I ran into a couple of the guys from AT&T here. They said that they didn't anticipate how many iPhones would be at the conference.<p>They showed me the emails they sent back and forth with John Donovan (AT&T CTO) about the issue, and said they worked like mad to increase capacity.<p>(BTW, according to the sig files in his emails, looks like John Donovan is on an iPhone.)
Looks like AT&T has responded to the twitter outcry: <a href="http://gigaom.com/2009/03/15/tweeting-works-att-boosts-sxsw-network/" rel="nofollow">http://gigaom.com/2009/03/15/tweeting-works-att-boosts-sxsw-...</a>
I've been to a few big events in Australia - and the big telcos deployed portable mini cell's in order to handle the load. Anyone know if AT&T is doing this at sxsw?
It's still baffling to me that Apple chose to tether themselves to AT&T. They built a mobile browsing device that almost 2 years later is ahead of the competition (at least for now) then tethered it to the worst data network available. It's like they built a Ferrari with wheels that fall off at 65 mph.
I have both the iPhone and a blackberry on verizon and I can confirm hands down that verizon is far superior to att (I'm writing this on the iPhone now and it's auto complete turned att to AT&T... Lame). FYI, I live in NYC but when traveling nationwide have had the same experience.
Too bad AT&T doesn't have a femtocell product that can route iPhone traffic over local internet connections.<p>Oh, wait, they do! It's in testing with their own employees. See:<p><a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Femtocells-in-2009-99608" rel="nofollow">http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Femtocells-in-2009-99...</a><p>Not deploying a few to SXSW would seem a major blunder and lost opportunity -- unless the units are currently so awful they'd be even worse then the current complaints.