iPhone users eating up AT&T’s network
iPhone users consume two to four times as much network data volume as other smartphone users, according to traffic measurement company Comscore.
That’s increasingly a problem for AT&T, which serves all those iPhone users in the US and must pay for the bandwidth to handle it all. AT&T starts at a loss by subsidizing customers’ iPhones. Then, it charges them only $30 per month for unlimited data download & upload — or the same it charges users of other smartphone, even though those users are cheaper to serve.
iPhone users now make up for 7.5% of AT&T’s subscribers. Their data-hungry lifestyles have strained AT&T’s infrastructure so much that “AT&T will need to add cell towers and spend more on the back-haul lines that connect the towers to the rest of the network,” the WSJ reports, after citing stats from Alcatel-Lucent, a network equipment maker showing how bandwidth-hogging Web browsing is. Web browsing consumers 32% of data-related airtime but 69% of bandwidth, while email used 30% of data airtime but only 4% of bandwidth, the study found.
It’s easy to pontificate — as the Journal’s analyst sources do — that AT&T should do away with unlimited data plans, or raise the price on iPhone users. But the company’s discount pricing on the expensive iPhone and its accompanying high-bandwidth lifetyle aren’t an accident. With more touchscreen iPhone competitors like the Palm Pre coming to market, and AT&T’s exclusive status as iPhone carrier set to expire next year, the company is clearly willing to pour money into locking down as many iPhone customers as it can.
(Photo credit: Anirudh Koul)
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About the Author, Paul Boutin
Paul (paul@venturebeat.com) covers Apple & the iPhone, social networks & social media, digital music & video, and any crazy Internet story. Paul wrote and edited for Valleywag from 2006-2008, after several years with Wired magazine and Slate. He writes regularly for The New York Times' technology section and sometimes for Wired and The Wall Street Journal. He studied computer science at MIT in the early 1980s, and worked as a software developer and network administrator for 15 years before becoming a professional writer. Follow him on Twitter at @paulboutin, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.
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