AT&T in conjunction with Cisco has just announced the “MicroCell” – a miniature cell phone tower for your home or office.  If you suffer from poor reception (and what AT&T customer hasn’t had problems with service?) you can stick this on your Internet connection and use it instead of AT&Ts service for your phone calls.  Your cell phones will see it just like a regular AT&T cell tower.

Here’s my fundamental problem with this: it is well known that AT&T has had major problems with their network over the past few years, especially with the proliferation of Apple’s iPhone.  It appears that they’re saying, “Look, we know you have trouble with our network, so why not use your Internet connection instead?”  Then they have the audacity to charge you an additional $20/mo for the privilege of not using their network to make your calls. They’re saving tons of bandwidth by piggybacking on your other connection.

AT&T has been very quick to blame iPhones over the past year for their poor service, but I tend to think it’s a very simple case of AT&T not putting enough money in their infrastructure.  In the absence of any real regulation, companies like AT&T are going to spend as little as possible to extract as much money out of their customers as possible.  Most customers will gripe and complain about it but won’t be moved to act on it. So the cycle continues.

We’ve used AT&T for years at BDPNetworks (and I have an iPhone myself) – but at this point I would jump at the chance to switch to Verizon, and our new employees will likely end up with Verizon phones as well.

-Brian

Filed under: general