Network Woes? Hate the iPhone, Not AT&T
Now that AT&T has finally greenlit MMS for the iPhone, maybe it's time we gave the company a break. — For years, AT&T's iPhone customers have endured dropped calls, slow connections, and crippled service, especially in crowded areas such as New York and San Francisco.
Context & Ripple Effects
The MMS greenlight lands at the end of a brutal stretch for AT&T: an August morning data outage followed weeks of criticism, capped by TechCrunch's blunt verdict in July that the carrier was 'a big, steaming heap of failure.' The Wall Street Journal reported just days before this piece that the iPhone exclusivity that once burnished AT&T's image now delivers an uncertain benefit, reviving questions first raised publicly back in late 2007 when its CEO appeared to chafe at the Apple arrangement.
MMS itself was contested ground: a Louisiana class action filed August 13 accused Apple and AT&T of failing to deliver the promised feature, days after AT&T revised its terms of service to push disputes into binding arbitration. The story traveled widely on pickup — Marco.org weighed in sympathetically while BusinessWeek's Brainstorm Tech profiled 'Seth the blogger guy,' AT&T's public answer to angry iPhone owners — evidence the carrier's network reputation had become a mainstream consumer story rather than a niche gripe.
First-order effects
- iPhone owners in congested markets like New York and San Francisco get the messaging feature they were promised, removing the loudest specific grievance even as dropped-call complaints persist.
- Starting September 6, AT&T requires all smartphone customers onto dedicated data plans, converting its most bandwidth-heavy user base into guaranteed data revenue just as it defends its network record.
Second-order effects
- With Gizmodo having argued earlier in 2009 that app-level traffic like SlingPlayer's 3G streaming strained the network beyond raw user counts, AT&T gains a rhetorical counter: blame shifts partially from carrier capacity to what Apple's platform lets users do.
- A friendlier AT&T narrative undercuts the case for ending the two-year iPhone exclusivity early — the very uncertainty the Journal flagged — giving both companies reason to paper over tensions rather than renegotiate.
Third-order effects
- If exclusive handset deals keep tying a carrier's brand to one device's network appetite, carriers will keep reaching for tools already visible here: mandated data plans, arbitration-friendly contract terms, and blogger-facing PR to manage the fallout.
- The MMS class action versus arbitration-clause standoff points toward litigation becoming a standard channel for customers to extract features and service fixes from carriers, rather than waiting on carrier roadmaps.
The trend: Exclusive smartphone-carrier partnerships are turning network performance into a co-branded reputation problem, pushing carriers toward mandatory data pricing, legal insulation, and charm offensives to hold the arrangement together.