[tinotopia]

A large part of AT&T's perception problem seems to have to do with their congestion, not their RF performance, in a few places.

This might be one of those situations where more information would be useful. The ideal solution would be to charge a higher price (e.g. a 'minute multiplier' — show this next to the signal strength indicator) for traffic in congested conditions — but this would present marketing problems, Mobile-phone pricing is already opaque enough, and people would rightly be suspicious that the introduction of such a congestion charge would soon result in interesting re-defintions of 'congestion'.

You might be able to get much the same effect by simply showing the user the current local network condition, by turning the signal indicator into a signal-and-congestion indicator. You'd see the signal strength as a measure of the radio conditions, and some kind of indicator that reflected the ability of the network to handle calls at that moment.

I'm assuming, with no particular knowledge of the matter, that the congestion problems with mobile-phone networks are like nearly all other such problems: extremely fleeting. You might be unable to make a call for about five minutes out of an hour; but if that's the five minutes during which you want to make a call, not only are you frustrated because you can only discover the situation through what amounts to black-box analysis, but the phone company gets no goodwill from you for the performance of the network during the other fifty-five minutes.

[gojomo]

Definitely, AT&T's problem in SF has a large congestion-related dimension. I know, because for the first ~2 years of AT&T service, it was annoying but not totally useless in my home neighborhood. But in the last 6 months, it's collapsed. Long periods where call attempts and SMS-sends fail, and where the signal meter oscillates between "no service" and 4 bars -- but even 4 bars may not allow calls and SMSes to succeed.

Congestion means they have lots of paying customers in the area -- so even without congestion pricing, they ought to be able to plan and maintain capacity here. That they have not is evidence of the lack of proper competition, aggravated by Apple's exclusive deal.

[moe]

Living in a civilized country (europe) I can only shake my head whenever I read about the issues the supposed "last remaining Super Power" has with their mobile networks.

Over here we get annoyed when we stumble into an area without HSDPA coverage which makes our data-rate drop from 400 kB/s to around 30 kB/s...

But dropped calls and such are mostly an unknown. I can't remember having ever experienced one except when driving through a tunnel with the car. Our main network (t-mo) is pretty much everywhere until you drive really far out into the woods. Even in rural areas my phone gets to choose between 2-3 networks most of the time. Smaller networks have roaming agreements with t-mo, so phones just seamlessly switch as needed.

You americans have my pity.