By Patricia Seybold (with help from Andrew Seybold)
Will iPhone Connectivity Get Better with Verizon? On January 11, 2011, Verizon announced iPhone 4 availability, ending AT&T’s exclusivity. In the U.S., iPhone users’ customer experience has been marred by connectivity issues. Customers in major metropolitan areas have been complaining that their calls have been dropped, that they can’t always get access, and that streaming video freezes up on the overwhelmed AT&T network. Comic John Stewart and his sidekick John Oliver did a hilarious segment on the Daily Show to illustrate how bad the AT&T iPhone experience can be.
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
Verizon iPhone Announcement | ||||
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The implication: life will be better with Verizon. But will it, really?
But no matter how good Verizon’s network is, it is still bound to become congested as more and more customers stream video to their phones. Each cell site can only support a finite amount of bandwidth. As more and more people consume bandwidth-intensive applications—watching sporting events, TV shows, and video conferencing for work and fun—other peoples’ service will degrade.
Needed: Premium, Tiered Service, Not “All You Can Eat” Data Plans
Verizon is planning to offer an “all you can eat” data service for the iPhone as they do for Blackberries. But iPhone users consume much more video and music than Blackberry users. The iPhone seduces customers into video consumption.
AT&T currently offers tiered pricing based on the megabytes of data you consume. AT&T may decide to also offer an “all you can eat” data bundle in response to Verizon’s.
Why is this a concern from a customer experience standpoint? Because customers do not currently have the tools to prioritize how they’d like to use their portion of the available wireless bandwidth. Nor do customers have any guarantees about what quality of service (QoS) they’ll actually receive, even if they do pay more.
Needed: Guaranteed, or at least Visible, Quality of Service (QoS)
I believe that we customers want a level of service that guarantees that our calls and emails will receive priority over other people’s video downloads.
Or, if we value the ability to watch streaming video on the bus, we can pay more for that privilege (but only if our video consumption doesn’t knock another customer off!). Or we may opt for a mix and match combination—give my calls and emails priority, and also give me streaming video (without clobbering others’ calls), but tell me how much you will charge for video each time, depending on the current congestion on the net.
I believe that the next step will be to provide customers with a minimum guaranteed level of service for a fixed price, along with premium packages that allow us to tailor the QoS we need for the ways in which we consume bandwidth. We can all share an equally degraded experience, or we can pay more to get a higher level of quality and/or throughput. But whatever level of service we choose, we should be able to monitor those service levels in order to be sure that we’re getting the performance we paid for.
In order to provide this ability to ensure our level of service, network carriers will need to be able to control, prioritize (and monetize) how much bandwidth each person consumes. I believe that wireless carriers have already deployed the instrumentation that will enable them to monitor and charge for bandwidth usage and for service quality (uncorrupted packets sent and received at what speeds).
I asked my brother, mobile wireless guru, Andrew Seybold, about this. He replied:
“Every 3G network is capable of QoS, but it has not been implemented by the network operators because they are concerned about making some of their customers second rate citizens and chasing them to another network. However, in LTE4G as implemented by Verizon and soon by AT&T, they will make use of QoS and several other priority systems and the pricing will eventually reflect that.”
~ Andrew Seybold
However, Andy cautioned, once the mobile networks turn on QoS monitoring and enable us to set our priorities (and pay accordingly), there’s still another big issue: the “first come, first served” properties of a mobile network.
“In order to get priority on the network, you MUST be able to register on the network, and this the rub. It is the signaling channels that are used by our phones to contact the network, and IF the signaling channel for a given site is overloaded, it makes no difference if someone has priority, since the network won’t even know they are there!
One of the FCC’s required reports from the network operators is how many calls are dropped across their network, but this only tells part of the story because the network operators cannot measure a call, or even count it as dropped, if the network did not see the request for the call in the first place.”
~ Andrew Seybold
So, bottom line. As you’re shopping for wireless service for your Smartphone, be a good citizen and demand more transparency. Look for ways to insure that your voice calls and emails can take priority over your kids’ music and video downloads. Ask whether you can prioritize your use of the mobile network and change those priorities. And don’t expect miracles. You probably won’t get them with the current generation of mobile networks in the U.S.
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