bryan stratton dot com

Just a quickie today; from the Old Gray Lady:

More than 20 million other smartphone users are on the AT&T network, but other phones do not drain the network the way the nine million iPhones users do. Indeed, that is why the howls of protest are more numerous in the dense urban areas with higher concentrations of iPhone owners.

“It’s almost worthless to try and get on 3G during peak times in those cities,” Mr. Munster said, referring to the 3G network. “When too many users get in the area, the call drops.” The problems seem particularly pronounced in New York and San Francisco, where Mr. Munster estimates AT&T’s network shoulders as much as 20 percent of all the iPhone users in the United States.

image © New York Times

Honestly, since I got my 3GS a couple of months ago (upgrading from a 2G iPhone), I haven’t noticed any decline in data or call quality. If anything, it’s improved across the board, and it’s miles better than the service I had on the Sprint smartphone that predated my iPhone.

Then again, I live and work in the relatively sleepy metropolis of Portland, not the tech Sodom and Gomorrah of NY and San Fran. But since most tech media is centered in one of those two cities, that helps to explain the pervasive anti-AT&T vibe that I’ve never quite understood.

That being said, AT&T promised MMS functionality by “the end of summer” (and yes, it’s completely ridiculous that the world’s awesomest futurephone still doesn’t have native picture mail). By my reckoning, that gives AT&T about 19 more days to get their act together. If I’m not able to text pictures of my drunk friends to their spouses’ phones by then, I’m drinking the AT&T Haterade.

UPDATE: AT&T says that MMS will be enabled on iPhones via a software update on September 25th. That’s four days late, AT&T! Four days late!!