter (net profit). If they only invested half of that, maybe their network wouldn't be under so much strain and the economy would prosper. How much people can YOU employ for $2B? I would say at least 40,000 people that would then be able to reinvest their money in you know, $500 cell phones and $120/mo data services.

Small wonder they dropped the "unlimited flat rate 3G" plan a month after the iPad 3G was introduced.

Makes me wonder how far the gap between the wonder and the reality of "cloud computing" is. Sounds great to keep all your data/music/video in the "cloud", but throwing around that much data grinds any capped data plan into the ground.

(Advantage to the early adopters: some of us still have that glorious "unlimited 3G" plan. Yay! FYI: they're transferrable.)

That's why they bought T-Mobile. Much cheaper and faster to buy existing infrastructure.

Two different problems.

In areas of low population density, their towers don't reach far enough, so there are huge areas with no signal at all.

In areas of high population density, their towers don't have enough frequency slots or time slots to handle the number of simultaneous users (and the added multipath problems caused by mostly-concrete high-rise structures make things worse).

Both problems are real problems. The problem with the U.S. is not that the density is too high or too low, but that the density has too large a standard deviation.

This will unquestionably be bad for all consumers. Not only from the obvious potential for ever-increasing prices, but an almost certainty that service quality will decline. AT&T has a long running history of not building out their infrastructure as they should. Demonstrably, T-Mobile has been able to despite their lower ranking in the market place and their presence has been a a limit on customer abuses by all wireless carriers.

Letting T-mobile get absorbed will not bring this "great quality" to AT&T. AT&T is an extremely powerful and capable company. If they wanted to improve their infrastructure, they would. They would rather provide less service and abuse customers for cash. This sort of operation should be discouraged and even inhibited given that they are given the "right of way" to use the government (by the people?) licensed air waves in exchange not only for money, but with the promise that they will provide a benefit to the people and the nation. They are consistently failing in much of that and clearly where it comes to keeping their infrastructure in an improving and developing state as they should.

But that is why day traders and quick turnover is so bad for this country! hell the day traders wouldn't give a shit if you burned the company down for the insurance as long as it bumped up the stock price. You do ANYTHING smart like invest in infrastructure? watch the price fall. Just keep the money and let shit fall apart? Stock rises. What we need to do is tax the living shit out of the short termers so if you buy stock you would have to be INVESTING, not treating Wall Street as Vegas with nicer clothes.

As for TFA any of us that has had to deal with AT&T knows their infrastructure sucks ass, full stop. In my area everyone gets reamed by the cableco because even one week on AT&T DSL will make sure you NEVER want to deal with them again. Every time I start to bitch about the cableco prices all I have to do is get called out to a customer that can ONLY get AT&T DSL to go "Wow, thank God cable is in my area!". We are talking a TOP speed of 756k, most of the time sub 200k, and when having to deal with them for a customer got basically told "tough luck we have NO intention to upgrade now or anytime in the future". Monopolies must be nice.

As for their wireless the shit is so bad I had to wire my dad up his own mini cell tower just so his damned phone would work without him having to go stand outside and point at the tower, and this is in the middle of town? Frankly if it wasn't for the fact they were the only game in town I'm sure they wouldn't have ANY customers at all! Piss poor signal, piss poor speeds, piss poor service. Hell they might as well change the logo to Goatse with a new tag line of "AT&T: we own this area so bend over bitch"

If a country like the Philippines (about 100 million - 20m of which live in the greater NCR give or take) can handle 10 million+ internet subscribers over 3G, with about 50 million more that use data on their cell phones daily, then I think the USA can handle it. Filipino's send 140 billion text messages every year on top of this too - sure, everywhere you look there are cell sites, most larger buildings have them inside on every floor too - but that's how you do it. Make your footprint smaller, add in more cells, blanket the country in fiber, job done.

What you suggest is certainly one solution, however I think the world has established that such steps are not necessary when you actually spend some of your billions on better infrastructure.