Is anyone surprised?

I’ve never tried to give the illusion that I’m a fan of AT&T. As soon as my contract expires, I’m jumping ship to Verizon because of some abuse me and my family received from their High Speed Internet Department while we were trying out their service. By abuse, I mean that they couldn’t get their service to work consistently, and they still tried to charge us a cancellation fee. They backed off when we informed them that if they insisted on charging us a cancellation fee for the Internet service, we would additionally be canceling our home phone and cell phone service that day – but it still left a bad taste in my mouth. While I never expect much from the likes of Telecom companies in terms of Customer Service, I have never been so amazed at such an abysmal quality of service (with the exception of my experience with the SiriusXM Customer Service Department). At least I can find some solace in the fact that I am not alone in my frustrations.

Personally, I’m still waffling about whether or not I want to get an HTC Thunderbolt or an iPhone 4 when I make the switch to Verizon. Does anyone have any feedback for me on their thoughts with either phone? Leave me some comment love and let me know.

There have been several good articles that have come out over the past few days. Personally, I’m a fan of Ars Technica’s rendition of this particular situation (credit to them for being the inspiration for my title). A lot of people are up in arms about this situation. Honestly, I think there are some angles in this whole debacle that have been neglected. I mean surely there are good things that could come out of this situation. Because there’s some good in every situation, right?

Right?

Pros for current T-Mobile Customers

So, I think the most obvious lens to use to analyze this situation is the benefits that T-Mobile customers will receive. T-Mobile is the smallest of the big four national cellphone carriers. While I’m not sure exactly how AT&T plans to integrate the T-Mobile customers into their legacy network, I do know that it is something they’re going to have to do if they want to maintain any notion of quality of service. Either that, or T-Mobile is going to have to remain as a separate company until a majority of their customers are on the 4G networks, which are compatible.

While I’m not sure what their integration plan will be for the months after the merger, they’re going to have to do something. I think the most likely scenario is that AT&T towers will also begin broadcasting on the T-Mobile’s frequencies – meaning near instantaneous better service for T-Mobile customers.

If anyone has found some documents that actually detail AT&T’s plans in this regard I would love to see it. I still haven’t seen anything concrete.

Cons for AT&T Customers

I couldn’t have this article be too positive, because there are some honest con’s – but I don’t think anyone has thought about this one.

The biggest and most dramatic eyesore in this whole equation is the fact that AT&T’s systems are going to have to be updated to cope with additional clients. I list this as a con because AT&T has been known to have some problems with their client facing systems before. Take, for example, the hack that lead to iPad email addresses being harvested. More notably, perhaps we should consider the iPhone activation woes that plagued many users? The fact of the matter is that AT&T has a horrible track record with making changes to their software, and some of us lucky few who use their web service from time to time are going to get to experience some of the joy.

I would advise anyone on AT&T to triple check their bill over the next few months.

Pros for Android Enthusiasts

Nexus One, a developer phone once sold as a retail phone.

I think it would be nieve to neglect the possible advantages that could come out of this deal for Android Enthusiasts. One of the things I hate about phones is something called “bloatware”, which is extra software that a manufacturer installed for promotional purposes. You typically have to go to great lengths to remove this software. Personally, I would rather not bother with that and the million other things that most consumers would not care about. So, because I’m a registered Android Developer, I have the option to purchase a Developer Phone from Google. A full-price no-contract phone with no strings or bloatware attached.

The one downside to this option is that currently, all of the developer phones are designed to run on T-Mobile’s network. My hope is that following this merger, Google will start producing Developer Phones that run on Verizon or Sprint. They could, if they wanted, produce developer phones for AT&T – but quite frankly I’m not interested in buying one. Mostly because I just don’t like AT&T. Sorry, nothing personal.

Anyway, a set of developer phones for other networks would be a huge step forward for Android development culture.

Conclusion

In all honesty, I think there are a lot of bad things that are going to come out of this deal. But I think these are some angles that occurred to me that were at least somewhat unique, so I thought I would share.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the AT&T/T-Mobile merger. Leave me some comment love and let me know what you’re thinking!

Overall, it was a good plan… if their data counting is reliable. It seems that is not the case.

The chief accusation of the lawsuit is that AT&T has utilized “phantom data” to over bill their customers. Essentially, the claim is that AT&T subtracting megabytes of data from the user’s data plan when they are not using their phone. The consulting firm hired by the plaintiff’s lawyer found that AT&T is overstating data usage by as much as 300% in some cases. To explain how this is happening, they equate AT&T’s billing system to a rigged gas pump that rounds transactions up to the nearest gallon.

AT&T denies these claims, of course, and is planning on fighting the lawsuit. The law firm is seeking class-action status, and if granted will allow other AT&T customers to jump on the bandwagon and join in the fun. However, if you’re like me and you were grandfathered into the old, unlimited data plan – you won’t be eligible to join in the fun.

I’m not sure how this happened, but I’m wondering if it isn’t simply a carry-over from some older telecommunication business practices of rounding up to the nearest minute for billing purposes. So, for example, on many telecommunication billing schemes if you talk for 1 minute and 30 seconds, you will be billed for 2 minutes. This has been accepted for a long time, mostly because it’s commonly accepted that minutes is a reasonable unit of measurement for a phone conversation.

