AT&T's City-By-City Plan To Up Wireless Coverage 158
alphadogg writes "AT&T has created different mobile calling models for every major city in America as it tries to improve a network that has come under fire for poor performance as the data-friendly iPhone has proliferated, an executive said Thursday. Other carriers just use one nationwide calling model to plan for all cities, claimed CTO John Donovan, speaking at the Open Mobile Summit conference in San Francisco. The nation's second-largest mobile operator has had a hard time planning for bandwidth needs in the rapidly changing mobile world, Donovan said. AT&T has seen rapidly growing mobile data usage — and much criticism over its 3G coverage — as the exclusive iPhone carrier in the US. 'If a network is not fully loaded, it's hard to know exactly how much demand is out there,' Donovan said. 'You put all you can in the ground, and they eat it all up, and then you put more in there, and they eat it all up.'" The story notes that mobile data at AT&T has grown 4,932% over the last 3 years.
4932% Growth - Imagine That (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Umm, what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, from the rest of his comment it seems he meant the exact opposite.
"If the network *is* fully loaded, it's hard to know the demand, because you have 100% usage, add more capacity, and quickly hit 100% usage"
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
"You put all you can in the ground, and they eat it all up, and then you put more in there, and they eat it all up"
This is the typical, in this case subtle (but in other cases not subtle) blaming of the consumer for overusing network resources beyond some mythical "reasonable/predictable" amount that service providers cling to in rationalizing their retarded infrastructure expansion plans.
News flash: your network and every other corporate network is at capacity already and you're overselling subscriptions. Don't add one tower and then complain that those data-hungry fiends are using the new bandwidth so quickly. Either think big and grow some balls about expanding your network, or quit complaining and admit that you've resigned to mediocrity.
Hard to know demand? (Score:3, Insightful)
Shame on ATT for blaming anyone but themselves... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bullshit (Score:1, Insightful)
This has always been how these communications companies act.
Read newspapers from the late 1890s. We see the same attitude coming out of Continental Telegraph, Union Telegraph & Transmission, and the other big players in those days.
Instead of improving their telegraph networks, some of them would impose a limit of no more than 10 words per telegraph when the load got too high.
Different companies, different technology, same fuck-the-customer business attitudes.
Not a network admin, is he? (Score:5, Insightful)
'If a network is not fully loaded, it's hard to know exactly how much demand is out there,' Donovan said. 'You put all you can in the ground, and they eat it all up, and then you put more in there, and they eat it all up.'"
You've never done any kind of network administration, have you Mr. Donovan? You designed your network for average use, not peak use. As anyone who designs networks for a living will tell you -- it will function perfectly well until it reaches close to or at 100% utilization, at which point it'll choke and die horribly. Had you excercised proper engineering methodology, you would have known to test each product/application being put on the network in test markets and used the use data to predict what the peak would be, and then only deploy it when you had a 20-50% greater capacity than what the data suggests.
But alas, you eschewed best practices to save a few bucks -- all those profitable quarters and executive kickbacks, all the while your towers were backhauled on 512kbit DSL and fractional T1s. Your infrastructure's been rotting for a long time, sir, and the iPhone has nothing to do with your failure as an executive to execute a proper deployment plan that accounts for growth. You should be ashamed: The chinese mobile phone network has over 500 million subscribers, and their plans are cheaper, have better options, and their infrastructure is far more modern. China has similar problems to the United States in terms of rural development and rugged terrain for deployment -- and yet you've abjectly failed to not only do your case studies, but even do exploratory research within your own market.
It's amazing that this level of incompetence is rewarded by our society.
Re:Bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
Bandwidth does not scale with number of employees.
Re:4932% Growth - Imagine That (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who just signed up for two years with AT&T, I can't wait for the iPhone exclusivity to end. Not because I want to jump ship, but because it should make things better for everyone.
The people who are the heaviest users and the most dissatisfied with the service will pretty quickly cough up the ETF and switch to the first competitor that offers it. After a few months, this alone may very well have a noticeable effect on network performance.
