AT&T responds to Verizon's 3G ad campaign -- by bragging about EDGE
By Nilay Patel 
posted Nov 12th 2009 7:17PM
posted Nov 12th 2009 7:17PM
My iPhone 3GS, in downtown Chicago, as I wrote this post.
Right, right -- the only difference. That must be why Apple named it the iPhone EDGE Slightly Faster.With both 3G and EDGE coverage, customers can access the Internet, send e-mail, surf the Web, stream music, download videos, send photos, text, talk and more. The only difference – with some data applications, 3G is faster than EDGE.
Now, AT&T has a valid point when it says that its 3G map covers 75 percent of the nation's population, and that Verizon's conflation of total 3G coverage with actual network quality is slightly misleading. But you know what? We watch our iPhones drop from 3G to EDGE and even to GPRS all day long in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, and that has nothing to do with the damn map, and everything to do with AT&T's actual network quality. Let's put it this way: Verizon's ad campaign would be totally ineffective if it didn't ring so true, and the best way for AT&T to counter these ads is to build a rock-solid network, not filing lawsuits and issuing press releases bragging about freaking EDGE. We all clear on this? Good.
So, who is it, your aunt, or your coworker, or they are the same person?
iTroll...
where does the whole Ma Bell thing come from? Serious question
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System
I'm thread jacking here but, EDGE isn't that bad, it's only in new york city, where I happen to be that AT&T sucks. The second you leave the city it rocks, 3G is marginally better, but EDGE is just find for most shit when it's not being raped by 5 million people.
The Bell Telephone Company was founded in 1877 by Alexander Graham Bell's father-in-law Gardiner Greene Hubbard, who also helped organize a sister company — the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company. The two companies merged in 1879 to form the National Bell Telephone Company, which in 1880 merged with others to form the American Bell Telephone Company
John Elbridge Hudson joined the firm as counsel in 1880 and served as president from 1889 to 1900.
Bell Telephone Company in turn became the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T). AT&T would later undergo mergers with SBC Communications and BellSouth to become the New AT&T.
@ tyler.brock
i live in southern california and i can tell you that at&t absolutely sucks. i cant get more than a couple bars anywhere between riverside and LA. im dropping calls all the time and i'd say 20% of the time i cant make a call due to 0 bars. i can never make calls in grocery stores or department stores either. it's also killer on my battery life since the phone is always trying to connect. i've fought with them for almost a year now for them to do something about it but they keep switching me back and forth between customer service and the local store. the funny thing is, if you look at at&t's coverage strength map my house is literally inside a giant circle of their strongest coverageand yet to make a call i have to go upstairs and stand right next to the window. in june im switching to verizon because most of my friends have it and they ALWAYS have full strength service. sure the iphone is sorta cool but it's just a phone and it's really not so cool that it's worth sacrificing service for it. and for those who will down rank me as an apple hater, im using my mbp with my airport extreme and i also have a 2g touch. im simply an at&t hater.
They've got the ill communication.
Well now officially we are just "at&t" lower case. no longer new or caps. DEE DEE DEE
Well I get awesome coverage with AT&T, Verizon is quite the opposite in my area.
Well it goes back farther than this but this should suffice.
Southwestern Bell became SBC which then bought AT&T
@tpd: No, I'm tellin' ya it's sabotage
By no means am I a lawyer, but the assertion that these maps imply that AT&T has no coverage over most of the country seems like something of a stretch, even for the technically disinterested. Most phones, including the aptly named iPhone 3G, make a point of talking up their 3G capabilities, which for even the lay person is pretty well understood as "faster internet", not service or no service. Also, I assume its become a given that the high adoption of the iPhone has led many purchasers to conclude that AT&T 3G networks has serious reliability issues.
For those too lazy to go to Wikipedia, I just wanted to point out that the majority of the phone companies in the US used to be a part of the Bell family of companies at one point or another. Bell used have a monopoly on telecommuinications until it was forced by the government to split up in 1984. People sometimes refer to the Regional Bell Operating Companies as "Baby Bells" with "Ma Bell" literally being a parent company. Some of the RBOCs kept the Bell name but others went through several name changes and/or mergers. Qwest used to be USWEST, Verizon used to be Bell Atlantic and NYNEX, and what is now known as at&t has gone through the most changes. Ameritech, Southwestern Bell, and Pacific Telesis merged to form SBC. SBC bought AT&T and then Bell South. When they bought Bell South, they started using the at&t name again. The Verizon name did not emerge, to my knowledge, until they bought/merged with GTE. All this is just the land line services. It gets even more complicated when you look at the wireless divisions. Is anyone else exhausted from all this?
this is a cool fight, so now, AT&T is lashing Verizon out with this. I wonder what would be Verizon's reaction to this next!
http://bit.ly/att-vs-verizon
Let's all gloss over the absolutely huge difference in EVDO versus 3G together, shall we?
@v3xx I couldn't agree more. I just moved into a new place by Culver City. Inside the apartment when I do manage to make or receive a call I can be assured that it will inevitably drop at some point. Calls often go straight through to voicemail. The signal is so bad that even the google maps app on my iPhone won't locate me most of the time. Everywhere in my aparment, with the exception of right beside the window, the signal strength on my iPhone is -114 db, which is thoroughly crappy. By the window it is -99 db, which is still crappy but will sometimes let me get through 5 minutes worth of a calls without dropping.
For those of you who are also on an iPhone and complaining about constant dropped calls what sort of signal strength are you getting? You can check your signal strength on the iPhone by dialing *3001#12345#* (note if you try to save that number to an address book entry and auto-dial from there, it will not work)
As an iPhone owner, I approve of this post.
