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.
The argument still doesn't make sense. They know they need more bandwidth because their network is constantly at 100%. The only thing to do is add more bandwidth. The only question is "do I spend a little and add 100% extra or do I spend a lot and add 1000% extra?" Since the past three years have seen over 4000% growth and more smartphones which make heavy use of data services are coming out all the time it seems reasonable to expect that 100% is probably not going to be enough.
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.
That's what I thought too, but I think it's poorly worded. I think he means, if we haven't fully loaded our towers with equipment and they're still maxed out, it's hard to know how much demand is out there.
If a network is not fully loaded, it's hard to know exactly how much demand is out there.
Remember, ISPs (of which AT&T is one) take a bet that their users will never use 100% of their paid for bandwidth.
Thus they base the network capacity on the usage demand, and try to provision only as much as they absolutely have to.
This is why ISPs hate Net Neutrality - b/c they wouldn't be able to continue playing these games and get away with it.
In this light, where demand determines how much actually gets provisioned, it makes sense. If max demand is 100, but only represents 10% of paid for demand
>>>they base the network capacity on the usage demand, and try to provision only as much as they absolutely have to. This is why ISPs hate Net Neutrality >>>
Net neutrality has nothing to do with underestimate of user demand. Net neutrality is about ensuring all websites are treated equally (i.e. no extra fees to access youtube, or no discounts to watch att.com). As for estimating demand, I would build 1000 times current capacity, figuring that demand has grown from 50k to 50 meg during t
Honestly, they just need to provision 100% of what users are paying for; and figure out the growth rate and provision accordingly.
...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
And if they didnt sign the exclusive deal with Apple, what do you think that growth would have been? Just saying they are complaining all the way to the bank on this one.
Still, this whole network thing has hurt their image. If and when Apple ends the exclusivity, there will be people clamoring to leave AT&T in droves.
If and when Apple allows TMobile to also have iPhones, I will happily stay on AT&T while all the suckers go and collapse TMobile's network, while AT&T's finally has some breathing space...
AT&T needs to get as many network upgrades in as fast as possible, especially now that they understand people are actually going to use mobile data. But I have some sympathy for them as they have seen a level of growth no-one predicted.
From the report it seems exactly as much as the current TMobile network, since people are not seeing faster speeds...
3G is plenty fast enough for me, if they make it more reliable and increase coverage which I would prefer over a much faster network in a handful of showcase cities. Frankly even EDGE is not too bad, it is poor for browsing but it works well enough for maps or other light data use.
By the time iPhone exclusivity ends, it's very likely that both AT&T and Verizon will have at least started rolling out LTE [wikipedia.org], meaning that the top two carriers will have a common wireless "platform."
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.
There's one thing about the iPhone situation that really annoys me:
AT&T has tiered pricing for data plans for phones based on its capabilities (i.e. estimating just how much of that "unlimited" data you will actually use depending on whether the phone is a PDA phone, or just a dumbphone, etc.) Tethering users, of course, get hit the hardest ($60/mo and they actually have a specifically documented usage cap). PDA users with keyboards get hit second hardest (formerly $40/mo, now down to $30/mo).
Err, Verizon has been making advertising gold out of it. Note that I'm not a fan of Verizon, but the "there's a map for that" commercials have to be striking a bad chord over at AT&T headquarters right about now...
Very true. It was one of the key reasons why I took back an iPhone about a month ago and waited for the release of the Droid instead. Quite a few people have told me great things about Verizon's network while AT&T has been miserable on my company Blackjack. I figured it was just a crap phone only to find the same level of service on the iPhone, which is a pretty good hardware platform otherwise.
"he story notes that mobile data at AT&T has grown 4,932% over the last 3 years."
3 years ago mobile data traffic was probably nearly zero, so putting this in relative terms means nothing to me.
I wonder how much traffic their feeble network is actually dealing with? Imagine it was only 100 MB/s off each cell site and they are whinging like this...
With the last firmware update, even a Nintendo DSi can be used to upload photos to a Facebook account. I know the DSi is not 3G, but the title of the summary only says "mobile data".
Urban cell towers usually get fiber backhauls, but rural and sometimes even suburban towers usually have either T1 backhauls or microwave back to an aggregation point.
by Anonymous Coward
on Friday November 06, @12:31PM (#30007120)
"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.
I do have some (very small) sympathy for a company that has seen a 5000% growth in data traffic. Who can realistically plan for that kind of growth?
But, this is not the customer's fault either. Plan better. And how about you stop laying more people off? If you are growing at these record levels why are there lots of articles about layoffs in the last 3 years? I don't understand this. I'll admit that data growth != customer growth but why the huge layoffs?
Apparently AT&T has 12000 unemployed former employees from just this year. Sounds like bad planning across the board. Maybe this is a good indicator that the top executives are totally clueless to the actual situation of their company.
Who can realistically plan for that kind of growth?
A whole lot of us in the 1990's watched ISPs face exactly that kind of network growth (and worse...)