More importantly, though, as AT&T actually begins to feel the financial effects of fleeing iPhone users, they're going to have no choice but to ramp up the infrastructure upgrades to compete. In other words, the market will actually start working like it's supposed to.
Re:Not a network admin, is he? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's amazing that this level of incompetence is rewarded by our society.
Unfortunately it's not amazing. It's so common and so frequently noticed that we've become blasé about it. The system of cronyism between rich people has utterly eliminated accountability and actual performance incentives (rather than fake ones), to the point where their precious "free market" in labor doesn't work at all.
It used to be that when you scrambled your way to the top, you had to keep scrambling because someone young and hungry was coming up behind you. Nowadays the gap between the rich at the top and the next layer down has become such a vast gulf, there's no worries that any hard scrambler can ever cross it. Even if he scrambles REALLY hard, the odds he'll ever scramble hard enough to be able to afford to get into your precious country club are slim to none. The membership fee rises faster than his piddly "fortune".
I used to think it was possible to scramble hard enough, until some helpful soul on Slashdot pointed out the folly of my optimism. I believed in the American Dream, until Slashdot very unkindly pointed out that class mobility in the United States has never been lower, and it's REALLY low. Thanks Slashdot. You killed my dream. Bastards.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the typical, in this case subtle (but in other cases not subtle) blaming of the consumer for overusing network resources beyond some mythical "reasonable/predictable" amount that service providers cling to in rationalizing their retarded infrastructure expansion plans.
Indeed, it's telling that THEY HAVEN'T STOPPED ADVERTISING.
Car metaphor: you're a car dealership. You run some ads in which you say "Buy our cars: we have them to sell", and then you sell all the cars you have. Do you
A: Order more cars to sell
B: Stop running the ads, since, no, you don't have cars to sell
C: Complain about customers buying your product faster than you expected while still running the ads and not buying more cars
Same argument used in highway construction (Score:3, Insightful)
What is peak of 4600% average increase? (Score:3, Insightful)
You've never done any kind of network administration, have you Mr. Donovan? You designed your network for average use, not peak use.
I think what he is saying (badly) is that you can't find the peak if your network is constantly at peak.
Not to mention it's hard to figure out what the real peak will be in a few years with 4600% growth in average use.
To put it simply, that level of growth caught everyone flat footed because people just did not use data plans that heavily before. AT&T is still trying to figure out how to adjust. I know they are building out because service in my town (Denver) has improved, but obviously they are struggling to have improvements match growth rates. And they probably will for some time... hopefully they are starting to realize they need to lay down new network capacity at a far greater rate, whatever that takes.
Re:Hard to know demand? (Score:3, Insightful)
It isn't a 5000-fold increase, its 5000% increase, which amounts to 50 times more data usage. They used that data representation to make it seem overwhelming when in fact it could have easily been projected with the first 6 months of iPhone usage. I usually play the devil's advocate, but I will never give AT&T that benefit. They are one of the sleaziest companies in the US. Getting angry because you are spending your customer's money on frivolous bullshit rather than increasing capacity in what they paid for is pathetic.
Re:Umm, what? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a telco monopolist mentality.
Gosh, we build, then it's at capacity. That's not what we had with landlines!
Remember: this isn't the AT&T of old, with wizened scholars. This is Southwest Bell that sucked up the other Baby Bells, then chose GSM as their infrastructure and got in over their heads. They're still clueless as to what success they've had as a result of Apple's business models. Apple, OTOH, could have 5x the customers if they simply shipped a (w)CDMA/GSM world phone.
Even more shocking... (Score:3, Insightful)
...offer something that is your core competency and people want to use it. This is what AT&T DOES. They sell data transit. Move the bits from here to there. That's their job. Their ONLY job. And they suck at it. If that's not a damning indictment against monopoly/duopoly, I don't know what is.
If only my employer had this problem. People beating down their door to obtain the service they most like to offer. Oh what a terrible fate. And they fumble it and practically fail at it. It would be unbelievable if I didn't already know they're more than half of a duopoly.
