New York Times: Customers Angered as iPhones Overload AT&T

It’s rare that I stoop to say those four annoyingly trite words, but I’m saying it now…

AT&T’s 3G coverage is abysmal.

I’ve said it at home. I’ve said it at work. I’ve been lambasted by co-workers when I called the AT&T lacking 3G coverage a “bait and switch”… but obviously there’s a problem. AT&T can’t supply the demand they’ve helped create: if you force you to get a certain level of plan, aren’t they obligated – by their own contract – to supply a certain level of support for that plan, particularly if they tell you are in a covered zone? All of King County is covered in orange on their 3G map – as a perspective customer, I would obviously think that I’d be able to access the network whenever I wanted. And obviously this is not the case.

What I’ve asked before is how long until the class action lawsuit hits? As a provider it should not be legal to do the following in combination:

– force a plan of a certain level (and pay rate)

– lock that customer into said plan for any length of time (2 years in this case)

– not provide the service of the required plan (to a certain extent – maybe 99.99%? Maybe 99%? I’d settle for 85%)

It’s true that any of these individually is a dick move and horrible customer service, but all three together smell… well, criminal.

Additionally, I love this comment by AT&T: “It’s been a challenging year for us,” said John Donovan, the chief technology officer of AT&T. “Overnight we’re seeing a radical shift in how people are using their phones,” he said. “There’s just no parallel for the demand.”

Actually, jackass, there is a parallel for this type of demand, many times over and on two continents.

The usage of the iPhone in the US is still nothing compared to the cell phone usage in Europe and Asia. When I worked for a wireless ISV in the 1999-2001 time frame, and Europe and Asia had already worked to solve this very problem. Ten years ago. Ten years ago, I was able to talk on my cell while in an elevator going up 40 stories in Hong Kong. I saw near broadband speeds with instant-on connections over the CDMA network when I got to the 44th floor through a simple PCMCIA card. Ten years ago.

American cellular carriers knew about these successes. I knew about them because I was there. I know our carriers knew about it because they were scrambling to get a piece of the pie. All of the American carriers were drooling over the money rolling into foreign carriers for text messaging, alerts, and email usage. There was a time with US carriers wanted to – and tried to – charge for email access. Oi.

They didn’t understand the market then – how companies like BT and PCCW could charge for email because there were five cellphones to one PC usage for people in their countries: customers had no choice! In the states, we all have PC’s on our desktops. We have choices. A lot of them, when it comes to accessing information. Why charge for that which is already free? Of course, it didn’t stop some carriers and WISP from trying [and failing].

At the time, the place I worked for pitched them some ideas and prototypes that would drive customers to their phones. We had 80% of all of these applications ready – just needed to put in logo customization and billing plumbing for each carrier. The classic [and flawed] 80/20 model. It was akin to each carrier having their own App Store and supplying their own applications, which definitely appealed to their walled-in-garden mentality. Side note: the Apple App Store is a copy-cat: BREW had the exact same model back in 2000. So what happened? Why wasn’t the carrier or BREWs stores the “holy grail”? Carriers only cared about air time. Minutes of talk time. After the email debacle, they said “screw data – we can’t make money from that.” And so carrier support dwindled from the application concept, and the market took a nap for a few years… it took a gorilla like Apple to force AT&T to support the App Store model and generate revenue from data customers.

And now AT&T sounds unhappy because their antiquated, lack luster, ill-prepared network can’t deliver the results they’ve promised…

Nope – no sympathy whatsoever.

Hell, if it wasn’t for the pain of jailbreaking and being one version behind – thanks to the exclusive bit with AT&T – I would still be on T-Mobile… and smiling about it.