Spotted: AT&T crews still upgrading system (CT)

[JNB]

Here in Connecticut this week, and spotted AT&T crews working on a micro cell and carrying a bunch of interesting wireless equipment, so (being "iWeek", and I'm just a nosy gearhead anyway) I stopped to chat a bit.

Turns out they're testing their sites region by region, and the system upgrades & re-surveys have been going on for several weeks now, and they're nowhere near finished. The crew boss mentioned that all his team is scheduled for pretty much throughout the next few months is adding new or upgrading equipment, conducting data surveys, and basically remapping the entire freaking network over the majority of the coverage.

Most telling comment was that overtime was not really a concern right now, there's plenty to go around.

SPECULATION: AT&T is willing to spend beaucoup bucks on system & infrastructure upgrades right now anticipating a large (huge) surge in subscriptions over the next couple quarters, and investing right now will pay even bigger dividends throughout the rest of CY '07, and on into 1Q/2Q '08.

 

[crazzyeddie]

Very interesting. I hope the reviewer who quoted load times for Yahoo (2 minutes?!) was in a non-updated area.

 

[darwen]

Nice! Good to hear... it is sorta still up for debate if this work is going to make a difference but it is good to hear.

 

[wakka092]

I'd actually prefer a network-wide rollout of 3G.. Deployment shouldn't be only limited to metropolitan areas. Verizon (ugh) has deployed EV-DO in a town near me that has a population near 18,000 people.

But sticking to the topic, hopefully the service improvements will improve EDGE speeds. I get 150 Kbps on EDGE here in West Tennessee and I can stream AT&T Cellular Video without buffering. Are these service improvements part of "Fine EDGE" or another project entirely?

 

[mustang_dvs]

But sticking to the topic, hopefully the service improvements will improve EDGE speeds. I get 150 Kbps on EDGE here in West Tennessee and I can stream AT&T Cellular Video without buffering. Are these service improvements part of "Fine EDGE" or another project entirely?

IIRC, EDGE has a theoretical maximum speed of 384Kbps, which is about half of a low-end DSL, but it should be plenty fast for mobile needs. The rub, of course, is finding a strong enough signal to support that speed.