“What we are seeing in the U.S. today in terms of smartphone penetration, 3G data, nobody else is seeing in the rest of the planet,” said Ralph de la Vega of AT&T during a conference call the other day.

“The amount of growth and data that we are seeing in wireless data is unprecedented,” he added.

As the long-standing negative buzz on AT&T’s network has peaked over the past few weeks (due in part to a recent Consumer Reports article and an aggressive advertising campaign from Verizon), AT&T has shifted from the somewhat defiant and dismissive stance taken earlier this year (when such reports were characterized as “anecdotal feedback” and “sweeping generalizations”) to a more plaintive tone - as demonstrated above.

Whether or not it’s good long-term policy for any company to publicly complain about how difficult it is for them to provide the service they’re being paid to provide is open for discussion - particularly when that company’s current windfall success is almost entirely dependent upon a soon-to-expire exclusive partnership with another company (i.e. Apple).

In any event, while the technical challenges AT&T faces may be very real, I would be more receptive to the recent “data networks are hard” excuses coming out of the company if it were able to a better job of getting even voice coverage up to par in the NYC area - above is a screen shot from my iPhone, taken from my home office.  My apartment (the blue dot) is located within 2 miles of downtown Manhattan - not exactly the middle of nowhere.  Yet, I get almost zero bars - and an unusable voice connection.

In AT&T’s defense, the company has recently launched an iPhone app to allow users to send the company location-specific reports of poor service (of course, in cases of no coverage you’d have to put the iPhone on an available wireless network for the app to function).

So that’s what I’ve done - I’ve installed the app, sent in my report, and am waiting  to see if my voice (let alone data) service improves.

In the meantime, while at my desk at home, it would appear I own an expensive  iTouch.

Last week, I attended the first HD Communication Summit, here, in New York. 

I have to confess, the concept of high definition voice transmission was new to me. 

Yet, by the time I left the auditorium, Jeff Pulver and team certainly made sure I was up to speed. (For the purpose of full disclosure, although I am a “telco guy”, I am primarily focused on market analysis and vendor scouting in the fixed broadband consumer data space. That keeps core voice service topics outside my purview).

So why HD-quality voice transmission, if for decades standard-definition 300 to 3000 Hz service quality has done just fine for most of us?

Among the arguments, once people have gotten a taste of what wideband voice communications is like, they wouldn’t want to turn back - ever!  

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Rant alert:   OK, so calls drop way too often (maybe 50% of the time) for me to use my iPhone in half the rooms in my my apartment - an apartment remotely located less than a mile from the sparsely-populated and little-known island of Manhattan….   Occasionally I can’t even use the phone on said island without having to cross the street to get bars… SMS messages occasionally arrive sometime the next day…

As hardware, the Apple iPhone itself is so well-executed that I tend to put up with the terrible AT&T voice network - to grudgingly accept it… but every now and then, I come across articles about other users experiencing similar problems (both voice and data), and I’m once again reminded of how disappointing the coverage is - at least in the New York City metro area.

And such is the case now - I’ve posted before about the poor performance of the AT&T voice/3G data network here in NY/NJ, but a recent article by Matt Richtel in the NY Times compels me to comment again.   A few user and analyst quotes from the article:

• “…the actual experience has been abysmal.”
• “I found myself walking around Manhattan frustrated”
• “AT&T is constantly falling below the threshold”

Strong words. For their part, AT&T has recently announced an $11 bil investment in shoring up their wireless network over the next year, and otherwise appears to be moving directly from the denial phase into the acceptance phase: while in January AT&T was pushing back (claiming one study merely took “anecdotal feedback from only 30 customers to fashion some sweeping generalizations about us in particular” and a similar Consumer Reports article was “based on anecdotal feedback from a self-selected group of subscribers”), this week spokesman Mark Siegel noticeably softened the AT&T stance: “I’m not minimizing the frustration somebody may feel, but I think the improvements in wireless in this country have been extraordinary.”

Maybe.  But there’s one heck of a long way to go.  And that’s OK - on a technical level, these are difficult problems to solve, we understand that.  Meanwhile, though, memo to AT&T (and Apple for that matter): even assuming a best-case 3G coverage scenario, there’s really no excuse for the pure science fiction portrayed in advertisements such as the one above.  It comes down to basic truth in advertising (as someone who’s had a bit of experience in the industry on the music side, it amazes me how they ever got away with airing this, even for a short period of time).

Cisco expects the percentage of mobile data related to internet video to roughly double by 2013, driving overall mobile traffic growth of 100% per year for the foreseeable future.  I frankly don’t see numbers like that happening, at least not based on the performance of the one 3G network I have experience with (I’d be happy just to be able to make a phone call from the bedroom).