Comments on article found at: www.macrumors.com/2010/03/02/atandt-ceo-randall-stephenson-speaks-about-iphone-and-ipad/
Bully for AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. I agree with AT&T’s decision not to rush 4G.
The real story is 4G and not the iPhone and iPad. The iPhone and iPad were used because the words tend to catch readers’ attention.
I agree with AT&T’s decision to slow roll 4G deployment. The reality is that AT&T’s network was in disastrous shape. The focus had to be on fixing the 3G network first, before any 4G work. Stabilizing the existing revenue-generating network is far more important than spending enormous amount of capital on new technology.
That all being said AT&T still needs to plan for 4G deployment. Planning is a fluid process and network implementation is a process that requires a lot of lead-time. You can be certain that AT&T has a plan. No carrier in its right mind actually flash-cuts a brand new technology; they may say that for the press. However, the reality is that all correctly performed implementations are over time and never as rushed as you may think.
Not rushing 4G is a financial and operations decision more than a technology decision. If either Verizon or AT&T wanted to throw a lot of money into LTE they would if they could. They cannot throw that much cash into rapid LTE deployment because of the recession. The carriers are publicly traded companies and would have a lot of explaining to do to their shareholders. Network investments have to generate sufficient revenue before a carriers can just suddenly turn on a dime and accelerate a next gen network buildout. As a matter of best practice, carriers will not rush a network deployment because real-world and theory are different. Goodness knows what kinds of operating errors you will encounter over time.
You can imagine the vendors are working feverishly to develop LTE while creditors and shareholders breathing down their necks. This is not an easy environment for any of the vendors to operate in. Bear in mind, carriers may cover the costs of specific trial deployments in their networks but the carriers do not cover the costs of research and development for these trials.
As important as it is to compete against WiMAX, it is far more important to deploy the network intelligently. I have seen network rush jobs and they are a disaster for the carrier.
In the case of AT&T, its 3G problems had been long anticipated by industry experts who had feared that a surge of data demand would overload its network. I should not pick on AT&T in this regard, all carriers were being observed for potential overloads. How much grief did AT&T get for not spending enough money on its 3G network? How much grief did AT&T get for deploying what amounted to a network that could not handle the data load caused by the iPhone?
AT&T is making the right decision in slowly rolling the deployment of 4G.
My suggestion to AT&T is to select a market that contains many of the attributes of the markets they wish to go commercial first. The selected market becomes a commercial trial for AT&T Mobility. The commercial trial market enables AT&T to trial the technology, marketing plan, the pricing plan, and the network operations processes.