If I had more room in the title, it would have read: “Mobile operators offer devices with advanced features, but not enough network capacity to take advantage of them.” This has been an issue related to smartphones across all major networks, but perhaps none as prominent as the iPhone on the AT&T network. These users consume bandwidth disproportionate to the level of most other users. As AT&T sells more iPhones, then, they’ll be increasingly bombarded with traffic, making network capacity a growing concern. What can they do about it, though? FierceWireless’s Lynette Luna tackles the issue.
During a webinar on mobile data traffic, Luna got the panelists to agree on something: “The consensus was that LTE will solve most of these problems as the technology features a low cost per bit, thereby keeping operators from hitting the 3G wall where data traffic grows faster than revenues.” Problem is, LTE is still two years away for AT&T. How will they manage data traffic between now and then, especially with a new iPhone in the works for a 2009 release?
The easy answer is a greater investment in its network capacity. AT&T profits greatly on the iPhone. It wants to extend its exclusive agreement with Apple because of said great profits. But if AT&T is going to continue offering new iPhones and continue pushing them with their marketing dollars, then they owe it to the users to provide a network on which it can function. If that means AT&T has to dip into its profits to increase network capacity, so be it. Otherwise they’d be offering a device which can’t run at full capacity because it wants to save on network costs.
AT&T will not stop offering the iPhone. No way, no how. But what if its current data network cannot support the demand of its users? Is it fair for AT&T to sell these expensive devices and then not have the capacity to serve them all? Not at all. Thankfully, it looks like AT&T will be jumping to LTE a bit earlier than planned, so hopefully that mitigates the issue. Still, there’s a lot of time and a new iPhone between now and then. It’ll be interesting to see if AT&T has yet another network failure shortly after the new iPhone launch.
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