AT&T to Apple: "Please Throttle iPhone Traffic"

 
Fred Vogelstein, from Wired Magazine, brings the story behind AT&T's effort to meet the demand from bandwidth generated by Apple's iPhone.

The story of AT&T and its efforts to answer the demand for mobile bandwidth, mainly in larger US cities, is not new. I covered this in a number of posts (here and here) and the common feeling was that AT&T will spend $B's (here) to increase its network capacity - as well as adding free WiFi services (here), moving away from unlimited service (here) and more. All these are local or longer term plans.

Now we hear that AT&T also tried to convince Apple to make changes to their applications, so bandwidth consumption will be reduced. Here's how Wired describes what AT&T tried to do. See "Bad Connection: Inside the iPhone Network Meltdown" - here:

".. In a bid to avert the looming problem, a team headed by senior vice president Kris Rinne met with Apple to ask for help. Of course AT&T was planning to upgrade its network to handle the increased demand, Rinne’s team told Apple executives, but that was going to take years. In the meantime, would Apple take measures to help throttle back the traffic? Perhaps Apple could restrict its YouTube app to run only over Wi-Fi. Maybe the iPhone could feature a smaller, lower-resolution videostream or cut off YouTube videos after one minute".

With traffic management solutions, AT&T could have done this (and more) without Apple's help (see the Belgacom example - here). They could also go for a tiered services concept like Telkomsel (here) and Elisa (here) - and maybe they are going there -see "AT&T Seeks Unified Policy Management for Wireline and Wireless" - here)