For internet billing however, the telecom companies use kilobytes as their base unit of measurement. In reality, a kilobyte isn’t much data. There are, however, many internet trasactions that take less than 1 KB of data. Take checking email for example. An exchange between a phone and an email system to check an empty inbox may only take 200 bytes (about 0.2 KB), but if you round up to the next KB you’re billed 1KB. That’s an 80% waste. If your phone is set to check your email every 10 minutes, you’re being billed for about 115 KB of data that you didn’t use every day. Over the course of a month, you will be billed for almost 3,500 KB or 3.5MB of data that you didn’t use. If charged $0.01/KB, which is the standard a la carte price, that would be roughly $35 out of your pocket for data that you didn’t use.

That’s a pretty stiff internet fee, if you ask me.

Today’s feature image provided by yomanimus from Flickr, used under the Creative Commons License.

Photo Credit: Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo

There has been much talk recently of the issues with signal reception in Apple’s new golden child, the iPhone 4. Ever since the first I heard about it from Gizmodo – I feel as though I’ve been hearing about it from everywhere. I hate to be that guy in the back of the room saying “I called it,” but… well, I can’t say it really surprises me considering the fact that they put super-duper-invincible-but-not-really glass on either side of it.

It’s not that it’s a bad idea in terms of making something look really cool… I just hope that if I were in that product development meeting I would have had enough sense to ask everyone in there how often they drop their phones… but that’s neither here nor there. It does not surprise me at all that, in their ambition to get the product out the door, they might have overlooked some practicality issues.

What am I talking about? Well, I saw an article on CNET today that got me started on this. They interviewed Ron Dicklin of Root Wireless, a company that evaluates wireless network performance. The entire article was a Q&A session where Dicklin explains what the bars actually represent. Nothing he said really surprised me, but I’ve taken a class that discusses wireless networks (yay Computer Science!), so if you’re not familiar with it I recommend that you scan over the Q&A before reading what I’m about to discuss after the jump.
Both Gizmodo and CNET reported today on Apple’s explanation of their software glitch at length (here and here for Gizmodo and here for CNET). The party line on the issue is, in fact, that this is a design related problem with the way Apple organized the guts of their phone. Well except for that goof Spencer Webb in one of the CNET articles who is quoted as saying “This design appears to be more sensitive to the human hand contact than other designs, but I wouldn’t necessarily call this a design flaw.” However, that leads more to a discussion of the meaning of flaw, so I’m just going to let him sit in the corner with his propellor hat and play with LEGOs or coat hangers or something. (If I can’t hold it like left-handers hold their phones, it’s a flaw.)

Anyway, my point is this: We know there is actual signal degradation when the iPhone 4 is held in a certain fashion. One of my classmates even demonstrated this to me first-hand using the SpeedTest app. But here’s the kick in the pants: Apple is maintaining that there is no flaw in their hardware. Even in the press release the only address the “drop [of] 4 or 5 bars when tightly held in a way which covers the black strip in the lower left corner of the metal band” and have promised a quick fix wherein AT&T’s formula for signal calculation will be used.

Follow this train of events with me for a second:

1. Someone at Apple decided not to use AT&T’s formula for some reason. I have no idea why, but something as big as signal indication isn’t something you do accidentally. So, this was an intentional decision. The engineers Apple has are some of the best there are, so I’m lead to believe this was because they thought their formula was better.
2. The new formula signaled to people that gripping their phone in a certain way resulted in a significant drop in signal. Picture a big red flashing light attached to the top of your iPhone caused by the low signal.
3. Apple releases a press statement indicating that they are “stunned” to find that their formula is “totally wrong” and has decided to implement AT&T’s formula. Picture Steve Jobs ripping that flashing red light off the top of your iPhone and telling you to pretend it never existed.

Did you catch the slight of hand?

At no time during this exchange are the performance issues that Gizmodo talks about actually addressed! It’s almost as moronic as a fire alarm has going off and the fire department showing up to just silence the alarm without putting out the fire. What is this, Steve Jobs? A game of Nighttime-daytime or peek-a-boo? Out of sight, out of mind?

I don’t know about everyone else, but I find that just a little bit insulting to my intelligence.

I can’t speak for you, but I know that if I were an iPhone 4 owner I certainly wouldn’t care if the top of my screen consistently showed 1 bar as long as the darn thing actually worked. But maybe I’m just a little bit too demanding for Steve Jobs’s world where if everything looks okay, it means that it actually is okay. This seems to be a continuing trend with Apple in regard to the iPhone in the past few years (*cough*non-disclosure agreement on app store rejections*cough*), and it makes me glad I’m in the Android camp.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Update: Seems I’m not the only one singing this song. Good. Stick to the man.

The other, more intriguing theory is that there’s something coming in the next 6 months that’s got AT&T so worried, they’re cutting the upgrade cycle by 25 percent. Something like the possible end of their exclusive hold on the iPhone. I’m not a huge proponent of iPhone on Verizon rumors because they have always and forever been piles of horseshit. But, the unmistakable aroma of desperation around AT&T’s new upgrade plans, mixed with rumors from what most would consider a reputable news source ( the Wall Street Journal) that a CDMA Phone is in the works, well, the idea suddenly smells a little rosier. [ AT&T]

Maybe AT&T knows something we don’t? All I can say is at least I don’t have to worry about it. Yay Androd!

Source: Gizmodo