Now to be fair, I think the only saving grace back then was that the tech and infrastructure were relatively slow to catch up, let alone exceed the expanding capacity (that is, most folks had a crappy 14,4k modem, then a crappy 28,8k modem, then their phone lines wouldn't give them the full 56k, etc). Also, the bigger your home pipe, the more expensive it got - ISDN was hovering at around $160/month (IIRC) mi
No sympathy from me. If the spokesdroid was being honest, he'd say "You take all the money you get from the government to put all you can in the ground, spend that money on executive bonuses and lobbyists, and then implement bandwidth restrictions to cover up your incompetence and greed. Oh yeah, you also use that as an excuse to kick your competitors off your incumbent network."
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
The exact same observation is made with highway construction--but it has led transportation authorities to the opposite conclusion: if the more you build, the more people use the resource--then clearly the answer is to not build any because you'll never fix the congestion, and you'll just encourage more people to use the resource.
Take any area on Earth where you are not at max capacity and then model data usage per phone. Done. In what way is this difficult for a multi-national megacorp?
The way I undestand it, before the iPhone the used data bandwidth was negligible. How the hell where they supposed to plan for a nearly 5000-fold increase in demand?
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
That's a nearly 5000 percent increase, not a 5000 fold increase. Yes, 5000% is still a lot of growth, but it is two orders of magnitude less than you perceive it to be. (5000% increase = 50-fold increase)
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 = mo
This guy's quote is BS, if you as the owner of your traffic don't know how much demand there is either by system monitoring and/or usage patterns for specific type clients (with demograhaphics tagged along with it, because ATT sure as hell knows its clients profiles and/or can buy such data from 3rd parties) then they need to get out of the business. Either way ATT has slacked on its network, let Verizon (good for them) to compete and do it well and then blame poor performance and oversell on its lack of knowledge. That is just BS, they know, don't care until it hurts in the pocket... And exclusive contracts with big hardware vendors does't help the public, its own customer base, as well as its image. Shame on ATT.
This guy's quote is BS, if you as the owner of your traffic don't know how much demand there is either by system monitoring and/or usage patterns for specific type clients (with demograhaphics tagged along with it, because ATT sure as hell knows its clients profiles and/or can buy such data from 3rd parties) then they need to get out of the business.
No, what's he's saying is that since the network is already full to 100% of capacity, it's impossible to tell how much more capacity they need in specific areas
'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.
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.
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 fi
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 -
Sounds like just another group of clueless executives in the communications/IT industry. All they saw was dollar signs with this agreement with Apple. They had no idea of the impact on their network.
...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 u
Umm, what? (Score:4, Informative)
If a network is not fully loaded, it's hard to know exactly how much demand is out there.
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"
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Redundant)
The argument still doesn't make sense. They know they need more bandwidth because their network is constantly at 100%. The only thing to do is add more bandwidth. The only question is "do I spend a little and add 100% extra or do I spend a lot and add 1000% extra?" Since the past three years have seen over 4000% growth and more smartphones which make heavy use of data services are coming out all the time it seems reasonable to expect that 100% is probably not going to be enough.
Even if you find your 1000% e
Re: (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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Still a cop out.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If a network is not fully loaded, it's hard to know exactly how much demand is out there.
Remember, ISPs (of which AT&T is one) take a bet that their users will never use 100% of their paid for bandwidth.
Thus they base the network capacity on the usage demand, and try to provision only as much as they absolutely have to.
This is why ISPs hate Net Neutrality - b/c they wouldn't be able to continue playing these games and get away with it.
In this light, where demand determines how much actually gets provisioned, it makes sense. If max demand is 100, but only represents 10% of paid for demand
Re: (Score:2)
>>>they base the network capacity on the usage demand, and try to provision only as much as they absolutely have to. This is why ISPs hate Net Neutrality
>>>
Net neutrality has nothing to do with underestimate of user demand. Net neutrality is about ensuring all websites are treated equally (i.e. no extra fees to access youtube, or no discounts to watch att.com). As for estimating demand, I would build 1000 times current capacity, figuring that demand has grown from 50k to 50 meg during t
Re: (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
4932% Growth - Imagine That (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I look forward to the day (Score:5, Interesting)
Still, this whole network thing has hurt their image. If and when Apple ends the exclusivity, there will be people clamoring to leave AT&T in droves.
If and when Apple allows TMobile to also have iPhones, I will happily stay on AT&T while all the suckers go and collapse TMobile's network, while AT&T's finally has some breathing space...
AT&T needs to get as many network upgrades in as fast as possible, especially now that they understand people are actually going to use mobile data. But I have some sympathy for them as they have seen a level of growth no-one predicted.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/04/t-mobile-7-2mbps-hspa-rolling-out-now/ [engadget.com]
Re: (Score:2)
From the report it seems exactly as much as the current TMobile network, since people are not seeing faster speeds...
3G is plenty fast enough for me, if they make it more reliable and increase coverage which I would prefer over a much faster network in a handful of showcase cities. Frankly even EDGE is not too bad, it is poor for browsing but it works well enough for maps or other light data use.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think TMobile will be the only choice.
