Have you made a phone call on AT&T network lately? Well I have, and the quality of the call has not changed from one year ago; it was bad then and it is bad now. The biggest annoyance is the unexpected dropped call and believe me, it happens quite often. I live in one of the “supposedly best” covered metropolitan areas of the country, in proximity to the company’s headquarter, and yet I suffered heavily from poor voice and data connections. Speaking of poor data connection, I would rather watch grass grow, than wait for my applications to run at a reasonable speed. It is a very exasperating and painful experience!! The slow connection is ruining my mobile broadband experience when I still have to resort to the desktop to perform simple tasks. Frankly, I find this service unacceptable considering the high rate plan I am required to signed for up just to use my iPhone and blackberry. It is just plain bad service!! It is like to going an expensive steak restaurant and only to be served spam for dinner. Did I say unacceptable? You get my point!
Just Google “AT&T bad service” or any closely related phrase and you will see the thousands of posting espousing this same theme, so I know I am not the only one wondering here. What a shame to have such a high end product (iPhone) associated with third world phone service. Wait, even third world phone service is better than this. At least I can complete a call without being abruptly cut off. So why is the company not doing anything about it? Well they are doing plenty. So we are told! And I for one do not doubt that the good corporate folks from the old telephone company are doing everything they can to fix the problem. The issue I have is, whatever they are doing is not working fast enough or at all. Sure, they are expanding the network, building more cell-sites, adding more nodes, increasing coverage area and making their pipes bigger. But they keep selling more smart phones and introducing more bandwidth hogging devices in the network. They keep fiddling with their rate plans to stem the tsunami of data consumption on their network. Yet, all this results in AT&T spinning its wheels and running around in circles. They are even drinking their own cool-aid. I heard Steve Jobs recently commented on the why the AT&T network is so bad. He was very careful and deliberate in his answer, but the crux of it is, he was told by very knowledgeable people at AT&T the network needs to get worse before it gets better. Whoa Steve!! I thought you are a smarter guy than that. Yea, I know, you even chuckled at your own answer.
In my humble opinion, I believe AT&T does not have a handle on the problem. They lack the big picture of the impact of data and video consumption by the end user on the network. There are many short-term reactions to the problems but no real long-term visionary planning. They throw equipment wantonly at problem areas, they react to specific geographic areas experiencing eroded quality of service, they continue to introduce bandwidth hungry devices and hope on a wing and prayer that the problem will not escalate. Plain and simple the company needs help, but would ma-bell ego allow that to happen? That is million dollar question or in AT&T case it could be the billion dollar question. And ah! If you think AT&T is the only one having this problem, then think again? Verizon and other Tier1 mobile operators better take plenty of notes here. The same monster could be lurking in your network. It just haven’t reared its ugly head yet! Verizon should milk the map commercial as long they can. Soon the gremlins will start chewing on your wires.
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