US Government: iPad and other smart mobile devices may strain networks

When traffic/flow is heavy use an iMaxiPad.

I blieve in AT&T, the fastest 3G provider and most reliable network in United States of America. Lol

How about our government shuts the hell up and gives us the kind of internet speeds you can find overseas?

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Images/commentarynews/broadbandspeedchart.jpg

And yes, I know the U.S. is a much, much, much larger area than Japan, but I'm sure something can be done to raise our average speed a bit. (For one, get rid of dial-up, as I'm sure that's what's dragging our average down on charts like this.)

We don't need to match Japan's crazy (awesome) average speed, but it'd be nice to bump our speed up a bit more as the internet becomes even more pervasive.

Working in the telecoms industry (at a vendor), it constantly amazes me how backwards the USA is in mobile technologies. In the rest of the world (Europe, Asia and even lowly Australia and New Zealand) the carriers (some better than others granted) have managed to rapidly grow and adapt their mobile networks to extreme growth in data. In fact, they actively encourage it. In Australia there has been a mobile data price war for the past year and the fixed network (DSL and Cable) price war has been almost totally abandoned. 5 Gigabytes per month on HSPA+ (7.2Mbps) is only $19 AUD a month! A minimal DSL plan still costs at least $59 for similar quota (incl line rental).

Where there is a market (mobile devices and data) the providers will step up to the mark - it seems that disparity in technology platform (EV-DO vs UMTS) in the USA and the previously slow uptake of services such as SMS/MMS has partially damaged the natural market competition for subscribers and data growth (carriers are still competing on coverage rather than services).

So - in summary, the government shouldn't need to get involved, maybe they should open the door to Vodafone to come and teach AT+T a lesson :)

at an entry level price of $630 i dont think enough people will even have a 3G iPad to congest any network lol

Well, I guess it drives page views.

Maybe not everyone remembers the AOL onslaught, but I do. The network problems were a pretty minor thing, as these things go. Some network operators were caught unaware, but stepped up to handle it relatively quickly. This led to the huge amounts of "dark fiber" that was installed, a lot of which is still turned off. There's a lot of capacity still to tap, waiting for people to pay money to use it.

Now, it is true that ATT seems remarkably shortsighted about infrastructure investment, and I wonder about why, exactly, Apple wants to be tied to them in their largest market. I assume there's a reason for it - Jobs isn't exactly shy about his demands on partners.

The responsibility falls on the providers, not the government, to deal with potential issues on bandwidth and connectivity. It seems that AT&T will have to bear most of the burden here so they need to work on strengthening their network, simple as that. This is just one more aspect of the nanny state trying to get a stronger hold, more power, over the people it claims to serve.

Um, how and why is the Government involved with this? Let's let the service providers take care of it. Just another example of the Government trying to scare us into thinking we need them to intervene.

The broadband speed and capacity in the US is already lagging behind by international standard. The solution is to beef up the network, NOT restricting usage.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/broadband_speeds_around_the_world.php

I work at a large highschool. We had a network with about 400 computers and the network was fine. Now nearly every student has an internet connected device and I don't think it's an underestimation to say we now have 1,600 devices on our network. (we have 2,300 students). Our network now crawls. Thankfully there can be guest restrictions, and MAC address filtering on our IT side to help, but still it is pathetic that my slow DSL connection works better than the school's T1.