By the time iPhone exclusivity ends, it's very likely that both AT&T and Verizon will have at least started rolling out LTE [wikipedia.org], meaning that the top two carriers will have a common wireless "platform."
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
There's one thing about the iPhone situation that really annoys me:
AT&T has tiered pricing for data plans for phones based on its capabilities (i.e. estimating just how much of that "unlimited" data you will actually use depending on whether the phone is a PDA phone, or just a dumbphone, etc.) Tethering users, of course, get hit the hardest ($60/mo and they actually have a specifically documented usage cap). PDA users with keyboards get hit second hardest (formerly $40/mo, now down to $30/mo).
iPhone u
Re: (Score:2)
Err, Verizon has been making advertising gold out of it. Note that I'm not a fan of Verizon, but the "there's a map for that" commercials have to be striking a bad chord over at AT&T headquarters right about now...
Re: (Score:2)
Very true. It was one of the key reasons why I took back an iPhone about a month ago and waited for the release of the Droid instead. Quite a few people have told me great things about Verizon's network while AT&T has been miserable on my company Blackjack. I figured it was just a crap phone only to find the same level of service on the iPhone, which is a pretty good hardware platform otherwise.
Re: (Score:2)
"he story notes that mobile data at AT&T has grown 4,932% over the last 3 years."
3 years ago mobile data traffic was probably nearly zero, so putting this in relative terms means nothing to me.
I wonder how much traffic their feeble network is actually dealing with? Imagine it was only 100 MB/s off each cell site and they are whinging like this...
Re: (Score:2)
With the last firmware update, even a Nintendo DSi can be used to upload photos to a Facebook account. I know the DSi is not 3G, but the title of the summary only says "mobile data".
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
First Post! (Score:5, Funny)
This would of been the first post, but I'm in new york and posting from my iphone
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.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
I do have some (very small) sympathy for a company that has seen a 5000% growth in data traffic. Who can realistically plan for that kind of growth?
But, this is not the customer's fault either. Plan better. And how about you stop laying more people off? If you are growing at these record levels why are there lots of articles about layoffs in the last 3 years? I don't understand this. I'll admit that data growth != customer growth but why the huge layoffs?
http://www.techworld.com.au/article/269777/t_cut_12_000_employees_through_2009 [techworld.com.au]
Apparently AT&T has 12000 unemployed former employees from just this year. Sounds like bad planning across the board. Maybe this is a good indicator that the top executives are totally clueless to the actual situation of their company.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Bandwidth does not scale with number of employees.
Re: (Score:2)
Who can realistically plan for that kind of growth?
A whole lot of us in the 1990's watched ISPs face exactly that kind of network growth (and worse...)
Now to be fair, I think the only saving grace back then was that the tech and infrastructure were relatively slow to catch up, let alone exceed the expanding capacity (that is, most folks had a crappy 14,4k modem, then a crappy 28,8k modem, then their phone lines wouldn't give them the full 56k, etc). Also, the bigger your home pipe, the more expensive it got - ISDN was hovering at around $160/month (IIRC) mi
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No sympathy from me. If the spokesdroid was being honest, he'd say "You take all the money you get from the government to put all you can in the ground, spend that money on executive bonuses and lobbyists, and then implement bandwidth restrictions to cover up your incompetence and greed. Oh yeah, you also use that as an excuse to kick your competitors off your incumbent network."
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
Parent
Same argument used in highway construction (Score:3, Insightful)
Hard to know demand? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
The way I undestand it, before the iPhone the used data bandwidth was negligible. How the hell where they supposed to plan for a nearly 5000-fold increase in demand?
Re: (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
Re: (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 = mo
Shame on ATT for blaming anyone but themselves... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder how verizon would fare if they were able to offer the iPhone with unlimited data as well...
Re: (Score:2)
This guy's quote is BS, if you as the owner of your traffic don't know how much demand there is either by system monitoring and/or usage patterns for specific type clients (with demograhaphics tagged along with it, because ATT sure as hell knows its clients profiles and/or can buy such data from 3rd parties) then they need to get out of the business.
No, what's he's saying is that since the network is already full to 100% of capacity, it's impossible to tell how much more capacity they need in specific areas
AT&T's new marketing for this (Score:4, Funny)
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: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.
Parent
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 fi
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 -
If you build it... (Score:2, Interesting)
Just another group of clueless execs (Score:2)
Sounds like just another group of clueless executives in the communications/IT industry. All they saw was dollar signs with this agreement with Apple. They had no idea of the impact on their network.
Just another day in the IT industry.
Simple plan.... (Score:2)
Don't sell what you don't have.
If you want to sell more, build more before selling it.
If this were any other industry, I would bring up "if you can't, someone else will" but the market providers are so few that it's not true.
Re: (Score:2)
There is, but he can't download it because their network is overloaded.
Re:TFA has nothing to do with coverage (Score:5, Funny)
Thankfully we don't have this "last mile" problem in Canada. We use metric!
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Last Mile's a Last Mile, but they call it "Le Last Mile".
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 u