It seems there is a downside to AT&T’s exclusive relationship with Apple and the iPhone and it can be summed up in the microcosm of AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants baseball team.
As the Wall Street Journal pointed out on Monday, iPhone users are bandwidth hogs. The comScore research firm reported in March that 80 per cent of UK iPhone users were accessing news and information through a browser – four times the rate for all mobile phone users. More than 18 per cent had bought and downloaded a game, compared to 6 per cent of other smartphone owners.
Meanwhile, an Alcatel Lucent study has shown that web browsing can typically take up a third of data activities on a cellphone but consumes more than two-thirds of the available bandwidth.
Now, some baseball statistics.
On a press tour of AT&T Park’s technical facilities on Monday night, Bill Schlough, the Giants’ chief information officer, explained how the ballpark was the first sports stadium in the world to provide free Wi-Fi access to all spectators with the launch of its Giants Digital Dugout in 2004.
Usage of the Wi-Fi has grown 573 per cent since the Wi-Fi enabled iPhone was launched in 2007 and on April 21, it’s busiest day of the season so far, nearly 1,300 fans were accessing AT&T’s Wayport free Wi-Fi points, 70 per cent of them using an iPhone or iPod touch.
Such is the popularity of the devices, the Giants have developed iPhone-friendly Foodfinder and Wi-Fi Replay services that locate the nearest hot dog stand or replay a key pitch or hit.
Mr Schlough could not quantify the extra 3G usage caused by the iPhone, but he did say AT&T, from this season, was having to call in the COWs – the cell-on-wheels trucks used to boost capacity in order to cope with extra traffic, and that it was planning a permanent upgrade of cell coverage at the park it sponsors.
So, in correlation with the other studies, it seems fair to assume that those $30 a month data plans iPhone users share with other AT&T smartphone users are taking up a disproportionate and expensive chunk of bandwidth on the Apple devices.
In the interest of balance, the real purpose of Mr Schlough’s tour was to show off the Giants’ new voice-over-IP telephone system installed, with AT&T’s apparent blessing, by Silicon Valley company ShoreTel, which beat off competition from Cisco, Nortel and Avaya.
The Giants had the biggest phone bill in Major League baseball with their old AT&T system, but the 450 VoiP phones installed by ShoreTel are saving it $375,000 a year, meaning the $1m upgrade will pay for itself in less than three years.
Oh, and the Giants went on to beat the Washington Nationals 11-7.
