AT&T Fails The SXSW iPhone Test | Hacker News Reader

AT&T Fails The SXSW iPhone Test

businessinsider.com

16 pointsksvs12 comments

I ran into a couple of the guys from AT&T here. They said that they didn't anticipate how many iPhones would be at the conference.

They showed me the emails they sent back and forth with John Donovan (AT&T CTO) about the issue, and said they worked like mad to increase capacity.

(BTW, according to the sig files in his emails, looks like John Donovan is on an iPhone.)

Looks like AT&T has responded to the twitter outcry: http://gigaom.com/2009/03/15/tweeting-works-att-boosts-sxsw-...

I've been to a few big events in Australia - and the big telcos deployed portable mini cell's in order to handle the load. Anyone know if AT&T is doing this at sxsw?

I don't see any on the street outside.

It's still baffling to me that Apple chose to tether themselves to AT&T. They built a mobile browsing device that almost 2 years later is ahead of the competition (at least for now) then tethered it to the worst data network available. It's like they built a Ferrari with wheels that fall off at 65 mph.

I am guessing they didn't have a choice. When they approached carriers, they didn't show them the phone. It was a "trust us, this will be awesome" situation. If you remember, when the iPhone was announced, a VP at Verizon bragged about passing up the deal. It seems that AT&T was the only carrier to trust Steve, much to their credit.

Apple also had stipulated very strict and unusual terms regarding revenue. AT&T was smart to see the upside potential of a radically new device causing users to switch to their network -- again, something that Verizon ignored. You have to give AT&T credit. Even though they have a horrible network, they are very strategically savvy.

Here is the whole story: http://thewickedwoman.com/2007/07/08/why-apple-chose-att-for...

I have both the iPhone and a blackberry on verizon and I can confirm hands down that verizon is far superior to att (I'm writing this on the iPhone now and it's auto complete turned att to AT&T... Lame). FYI, I live in NYC but when traveling nationwide have had the same experience.

Too bad AT&T doesn't have a femtocell product that can route iPhone traffic over local internet connections.

Oh, wait, they do! It's in testing with their own employees. See:

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Femtocells-in-2009-99...

Not deploying a few to SXSW would seem a major blunder and lost opportunity -- unless the units are currently so awful they'd be even worse then the current complaints.

It would also be cool if AT&T had some kind of VoIP/mesh software for the iPhone. That would allow them to benefit from the mass assembly of their customers, and maybe even reduce their infrastructure requirements for the event (rather than increase them).

AFAIK a femtocell can support fewer than a half-dozen phones; you'd need a ton of them to handle the Austin Convention Center. It's not even clear that such density is possible from an RF engineering perspective.

OTOH, T-Mobile is fine and the wi-fi works well (which is impressive with ~3,000 simultaneous clients).

I know nothing of the technology itself, and I would love to hear from an expert. But to speculate:

If the femtocells are to work in an urban environment, they'll have to work with many to a city block -- or even single apartment building. That is, about the same density as wifi access points. I can see 7 SSIDs right now from my kitchen table; from the roof of my building I can see 20-something. (Of course only a fraction of these are usefully connectable.)

So why not a femtocell in the ACC everywhere there's a wifi access point? That would seem to mirror the best case for deployment once they're for sale to home users.

Or at least a half-dozen in the corners of the venue? So at least a few people can report back about islands of good coverage?

what else is new, even around the apple campus service is laughable. with att, i've come to expect nothing so i'm surprised by everything.

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