Asymmetrical Information

Because the other cell companies wanted too much money, or insisted on using 3G data (which takes way too much power)?

On the other hand, some people seem to have this huge hate for AT&T, but I've had really good reception and connectivity with all of my phones from them. My iPhone hasn't gone off of full signal since I acivated it.

My understanding is that AT&T's network is very good in certain concentrated areas, but pretty bad elsewhere. So if you live somewhere that AT&T has a reasonable network, it'll have a really good network; but it's easy to find places it sucks completely.'

I'm another of the Verizon fans. The phones are about half a generation behind everyone else's, but all my calls go through and I have reception everywhere. The other stuff is why I have a laptop.

Other reviews have said that the iPhone is actually pretty good as a phone. But that doesn't do you any good if you can't get service.

My sense is that all of the networks have good reception in some areas and not so good reception in others. I have Verizon and there are lots of places where other people seem to get signal and I don't. Of course, some of that is a combination of an outdated phone and my failure to do whatever it is you're supposed to do to update it. But I think that's not all of it.

Cingular/ATT coverage is certainly better on the Stanford campus, for example - Stanford had an exclusive deal with Cingular for many years and there aren't CMDA towers near enough to get good signal on campus.

Various news reports (the WSJ ran one) indicated that his first preference was Verizon, and that he'd approached them first. Verizon not being known as the most flexible of carriers, apparently wasn't willing to give him the design latitude he wanted. Verizon likes to exercise at least as tight a control over the phone (and the ways you can use it without paying them money) as Jobs wanted to.

I may have this wrong (that would not be a surprise, after all) but if the US market is anything like the European ones then AT&T is paying Apple a big whack of money for every person who signs up.

(The mechanism is that normally your handset is subsidized by the service provider, they recoup it over the life of the contract. As there is no subsidy here this leaves room for the service provider to be paying the handset maker, not reducing he cost of the handset to the consumer.)

As I say, I could be wrong but I wouldn't be at all surprised to see that $300 or so is being handed to Apple for everyone who signs up with AT&T.

Perhaps Verizon and the others were the lower bidders?

My theory is, like the Motorola ROKR, Apple did this to get into the marketplace and block out other people. Once they gain a foothold they can force the issue of selling unlocked phones and will make even more money.

Up here in Seattle Cingular's EDGE blows. Like an 8 second latency just to contact a webpage. Tmobile was margainally better.

I have had no problems with AT&T/Cingular coverage all along the Northeast corridor. In fact, it has been more reliable than my wife's Verizon coverage. I don't know everyone is kvetching about.

Why did Steve Jobs lash his fortunes to that dog?

They paid him lots of money?

I tend to think that with all the money AT&T will make out of this, their coverage will get better. And I also agree with the poster who said that it is likely that once Mac has a foothold in the market they'll open it up.

My big concerns are:

1) The battery issue that the iPod has is the same battery issue the iPhone has

and

2) There appear to be some serious security issues on the iPhone.

In South Louisiana Cingular (the New at&t) is horrid. That "least dropped calls" thing really gets on my nerves.

As the Telecommunications Manager.. please don't let my VP's see a good review of the I-Phone on the next Airway Magazine. I'll be screwed.

There appear to be some serious security issues on the iPhone.

Our corporate IT sent out a memo that we are not allowed use of them for corporate work. They do not have the security features that the Blackberry does. In addition, many of our sites prohibit camera phones, so it's a non-starter for me.

The Cingular network has worked for me everywhere I've lived, which includes both the urban south and rural inner northwest.

The AT&T GSM network is absolutely superlative and I don't know where these people are getting their disinformation. They are probably still using analog bag phones from the 80s or something. Whether you prefer GSM, GMS, CDMA, TDMA, or any other technology, you have to admit that AT&T's GMS network does not drop calls and has great reception...or your phone is a dud and it is time to pony up and buy a new one.

why? heh, because it's easier to take over 'da woild if you take bites dear Lady...

Out here on the West Coast (North), I don't have a problem with AT+T's service area (on my boring little Motorola).

Kate: The only actual "Security" issues I'm aware of with the iPhone aren't relevant to its market. Yeah, it's not a Blackberry that can have outside policies turn off features.

And you *could* put sensitive information on it and lose it, oh no.

Unless you work in a place that has Hardcore Security And Locks Down Your Phone, that's irrelevant. It's not like the "security issues" people are talking about involve attackers Hacking Your Phone.

I used to manage telecom including over a hundred cellphones. Every carrier has dead spots, and if your home is one of them you end up hating the carrier. My house works great for AT&T, but not Sprint, as an example.

No matter what carrier Apple selected, some people would be disappointed with the service. The real problem is that Apple decided to lock in just one carrier, so their customers can't pick the best service for their specific location.

"The real problem is that Apple decided to lock in just one carrier, so their customers can't pick the best service for their specific location."

I imagine that they did this to defray some risk. If the product just can't cut it, then ATT shares some of the losses. If the product is a "must have", people will switch to ATT (their incentive to share risk), and Apple sells it anyway. They only lose if the product is "nice", as in "That's nice, I wish my carrrier supported it." I think, considering the price, not many people who would buy one would not be willing to change carriers. In the future, when the price drops, it will seem "nice" to more people, but it will also be available to more carriers, so Apple can sell it to them too.

All in all, I think it is a good strategy for Apple, though a different carrier might have been better.

There are two basic networks in the US: CDMA, and GSM. Verizon and Sprint Nextel are primarily responsible for the CDMA network and AT&T is primarily responsible for the GSM network. Each of these three carriers hosts roughly one-fourth of all US cellular custmers, and the remaining fourth are on other carriers like T-Mobile, Virgin, TracPhone, etc. who are subletting their access from one or the other of the networks.

