My husband has been an AT&T user for over a decade. He never experienced dropped calls until we started dating and he was talking to me (I'm on an iPhone, he is not).
Right, and during that decade there were no iPhones overloading the networks. Barely anyone used the data traffic capacity back then. With the iPhone, usage of the onboard internet browser on smartphones went up from 15% to 85%. Steve has unleashed hell and now he's poured gasoline on the whole thing by introducing the 3G iPad.
What you have now is a situation with millions of people overloading the network by utilizing their wireless devices in ways the networks won't be able to handle for at least another 5 years, and it's only going to get worse. Netbooks, iPhones, iPads, Androids... sorry, guess we'll have to discontinue voice traffic services, please go back to your land phone.
"Explosion of wireless devices causing data traffic jam"
It's not only a capacity problem, it's also a spectrum problem. AT&T could put up a dozen cell towers in a ring around your house, it ain't gonna do much about the dropped calls. The data traffic jamming is the reason for dropped calls. Voice and data are different services but it's the same network infrastructure equipment handling both services. This equipment uses dozens of different technologies to maximize capacity. Adaptive Multi Rate codecs, Cell Load Sharing, Dynamic Half-Rate Allocation, Frequency Hopping, Intra Cell Handover, DTX Discontinuous Transmission, Fractional Load Planning, Multiple Re-use Pattern... all these technologies are band-aids that milk more capacity out of the network. Each time one of these technologies kicks in during a call, there's a slight risk of the call being dropped, and this risk increases ten fold if the infrastructure is so busy with data traffic it really doesn't have the resources to manage voice traffic properly. As long as the carriers don't get more spectrum, they're stuck in this situation.
"Currently, wireless companies have 534 megahertz of spectrum allotted to them, with an additional 50 megahertz in the pipeline. The industry says it needs at least 800 megahertz more within six years to accommodate demand.
"Spectrum for us is our highway," said Christopher Guttman-McCabe, vice president of regulatory affairs for CTIA-The Wireless Association, a trade group. "But the volume of traffic is picking up. Without more lanes, we'll have more traffic and more congestion," which will result in slower service."
So who are the real culprits in this mess? Well, 1) naive carriers who introduced services the networks weren't built for (they have the technology but not the capacity for this massive volume), and 2) these customers:
"Limited spectrum is only part of the problem, experts say, though an important part. Often, slow cell service is caused by a handful of bandwidth hogs -- watching videos on their iPhones, for example -- in a small area between cell phone towers.
"You have a few users clogging up capacity -- that is not something which can be solved just by providing more spectrum," said Aditya Kaul, director of mobile networks for ABI Research, a technology research firm."
Wanna get rid of dropped calls before 2015? Find the bandwidth hogs in your neighborhood and tell them if they don't stop using 3G like it was regular broadband, you will shoot them. Tell them it's because of them that everyone else who had an unlimited plan will soon have a capped plan, and if they don't stop, everyone will soon be on a plan where they pay by the megabyte.
we customers deserve to choose our carrier for our iphone.