Worse, they got a giant government handout a decade ago, before giant handouts were quite so common, and they STILL fail. How much of the free broadband money (tax credits) did AT&T née SBC née Bell South née AT&T get from the gub'ment? Billions. And here it is 2009 and they're having trouble moving data from a few million phones. It's crap like this that is the reason why Third World countries tend to stay Third World. We truly have become a banana republic, and we're going to destroy ourselves if we keep up that habit. It does not work.
Re:Hard to know demand? (Score:3, Insightful)
In answer to your question of how to plan for huge growth, there were several factors they should have paid better attention to.
1) Exclusivity. they knew getting into this deal that iPhones would grab a huge user base, which is why they negotiated an exclusive contract. Conclusion: More users = more traffic.
2) Design. The iPhone is designed to leverage a 3g data network. Conclusion: More iPhones = more traffic per user than other cell phones.
3) History. IPhones have been out for what, 2 1/2 to 3 years? Presumably, they are able to look at traffic on a per-user basis and conclude that average iPhone users consume X mbits of bandwidth. Multiply that by your sales figures, and subtract that from your current capacity. Project your results out a year or so. Wherever you have a deficit, you need to ramp up your coverage. Conclusion: Someone's not paying very close attention in the Planning Department while Sales is still cashing customers' checks.
Be realistic (Score:3, Insightful)
If he'd been doing case studies from the start and deploying products in test markets on a schedule
Come on, how are you going to "test market" something like the iPhone? It releases everywhere, all at once - and it's been a rollercoaster for them since.
I have seen so many test market plans from large companies go up in smoke. Invariably there is something large no-one accounted for in the testing. You can test and test to some degree, but there are always at least a few huge surprises when you deploy - and the growth of actual data use on hand-held devices is simply something that could not be "tested" for as it also goes hand it hand with application growth, which would not occur at the same rate in test markets.
But they disregarded that in order to release the iPhone nationwide all at once as part of a huge marketing campaign,
But if you want to blame someone for that, it's all on Apple - not AT&T. Honestly though, I don't see that plan really working for them well even if they had been able to do it - as I said before part of the rise in bandwidth is the rise in the number of applications that make use of that bandwidth.
And honestly, who even does small market test releases anymore? Did Verizon do that with Droid? No, because you simply cannot take that kind of time in todays mobile market.
The problem is, it costs more to rush a deployment after a problem like this presents than to do a phased upgrade, when there's opportunities to cut costs by careful selection of distribution channels, contracting during periods of reduced production, etc.
Ah, but this careful approach also would lose a lot of customers, and the iPhone would not have been a success had it been tried as it would have given everyone else way too much time to catch up.
Personally as a customer I'd rather have a network with a few issues and an iPhone than be wondering when it would come to my town... that goes for any device, people always bitch when you release it into a limited market first. Phones are not a thing you can do that with, although it works for other tech sectors.
Re:Umm, what? (Score:3, Insightful)
...and there'd only be 50 cell phones per city, because no one else could afford one. (Back when AT&T was a monopoly, this was actually the business model: Cell phones were planned as a high-end luxury item found only in limousines and such.) For guaranteed 100% availability of "what users are paying for," every cell site in the network would have to have one radio channel per customer... and that channel would sit idle and unused 99.9% of the time, but it still has to be there, ready and waiting, in case all 50 customers are stuck in the same traffic jam.
To borrow a downthread commenter's analogy, this is the difference between paying for 1.5Mbps DSL and running a full-bore T-1 line to your house: One of these things costs 5x more than the other, and if we insist that ISPs build to that capacity level then most of today's customers will be priced out of the market.
Not that AT&T couldn't have done a better job of growing their capacity, but they really do have a tiger by the tail here: The iPhone is hammering their data network like nothing before or since. Even if they had accurately forecasted the iPhone's impact, they wouldn't have been able to build enough capacity in time.