AT&T or iPhone: who’s to blame for network woes?

Ask any iPhone owner in NYC or San Francisco and you’ll hear some negative feelings for AT&T, the iPhone exclusive carrier. In these two cities and other events that draw iPhone users together, such as CES or SXSW, users find the network is brought to their knees. Is it all AT&Ts networks fault, as so many users assume?

For their part, AT&T acknowledges their network needs improvement and has set out making those improvements such as upgrading to speedier 7.2Mbps HSPA+ protocols and moving towers to 850MHz spectrum. 4G/LTE network upgrades loom in the future but AT&T has pledged stopgap solutions until then. With more data-intensive phones coming out with each passing day plus the exclusive arrangement for the iPad, things are only going to become more critical for AT&T.

Or is it the iPhone itself? Around the world, no other countries that sell the iPhone see the issues Americans do, this is, except the UK. Users, specifically in London, experience identical issues: dropped calls, spotty service and the inability to make data connections. O2 has been the exclusive iPhone carrier in the UK for years and learned a few things.

For years, phones kept the data connection open as battery life wasn’t a major issue on older phones. With the advent of the modern smartphone, clever makers tweaked the radios to shut down after the requested data was served. New data requests require creating a new connection. The starting and stopping of connection requests is where the problem is for carriers, but is also responsible for lifting battery performance to mediocre. Without this data switch being flipped so often, battery life would suffer even more.

The end result seems to be both the network and the device. Word is O2 has passed what it learned on to AT&T and Apple. Apple seems content that AT&T can handle the challenge, enough to entrust the success of the iPad with the carrier. That should speak volumes to us.

Read: [ars technica]