No point to tell people they can drive @ 80 mph when you only provide a two-lane highway since everyone end up getting stuck.

There are microwave and E-Band microwave technologies and fiber lines they can deploy to improve backhaul consider how much financial resource they have.

It is a bloody shame.

Any concerns from AT&T contrary to this are pure FUD just to make more $ off iPhone users.

If AT&T does charge for tethering, it will be a bogus charge and customers should strongly voice their complaints against this.

The best wireless 3G download speeds are in the neighborhood of 700k-1Mb currently.

Matt Kennedy

Meanwhile, how hard is it to drop a metro fiber connection to a base station? If tall buildings can get backhaul, so can towers, somebody just has to string it up the hill.

Since the Ev-do upgrade for the T-mobile service and to WM6 on my smartphone (I used the MDA during dial up tests and Wing currently), the link is now displaying 10mbps when I open the connection icon in my task bar, though only connects close to 2.3 up and .5 down according to speedtest.net tests.

The connection speed varies, it is good for loading pages and non-complex java programs, but streaming video still needs additional buffer time.

A contemporary of mine is on the Sprint system using a Mogul and is connecting at slightly a faster rate.

Regardless, tethering is a great alternative to searching for wi-fi signals. It takes only a few minutes to set up, actually, it is pretty much plug and play as they have updated the configuration to automatically install the proper drivers.

Sprint offers web access for $15 a month according to my friend. I am paying $30 a month for T-mobile and have for the past three years now with mobile web capabilities.

There is the reason data services are slow. A T1 on average is eight times as much as ethernet facilities. AT&T mobility leases millions of dollars of T1s from AT&T and with the lose of that revenue stream kills AT&Ts overall bottom line. If you don’t believe that AT&T is still charging AT&T Mobility(Cingular) for lease lines, check their quarterly reports for Q1 of 2006 and Q1 of 2008. There should be a huge shift in OPEX on AT&T mobilities part in the negative (good) and a huge drop in income on AT&T part.

If AT&T mobility converted to ethernet today, which they can do with inexpensive cisco CPE equipment, AT&T would look live Verizon. Legacy costs and revenue for AT&T is a win-win because the equipment that the legacy facilities are on has depreciated to $0 and all revenue that comes in is straight cash for them.

Telcos are full of it and it is not about public service but money, but how can they survive if they didn’t think this way. Maybe they would have needed a bailout. I like their arguement about not being obligated to rural carriers if the USF funds are not sufficient (“if it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense”). The Telcos will not build out these areas if Obama doesn’t supply 100% of the capital needed or some rural competitor comes out smelling like roses and give them a reason to want central SD.

For the iPhone argument, they are wanting to know how bad you want it. If the phone worked the first time, it would be too efficient and they need you to waste so money can be made off of it, “by design”.

I’m getting an iPhone on the 30th of this month.