You have seen the news. On December 9 or thereabouts, Ralph de la Vega announced that AT&T plans to curtail excessive data usage by some iPhone customers. It sounds pretty funny right? So funny it makes you want to either cry or laugh out loud. However, I agree with the solution.

What Ralph de la Vega is describing is nothing new to the network business. In fact, any network operator will tell you that in extraordinary circumstances throttling traffic is essential to keep overall traffic flowing. This is performed in the direst of emergencies. Yes, there is trouble for the network manager and especially the engineering team who designed the links. Yes, it is a controversial action but how much network do you put in place without spending too much money? Before you begin explaining the various methodologies behind traffic engineering; I already know them. The bottom line is a carrier needs to have realistic projections for average bandwidth use and projections for peak traffic demands. If you don’t plan for the appropriate peaks and flows of traffic you are going to have network traffic problems.

Unfortunately for AT&T, because it is the iPhone anything AT&T does will draw attention. Unfortunately for AT&T, iPhone’s high profile means it is operating under a magnifying glass.

Several years ago the cost for a cellular minute of use was as high as $3 per minute. When the cellular carriers began moving towards flat rate plans they began dropping the price for a minute of use. What many people did not understand is that the programs were being phased in by carriers in stages so that the carriers could beef up the capacity of their networks. The problem the iPhone brought to AT&T was that it brought so much demand and attention AT&T could not phase in the handset on a region by region basis; AT&T had to go national right away. Therein lies AT&T’s troubles; it forgot the fundamentals of network planning –  the network needs to project the needs of the market and never ever allow marketing people to design the network.

What Wall Street analysts fail to understand is that cellular technology needs to be phased in otherwise the financial costs to the carrier will overwhelm it. Think about it, despite all of the nonsense Verizon-haters threw ate Verizon because it did not scream it needed the iPhone, Verizon’s network is still operating quite well and customers are largely happy with the company. Verizon is not a first mover of technology and that is fine. Verizon is a service leader; technology is a tool. Verizon understand that customers do not care about the engine behind their cell phone; customers only care that the services promised are provided.

Data caps are not new. However, significant network dollars will need to be spent to bring the network up to par. The question facing AT&T: “How much money do you spend on 3G or LTE (4G)?"

If AT&T is going to be criticized it is not that their network cannot handle the data load but that they did not do their homework on how much data would be placed on the network. It is called network planning. It is called understanding the fundamentals of the business.