Apple’s new 3G iPhone will soon be issued to most of you. Ownership of the Apple 3G iPhone is mandatory. This message is brought to you by the Ministry of Cellphones, MiniCel.
APPLE IS PEACE.
FREEDOM IS NO THIRD PARTY APPS.
NOT INCLUDING AN ACCESSIBLE BATTERY COMPARTMENT IS STRENGTH.
The one concern is that AT&T’s offerings limit the iPhone’s data transfer rate to 1.4Mbits/s downstream. That’s better than EDGE, but isn’t 3G supposed to be able to produce 3.6Mbits/s, with claims that 3G would hit 7Mbits/s soon?
From Gizmodo:
Turns out, according to AT&T people we talked to, 1.4Mbps is the capped bandwidth for all mobile smartphones on the network for a few reasons….
A major one is battery life—the faster you burn, the faster your battery dies, so going full steam at 3.6Mbps would cut you well short of that nice round five hours. A second one is cell site congestion and backhaul (carrier-speak for size of the wired dataline that connects cell sites to the actual telecom infrastructure). While everyone at AT&T, from the top down, is adamant that AT&T is “comfortable” with their ability to meet the huge data draw once 3G iPhones hit the streets, it’s not like the pipe is unlimited.
Ah – this is understandable. A glut of new iPhone users will create strain on the network, and so, in order to prevent the network from being overwhelmed, it is limiting the bandwidth – that is, the throughput of the connection – in order to ensure that every customer has a decent service rate.
This seems to be an effective plan to dealing with bandwidth shortage on overcrowded networks.
But… hmm, who else has been complaining about overcrowded, oversubscribed networks lately? Who was it that was talking about ‘bandwidth hogs’ and tried a different solution? I just can’t seem to put my finger on it…
Data capping is seems to be ISPs stock solution for dealing with what they claim to be oversubscribed networks. Of course, we’ve showed that time and time again, data limits don’t solve bandwidth problems. QoS policies and per-user bandwidth limits – like the one AT&T is rolling out for the iPhone 3G – do.
Which leads me to suspect that the big “bandwidth shortage” for broadband providers is something that’s almost entirely overblown – perhaps even fictional – to derive a new revenue stream from consumers while hindering the competition to services that compete with other subsidiaries of ISPs parent companies. Because if there was actually a bandwidth shortage, wouldn’t ISPs be doing what AT&T is doing with the 3G network? Wouldn’t they choose the more effective solution to the problem?
Something’s not quite right here.
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