PC World Ranks AT&T Top 3G Network
Posted by Kevin McGuire on Tuesday, February 23, 2010 · 
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We’ve seen the ads with both Verizon and AT&T each claiming that they have the better 3G network. But whom were we to believe? According to PC World, the winner is A&T.
Interestingly, AT&T fared poorly in the same series of tests last year. It’s average 13 city download speed was just over 800 kbps. But after a concerted effort to enhance their network (fueled I would guess by data demand and bad press), AT&T has achieved an 84% improvement over 2009. The tests show that AT&T now boasts 13 city average download speeds of over 1400 kbps, besting the nearest competition by 67%
It doesn’t appear that AT&T is going to stop there either. According to its website, it “… plan[s] to increase 3G speeds via our HSPA 7.2 upgrade and backhaul rollout while adding thousands of new cell sites to enhance wireless coverage and capacity.” If you go out to the press releases on their website, there are nearly 30 releases (dated February 17th and 18th) that describe their intent to invest in states to improve the quality of their mobile broadband network. And they all contain this paragraph:
AT&T’s 2010 wireless and wireline capital investment is expected to be in the $18 billion to $19 billion range companywide, an increase of between 5 and 10 percent over 2009. This planned amount includes an increase of about $2 billion in capital expenditures for wireless and backhaul related to AT&T’s wireless network. This planned level of investment is framed by the expectation that regulatory and legislative decisions relating to the telecom sector will continue to be sensitive to investment.
Now that the mobile market is saturated (308M people in the US, over 276M wireless users), carriers are now fighting to woo customers away from their competitors, and keep them on their networks. Devices are going to be very important as we’ve seen with the iPhone, but I believe networks will be even more important in the future. What good are devices if they are rendered unusable by an over-saturated network? Now, about their customer service…
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