The history of Apple and AT&T's marriage of convenience

Say what you will of the quality or otherwise of the AT&T network, the fact still remains that they and they only were willing and able to execute on Apple's proposal based purely on trust and untried projections, and this has paid off handsomely for them. Conversely, those US carriers that initially dismissed Apple out of hand having been approached even before AT&T was have been left thrashing around looking for competitive alternatives in totally random fashion.

Knowledge before the event is mastery just as knowledge after the fact is ordinary and mediocre. The international carriers that jumped on the bandwagon several months after the advent of the first iPhone have AT&T to thank for their new subscriber sales impetus; consumers, developers and retailers alike suddenly have so much more options in terms of choice, revenue and profitability, even with the global economy in the grip of a deep recession.

Though the difference in corporate culture between the suits of AT&T and the turtle-neck and jeans of Apple is glaringly obvious, the overall relationship has endured as one of faithful and true partners, which is extremely rare in the vicious and philistine modern-day marketplace.

Why are is TUAW regurgitating the wired article?

I love it that anyone told Steve Jobs (or anyone, for that matter) what to where to a business meeting. Like the AT&T execs are royalty. Such hubris comes, in part, from their insane compensation packages, no doubt.

I understand AT&T's quibbles but I have zero sympathy. The major problems stem from the demand on the AT&T network and the reason that there's such a demand on the network is AT&T is the exclusive provider. I don't doubt that Verizon would have suffered in the same way, but once the iPhone isn't exclusive to one company, I'm guessing most of these bandwidth issues will be resolved. AT&T just isn't equipped to handle the full demand. If they had been willing to share the iPhone with Verizon, they would have lost some revenue, but they're reputation wouldn't be nearly as terrible as it is. It isn't like AT&T didn't have options, it's just that their options would have taken a bit off the bottom line. They made their choice.

I call bs on the ATT's network can't handle and other could.. I say that because Verizon & Sprint users CAN'T be on the phone & use data @ the same time. On AT&T, you can use both the voice & data connections. That alone with increase "usage" on a network..

They will feel the pain when they launch 4G phones and you can do both (widespread)..

If there's one thing I trust, it's that the news media, bloggers, and sources all have it wrong or mostly wrong...

So the question is now: Do the other networks realize that they may face the same issues as ATT and in turn hurt their reputation as well? If they do why would they want the iPhone on their network? Hopefully if most carriers are able to pick up the iPhone then as the cell/data demand spreads across everyone it won't hurt one singular carrier quite as much.

I've spent the last seven years with Cingular and now at&t and frankly, the call quality is just fine. I hardly ever drop calls and my phone works substantially better than my work (Verizon) phone in the area I live. However, I do live in a rural area where the towers are far from overloaded.

Drive to a large city (such as New York) and the opposite is true. While I have full bars for both providers, the at&t data seems much slower and I get more dropped calls.

From this, my belief is that the at&t network simply can't handle the high volume of traffic it receives in busy areas. So yes. I'd have to agree that if Verizon had the iPhone, their network would probably be just as bad as at&t in busy areas. Just my $0.02 though...

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

150 years ago, Cornelius Vanderbilt told his corporate board that running an railroad was easy. All it took, he said, was to remember to put 10 per cent of your profits back into fixing up your tracks and rolling stock every year. When he died, his company decided to stop doing that sort maintenance and just fix things as they broke. It raised profits--by just that ten per cent.

25 years after that decision, the railroads were falling apart so badly that the U.S. government, needing them to ship soldiers and supplies around for WWI, bailed them out by rebuilding all the tracks and rolling stock, at the taxpayer's expense.

It seems as if that's what American corporations never learn. ATT could have done fine *IF* they'd been prepared to accept slightly lower profits as they plowed some of them back into updating their network. Instead, they've spent just enough money to keep up with the increase in demand.

Now, that increase in demand has been spectacular. Because of the iPhone, the use of data plans over smartphones has increased by over 4000 per cent since 2007. Despite how it looks, ATT has been scrambling adding new towers and infrastructure to keep up. But they've never tried to build in advance of demand.

Even when they were offering the new data plan for the iPad (remember that? The one they later unceremoniously dropped?) they've maintained a wait-and-see attitude as to how many towers and network cells they should add.

Even when they went into the launch of the iPhone4, after having woefully underestimated how many reps they'd need for the launch of the initial iPhone AND the iPhone3G AND the iPhone3Gs, they didn't think to hire more reps to deal with the crowds on launch day and got bogged down.

ATT's bad reputation has been gotten the old-fashioned way: they earned it.

It's funny that the 'only' two things that stopped Apple moving to Verizon where 1) that the phone wouldn't work and 2) that the network couldn't cope