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So AT&T has finished upgrading its 3G footprint to HSPA 7.2<\/a>, completing the first phase of an effort that will improve connection reliability and at some point later this year or in 2011 raise its maximum 3G data speed to 7.2 Mbps from 3.6 Mbps. Welcome news for long-suffering AT&T subscribers who recently ranked the carrier dead last in Consumer Reports annual survey of wireless customer satisfaction<\/a> — but only for those in cities where additional backhaul connections have been added to support those higher speeds. And, sadly, for Bay Area and New York City residents, neither of those regions is among them. As AT&T head of operations John Stankey told attendees of Citigroup conference Tuesday<\/a>, those two cities present particularly challenging density and zoning issues. <\/p>\n\u201cI thought by the time we\u2019d closed 2009 we would be in a better place in New York City than we were,\u201d Stankey said. \u201cBut New York City is a little bit of a different animal and it\u2019s a good example of having to scale in this data environment, where not only do we have a lot of capacity issues to deal with but physically there is network equipment and network elements that are needed to be changed out. They just flat-out have hit their capacity levels and we have to replace them with new ones. And as a result of that, those transitions and that work has taken us a little bit longer and it\u2019s been a little dicier than what we had hoped it would be.\u201d<\/p>\n
And evidently, the situation is equally dicey in San Francisco.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur challenges [in San Francisco] are largely zoning-oriented,\u201d Stankey explained. \u201cIt\u2019s a little bit tougher in places in San Francisco to do adjustments to antennas that we need to do in areas like the Financial District, where we had antenna structures that worked really well in a 2G environment. They need to be replaced to support 3G services and it\u2019s just taking time to get the zoning ordinances square to replace those antennas and clean up the portions of the city that we are dealing with.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ok. So San Francisco and New York City upgrades are tough going — that\u2019s understandable. They\u2019re both big, tech-savvy markets with high data demands. Still, it\u2019s a travesty that a carrier like AT&T STILL<\/strong> can\u2019t reliably connect calls in either of them when it\u2019s raking in 80 percent more wireless data revenue than it did in 2007<\/a> …<\/p>\n Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n