Hutchison 3 can be considered one of the unofficial sponsors of the Tamoggemon Content Network - their highly affordable data plans have allowed me to write and publish many an article on the go in the last two years.
Two years ago, yours truly paid 9€ for 3GB of data after a generous cut of over 50% - nowadays, 9 Euros buy every Austrian the same amount (or even more). Furthermore, faster and more powerful handsets increase the data throughput per customer: two years ago, uploading 20MB was difficult; nowadays it’s blazingly fast. And don’t even get me started on YouTube/iTunes…
We probably all agree that data usage is increasing: unfortunately, carriers are not prepared as well as they should be according to their marketing departments. Don’t get me wrong: I am not into the business of peddling fear of network outages, internet addiction or any of the other things where snake oil peddlers amass huge fortunes.
But: the problems in the mobile broadband area can not be ignored. Industry journals like Mobile report that customers have begun to return their dongles frequently due to low speed; major network outages have occurred in both Austria and the UK (which are data-heavy countries).
Insiders at a major Austrian carrier tell me that the problems are not due to the wireless equipment, but rather due to the uplink system connecting the cell towers to the network. As more and more customers gang up on a cell, the uplink no longer is able to handle the data transfers…which leads to slower speeds.
Carriers frantically upgrade their networks - unfortunately, this leads to outages like the A1 and T-Mobile outages experienced recently (to be fair: Hutchison had a small one, too…which struck me in the very moment when I needed the web urgently). The problems will be solved in the future - in the mean time, customers can do little except embrace the lag…
Image (c): abc texte/Dr. Kohrs - no reproduction permitted
