January 7th, 2009
Finding bandwidth in San Francisco
One thing that’s been driving me nuts here at Macworld Expo in San Francisco is the horrible state of affairs with bandwidth and the AT&T 3G cloud. Phone calls are hit or miss on AT&T’s cell network. About half of my calls don’t connect, fail in the middle or otherwise have weird silent dropouts throughout the call.
Data connections on AT&T are brutally slow and the iPhone’s 3G icon will randomly switch the evil EDGE “E” for no good reason. I thought SF was supposed to be wired? SpeedTest.net won’t even load on Mobile Safari on EDGE and my iPhone can’t hold a 3G connection to save its life. Previously, the fix for no 3G was to reboot the iPhone, now even that doesn’t work.
People, can you please get off the 3G network so that I can have a little bandwidth?
Even worse: A quick check of SpeedTest.net reveals that I am currently getting a miserable 750 kbps (down) and a pitiful 150 kbps (up) with my Verizon USB727 EVDO card connected to my MacBook Pro. I know it’s not WiFi, but still.
So, is it just a timing thing? Are all the iPhone toting Macheads simply oversaturating AT&T’s 3G network? Didn’t AT&T just ramp the 3G network just recently? Maybe there’s some other reason for the horrible bandwidth in SF this week, I’m just not sure what it is.
One thing I am sure of: iPhone users are definitely having a poor experience here in San Francisco, at least this week.
Can you hear me now?
Jason D. O'Grady is the editor of PowerPage.org, which has been publishing daily mobile technology news since December 1995. For disclosures on Jason's industry affiliations, click here or to view Jason's full profile click here.
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