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Comment by jswinghammer | Hacker News Reader

What I don't understand is why hasn't AT&T fixed this problem? I'm sure they have enough capital to make the investment to end this discussion. If consumers are aware of this problem I'm sure that AT&T is. It seems like this would be a better long term solution than lawsuits.

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I read somewhere recently that their data usage has spiked several thousand percent since the iPhone came out. They've drastically increased capacity, but haven't caught up yet.

So it's a hard problem. Not that it excuses them - they launched a great web device into a field of devices that were nearly unusable on the web, so the spike is not surprising (at least in hindsight). But I do think they're trying.

AT&T is another monopolistic relic. They don't move fast on anything and there's a huge amount of management overhead for even the smallest task. They may very well invest a huge amount of capital into infrastructure upgrades but how much of that actually translates to real world improvements is unknown. I'm not sure Verizon is all that much better off in this respect but they happened to deploy a more scalable technology better suited for data long before the demand was a reality. Going forward with their LTE upgrade we could very well see the same situation AT&T is in.

It's possible that they're holding their cash to roll out something like WiMAX instead.

I think the proposition of a single WiMAX data network is just about dead. Hopefully the tech survives to drive things on the scale of municipal wifi projects - as it's a vastly superior technology than wifi in those situations.

But in any case, AT&T is firmly in the LTE camp.

that doesn't mean that Intel (who is firmly cemented in the WiMax camp) won't use its influence with Apple to get an WiMax-powered iPhone...

I don't doubt a WiMax-capable iPhone might happen, as a secondary data capability ala the existing WiFi support.

I just don't think it would be sold as a WiMax iPhone as opposed to GSM/CDMA/LTE.

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