The Impending 3G Network Apocalypse

Unhappy with your AT&T Wireless network coverage? Just wait until the 3G iPad hits the airwaves.

People are concerned. Very concerned.

Consider some recent events:

The FCC, represented by Phil Bellaria, director of scenario planning, and John Leibovitz, deputy chief of the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, have voiced their concerns about an unnamed GSM carrier’s ability to handle the coming iPad traffic:

With the iPad pointing to even greater demand for mobile broadband on the horizon, we must ensure that network congestion doesn’t choke off a service that consumers clearly find so appealing, or frustrate mobile broadband’s ability to keep us competitive in the global broadband economy.

New York City (my stomping grounds) and San Francisco – both hotspots for early adopters –  have been hit hard by outages, dropped calls, delayed messages, slow web access, and service interruptions.

Last year, Foursquare chose to launch their location-aware iPhone app at the SXSW conference and nearly brought the A&T network in Austin, TX to its knees.

The FCC is so concerned about capacity that the government agency is considering a plan to ”pay broadcasters to vacate airwaves it could use to alleviate network strain caused by the surging use of smartphones.“

If that doesn’t sound like the words concern to you, let me paint a clearer, more practical picture.

Do you know how much data, on average, an iPhone user consumes every month?

According to a recent research report conducted for Consumer Reports by Validas, a company that provides Web-based wireless bill analysis and optimization services to consumers and businesses,

the average iPhone user consumes 273 MBs of data per month. That compares with 54 MBs for consumer users of BlackBerrys and 150 MBs for consumers who use other brands of smartphones, the Validas study found.

Still think you’re going to get by on that 250 MB data plan for your 3G iPad?

And let’s not forget about Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) and it’s video conferencing capabilities. AT&T recently removed the restrictions on using VOIP clients on their 3G network and people have begun to use them. But the Big Kahuna still doesn’t work over 3G, yet: Skype. When Skype finally takes advantage of their newfound 3G freedom, watch out.

So what’s to be done?

Migrate to 4G. Quickly. AT&T is planning to migrate to 4G (LTE) “in 2011.” That’s just not soon enough.

Diversify the available networks for the fastest growing smartphone – and the soon-to-be fastest growing internet-connected tablet – to other networks.

Image / Gizmodo

AT&T is taking on the world’s most popular devices all by themselves. If Verizon and Sprint could bear some of the burden, service on AT&T might actually improve as consumers migrate to those networks, rather than AT&T being locked in this never-ending race to add capacity each time the company acquires new smartphone subscribers. They just can’t keep up (or so they say).

Sure, this may not make business sense to some folks – why would a carrier want to lose potential new subscribers and have others churn out? But this is a bigger issue now. Not many people are going to leave their iPhones behind and with the 3G iPad locked into the AT&T network (at least in the United States), there will just be more unhappy customers and still poorer service.

I may move to Japan.

[Consumer Reports] [WSJ]

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