AT&T identifies Alcatel-Lucent as slow upload culprit, fix in the works
As we'd suspected, AT&T isn't intentionally limiting upload speeds on iPhone 4s in some markets where things suddenly got slow over the weekend. Or that's the company's claim, anyhow — and seeing how they're actually calling …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the latest chapter in a three-year-old story: the iPhone straining AT&T's network. Backers of that narrative range from the [[a:1183535|2008 class-action lawsuit accusing Apple and AT&T of over-saturating the 3G network with iPhones]] to PC World's September 2009 argument that users should hate the iPhone, not AT&T, and even the original 2007 launch, when customers reported sudden boosts in EDGE speeds after AT&T's tuning work.
What changed this week is the diagnosis. After iPhone 4 upload speeds suddenly dropped in some markets over the weekend, suspicion naturally fell on AT&T itself — the company has denied intentionally limiting upload speeds, and instead points to equipment from vendor Alcatel-Lucent, saying a fix is in the works.
First-order effects
- iPhone 4 owners in the affected markets get their upload speeds back only when AT&T's fix ships, leaving them degraded until then.
- Alcatel-Lucent takes the reputational hit: its network equipment is now publicly named by one of the largest US carriers as the cause of a visible performance defect.
Second-order effects
- AT&T gains a deflection from the capacity critique that has dogged it since 2008 — if a vendor's gear caused the slowdown, the 'over-saturated network' lawsuit narrative weakens, while Alcatel-Lucent's other carrier customers have reason to audit their own deployments for the same fault.
Third-order effects
- As smartphone data loads keep growing, network faults are increasingly traceable to named vendors rather than generic congestion, raising the stakes for equipment makers like Alcatel-Lucent whose gear sits between carriers and their public performance promises.
The trend: iPhone-driven data demand keeps exposing specific weak points in AT&T's network stack, shifting blame between carrier capacity and vendor equipment with each incident since 2007.