Do I sense trouble in paradise?
There was precious little said about AT&T. There was the comment that they are lagging behind in MMS and won't get it out until late summer (smart money says thanksgiving.....).
Add to that the utter lack of response as it relates to tethering on AT&T's network, no mention of cut price (limited useage) data plans, and the upgrade pricing for current 3G users and I can't help but wonder if there are tensions in the bedroom.....
From a business perspective I can understand why there may be a lot of internal tensions in the Apple/AT&T agreement depending on what stance Apple was taking as to their desired outcomes in the above situations.
Massive wireless infrastructure on the level that AT&T has to deal with is beyond exorbitantly expensive and yet there is an exception to turn all this into small easy on the wallet numbers for the end consumer.
Even with the massive amount of users to amortize these costs over, I can still see why this might be a huge pill to swallow.
Further compounding Apples problems is AT&T's failure to provide a data infrastructure capable of handling even the current load, much-less being in a position of expansion-readiness.
Add it all up and I can't help but believe what (I theorize) Apple is demanding from AT&T is simply not possible for them to deliver at the moment. Be that because of hard financial realities, or failure to plan.
EDIT: DO NOT misconstrue this post to think that I am hammering AT&T. I don't think they are a massive evil corp, I do think that they may not have understood what the iPhone may do to (and for) them when they signed on. But then again, I don't know how many people thought it would be _this_ successful.
Hopefully we will hear more this week.
Karl P
There was precious little said about AT&T. There was the comment that they are lagging behind in MMS and won't get it out until late summer (smart money says thanksgiving.....).
Add to that the utter lack of response as it relates to tethering on AT&T's network, no mention of cut price (limited useage) data plans, and the upgrade pricing for current 3G users and I can't help but wonder if there are tensions in the bedroom.....
From a business perspective I can understand why there may be a lot of internal tensions in the Apple/AT&T agreement depending on what stance Apple was taking as to their desired outcomes in the above situations.
Massive wireless infrastructure on the level that AT&T has to deal with is beyond exorbitantly expensive and yet there is an exception to turn all this into small easy on the wallet numbers for the end consumer.
Even with the massive amount of users to amortize these costs over, I can still see why this might be a huge pill to swallow.
Further compounding Apples problems is AT&T's failure to provide a data infrastructure capable of handling even the current load, much-less being in a position of expansion-readiness.
Add it all up and I can't help but believe what (I theorize) Apple is demanding from AT&T is simply not possible for them to deliver at the moment. Be that because of hard financial realities, or failure to plan.
EDIT: DO NOT misconstrue this post to think that I am hammering AT&T. I don't think they are a massive evil corp, I do think that they may not have understood what the iPhone may do to (and for) them when they signed on. But then again, I don't know how many people thought it would be _this_ successful.
Hopefully we will hear more this week.
Karl P