CDMA and GSM have roughly equivalent coverage areas, but different dead spots, especially as you get into rural areas. CDMA has slightly better coverage overall but that's more of a first-to-market issue than any significant problem with GSM. New towers are raised every day for both networks.

Most other reception issues reduce to your particular phone model. Small phones with no exterior antenna will naturally have slighly worse reception than phones with an external antenna; metal superstructures and roofs attenuate the signal; etc.

That said, I have one of those cheap $20 Motorola prepaids operating on AT&T, and have had excellent reception throughout all of central and western Colorado, save for the obvious problem of rural areas where neither network has made any significant penetration. That Slate article is a crock: The guy is bashing AT&T broadly because they don't have good coverage in his area, yet he gave up Verizon (which apparently has very good coverage there) in order to buy the exorbitantly expensive Pop Culture Item Of The Week.

And Jane is uncritically jumping on his bandwagon, for some inexplicable reason...

"And Jane is uncritically jumping on his bandwagon, for some inexplicable reason..."

Women are always running off with some guy 'cause of his cool bandwagon.

Thanks, Njorl. You ever snort a premium arabica coffee before lunch? It kind of tingles and leaves a minor mess across your workspace.

I have an explanation. As someone pointed out here, the U.S. market is split between CDMA and GSM, with Cingular being GSM. Much of the rest of the world (Europe, Asia except Japan) is GSM. So, Jobs selected the major GSM network in the U.S. so that he can also penetrate the non-American GSM markets as well.

Noone outside the U.S. uses CDMA much. The Japanese have their own protocols.

IIRC the Japanese DO use CDMA, but on different frequency spectra that are incompatible with rest-of-world CDMA phones.

Not too surprising, since CDMA protocol has the advantage of being natively capable of handling 3G content. GSM has had to adapt to a 3G cellular world by grafting on the EDGE standard, at some non-trivial expense of infrastructure upgrades.

Alltel user here (and formerly Sprint).

My guess is that the major phone networks were unwilling to give up content control, save for AT&T, and exclusivity was probably a demand. After all, why give up the incremental revenues from selling various data doodads (downloads, text packages, games, crud) if it's not adding to your subscriber base? At&T needed something to give them an edge and figured the increase in subscribers would be worth more than the loss of income from its own controlled content.

As for Apple, they are experimenting this round, kind of getting the kinks worked out, and will ultimately be routing calls through some type of VOIP mechanism down the road in a sort of major telecom bypass (A theory).

CDMA is also used in Eastern Europe. China is implementing TD-SCDMA.

The answer is, as Finn said, lack of choice. AT&T was the only cell carrier willing to talk. Telcos aren't noted for their flexibility and risk-taking behavior.

My guess is, we'll see the iPhone become enough of a success for other cellphone carriers to say, DOH! and get in as well. And then people will have a choice.

AT&T does have an at-least two-year exclusivity deal.

Will somebody explain to me again why Americans have such lousy phone service?

I mean our networks are anything but models of customer service, but they all have pretty much universal coverage and the phones work almost anywhere in the world (I know: CDMA v. GSM).

Oh and if I call someone, I pay. So people leave their phones on.

I still find professional Americans who don't have a cellphone. That's almost unknown in Europe.

Valuethinker: America is big. Really big. It's incredibly expensive and not very valuable to cover the entire country. That has at least something to do with it.

And my friends without cell phones don't do it because of money. They do it because, "If I had a cell phone people could get in touch with me."

i'm using the iPhone in San Francisco. No problems with the call quality or connections. Certainly, as good or better than my T-mobile ever was. The Edge service seems as good or better than my Sidekick phone's data service as well. Not sure what all the whining is about over AT&T. Before i was on T-mobile, i had Sprint. All cell carriers are crappy on some level... You can decide to complain about any of them and have plenty of validation. The iPhone is superlative, however.

actually it seems to work pretty good for a phone (given the 24 hours or so i've had it activated,) at&t works better for me than t-mobile (which seems to be the suck when you're in rural maryland,) and its less bulky than my old ipod and certainly less bulky than my old ipod + my old phone. my only issue w it is that i can't keep my hands off of it right now, and i also have no idea how i'll be using it as a device three weeks from now.

Jadagul

I buy the size explanation-- although your telephone reception in rural Spain (which is a very remote, thinly populated place) is better than at least some of the places I have been to in America. Maybe rural Poland or Bulgaria is a better counterexample supporting your argument (or the Italian Alps).

On the phone ownership question, maybe it is social custom/ social norm thing. A lot of the people I know under 30 don't even have a fixed line. They never connect one when they move into a flat.

90% of European adults carry a cellphone. Lots of people I know carry 2: a personal one (which they always answer) and a business one (which works in business hours).

It's only a matter of time before Reihan joins the ranks of single-named celebrities. I completely skipped the byline, and I could tell he was the author by the third paragraph.

Cingular/ATT works better in the fringes of the SF Bay Area than the other carriers, and has fewer dead spots than the others.

For a really interesting review of the iPhone, which seems to mostly hold up since the actual introduction, see here:

Regarding Cingular as the service provider -- the only real question for any Apple middleman is exactly how Apple will slide the knife between their ribs, and I think we can see the endgame here. At a time well within Cingular's "exclusive" 2-year contract, Apple will announce its own Apple-branded phone service that just happens to run on a higher-speed network, and tiny "Apple Phone Stores" will instantly materialize in every mall next to the Sunglass Hut.

My sister-in-law works for Ericsson. She used to wonder why all the networks in the USA don't use GSM. Then she got stationed in the states and found out; CDMA doesn't need as many cell towers to cover the same area. The cost difference was significant in the beginning.

Sometimes we backward Americans do things differently for valid reasons.