John Donovan said he and other executives flew to Apple's Cupertino, Calif., campus to give the handset maker a "crash course in wireless networking."
The prospect of nitty gritty communications issues being communicated by executives is possibly frightening, but I suppose a CTO could be briefed up on the issues.
The issues they mention, e.g. message querying, sound more like a "we don't do this particular operation very well right now, please stop hurting us" talk. These can be fantastically productive. Back in the '90s I was with a group that got one of these from Sybase. (They called it a talk on optimization.) The presenter knew their products warts inside and out, started us down the road with the big, common ones, then worked with us on our specifics. No where in the printed documentation would you find this knowledge, but once you had it passed to you orally you could dramatically improve performance. I have never seen a project benefit more from a half day meeting.
The balance of power ought to be tilted towards Apple in this situation right? I mean, I've never met anyone who owns an iPhone and actually likes AT&T. So I'm a bit surprised to see Apple doing work on their end to make the iPhone less network-heavy, rather than demanding that AT&T moves faster to upgrade their network. Am I missing something? Does AT&T actually have any negotiating power with Apple?
I have an iPhone and I like AT&T provided that I'm in a city with good coverage. I feel like they've done a decent job in LA and they're improving constantly (faster and faster 3g it seems), and they're about on par if not better than the service I get from Verizon. I don't know that many iPhone users in LA that are angry at AT&T. Only if they can't get service in their homes, or if there's some major outage...happens occasionally, but not enough to be a serious bother.
That being said, I go up to San Francisco like once a month, and up there my calls exceeding 1 minute drop at an alarming near-100% rate, my text messages are delayed, half my phone calls can't even be received, location services never works because data never works, and if I can't even get GPRS, there goes all my email and more. It's a complete wreck and I can totally understand the AT&T griping then.
Part of me thinks that Apple is caving in here to AT&T's requests because the level of service AT&T is providing is hurting Apple because a lot of people are refusing to buy or are no longer buying iPhones because of AT&T. Also because for AT&T to upgrade their network, it will take time, and these little changes can make a big difference while we're waiting for these upgrades to happen (now, whether or not AT&T is actually upgrading their network is a different question....).
Lastly, I feel that this kind of situation is one that any carrier would have run into if they had a phone like the iPhone available on their network. It's not just any smartphone, it's a smartphone that changes the usage habits of the users, and changing the user experience of what these users are looking at...no wonder we're all using more data. It would be a strain on any network.
The main differences I've noticed in recent weeks: (1) the presence of 4-5 bars of signal strength is no indicator of whether a call is possible or stable; (2) wild swings of connectivity even without changing position; (3) the presence of the '3G' icon and bars is no indicator of whether a data connection is possible.
That is, it's gotten worse -- less reliable, and the indicators of service have become less connected to the actual level of service available. (This is in San Francisco.)
The prospect of nitty gritty communications issues being communicated by executives is possibly frightening, but I suppose a CTO could be briefed up on the issues.
The issues they mention, e.g. message querying, sound more like a "we don't do this particular operation very well right now, please stop hurting us" talk. These can be fantastically productive. Back in the '90s I was with a group that got one of these from Sybase. (They called it a talk on optimization.) The presenter knew their products warts inside and out, started us down the road with the big, common ones, then worked with us on our specifics. No where in the printed documentation would you find this knowledge, but once you had it passed to you orally you could dramatically improve performance. I have never seen a project benefit more from a half day meeting.