Thursday, September 03, 2009

"the U.S. and Canada are the third world of mobile phone networks"

I was just reading an interesting article on the NTY website about the overload that the iPhone is placing on the ATT&T network:

Customers Angered as iPhones Overload AT&T

I understand the need for a company to make money, really I do, but at a certain point companies need to invest in maintaining an advantage over their competition in the future. I would own an iPhone today if I had not had such a crappy experience with Cingular/ATT&T years ago (almost 10 years!), but with that in mind I will continue to use my palm with Verizon. My palm is fast and not without its flaws but it is a known, and I have heard that things have not improved much on the ATT&T network since my experience.

If you are not a frequent visitor to my blog then you may not know that I am a computer science graduate student, and that my area of research interest is in networking and distributed systems. I should be very clear in saying that there is no silver bullet and no perfect network. They all have their own advantages and faults. Take the home access to the Internet in the United States as an example. I have hear rumors that in parts of Europe and Asia one can get a network (Internet) connection that offers roughly 10 times faster download speed and an amazing 400 times faster on upload. This connection can be had for as little as $10 us and I pay almost 5 times that amount for a connection that is much MUCH slower. Am I angry because I want a faster connection? No, I am angry because I pay so much for a "slow" connection. For most of us, we don't utilize a substantial portion of the connection we have. Like my friend Mike J. says... As long as the tubes keep the [media] flowing ;-)

I don't want to get into a debate about why the US is a leader in innovation, but lags so far behind in implementing and deploying those innovations, but I would like to see us do a better job of doing things right. Maybe if we get our priorities strait...

So I guess its my own humble opinion that it is not the iPhone that is the adversary, but a network that is not up to global standards. Hell we invented the internet 40 years ago, you think we could get it right.