Also, the Land of Misfit Toys commercial had me laughing so hard I cried - then I wrote Santa a letter asking for better AT&T coverage (currently I can't maintain conversation at home OR work for more than a couple minutes without a seemingly random dropout - and I'm not even moving but SITTING THERE).
I love how the phone can just sit on my desk all day and go from 4 bars to 2 bars to No Service and back like magic. *sigh*
In the United States, telephone service was provided for many years by the Bell Telephone Company. Eventually Bell Telephone Company became known as American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), which still provided all telephone service in the country.
Eventually, government regulations/antitrust lawsuits (I don't remember the exact history here) caused the AT&T to get split up in the 1980s, forming AT&T (focusing on long distance service) and local telephone companys, known as Regional Bell Operating Companies or "Baby Bells".
Eventually government deregulation resulted in many RBOCs merging to form Verizon, AT&T going through various splits and mergers, and eventually one of the few RBOCs not part of Verizon (SBC) purchasing AT&T.
So it's pretty much Ma Bell on Ma Bell action going on here.
Wow, I detect some real emotion coming from you guys. I haven't seen this side of you before
I just came over from facebook, and I was looking for the "Like" button on this article :(
@Brian Phillips
"Wow, I detect some real emotion coming from you guys. I haven't seen this side of you before"
I know, it's giving me a chubby.
hey - if it's not apple fanboyism isn't something else
i'm really proud of you engadget for having some articles that aren't all - 'love u iphone'
So by AT&T logic it's better to promote an slower and obsolete technology...than fix the better faster technology.....
Hmm makes sense..Must have the Engadget comment section creator back there somewhere pulling the strings...
EDGE is faster than CDMA 2000 1XRTT
If Verizon paint its CDMA 2000 1XRTT coverage as 3G,
then it's totally fair that even if AT&T paints their EDGE as their 3G coverage
*If someone wants to argue that CDMA 2000 1XRTT is 3G, (even though it is slower than EDGE), just because CDMA 2000 is 3G;
then EDGE is 3G too, by International Telecommunication Union's standard
http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/imt-2000/DocumentsIMT2000/IMT-2000.pdf
@ Raymond
No, the majority of VZW's markets are EVDO enabled. There isn't any foul play going on.
@macfan4321
no, Raymond is correct. i posted a long comment about this in another article the other day. CDMA2000 is a hybrid of 1xrtt and evdo. cdma2000 is classified as 3g even though it includes 1xrtt, which is 2.5g. verizon is showing their entire "cdma2000" coverage map as their 3g map. edge is faster than 1xrtt, so raymond is absolutely correct that an apples to apples map would include edge on at&ts map.
AT&T, can we be honest for a moment?
You suck. You always have. You still do.
Quit whining like a big baby and get fixed.
Your pricing and tendencies to brag about yourself and whine about your competitors are too high, while your network speed, 3G coverage and reliability, and customer service quality are too low.
At this rate, you should be charging less per month than Sprint and T-Mobile for everything you offer.
Wasn't Verizon used to be part of Ma Bell? Bell Atlanta?
Verizon was formed by the unholy combination of Bell Atlantic and NYNEX (both ex-Bell System), and GTE (which was most definitely NOT part of the Bell System)
But the NYNEX types in New York run it, so I guess it's fair to call it a Bell System descendant.
Yea, but they broke it off and split up and became the companies they are today.
And Verizon Wireless, which is a separate company, is 55% owned by Verizon and 45% owned by British telecom Vodafone.
heh EDGE...? might as well be carrier pigeon.
Don't undermine the speed of the pigeons.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/10/south-african-pigeon-transmits-data-faster-than-local-dsl/
There's a protocol for that:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149
Can South African pigeons carry a coconut?
So that's what these darned kids mean about "Tweeting"
yeah - Steve, don't be an idiot. The iPhone has no problem doing things like web surfing or getting email while you're talking on the phone at the same time. This is a serious drawback to going with Verizon.
This is all AT&T's fault. The average person didn't know/didn't care what 3G was until AT&T wouldn't shut the fuck about it when the iPhone 3G came out. Suddenly Verizon and Sprint both started using 3G in their ad campaigns after that, and now it's coming back to bite AT&T in the ass. People "care" about 3G now, and they simply don't have the same 3G coverage as Verizon at this point, plain and simple. There's nothing misleading in the ads.
Hey! EDGE isn't all that bad! I remember when it took 5 minutes to download a ringtone! I--
--OK, it sucks -_-
Ah but 3G is so 2006 (or so), I want my 4G now. And take your stinkin' outdated 3G crap and put in on your EDGE towers. 4G 4G 4G
but something NOBODY mentions is that CDMA won't do simultaneous voice and data.
So all this verizon 3g coverage doesn't mean squat if you're on the phone and trying to pull up a map or e-mail.
So what....are you arguing it's better to have unreliable voice and data, dropped calls and slow downloads as long as you get to talk on the phone and look at a map at the same time?
I think most people would much rather prefer to have reliable and consistent coverage, no dropped calls, and fast 3G service wherever they are.
Something that also doesn't matter if your phone can't multitask in the first place.
I would MUCH rather have solid 3g coverage pretty much everywhere I go and do either voice OR data, rather than stand in that one magical spot where a unicorn shed its tears and obtain voice and data at the same time.
AT&T = Fail.
Please insert .25 cents and try again.
I also would like to comment about something that was said at theiphoneblog.com which is most happy AT&T customers feeling:
"In other words, AT&T is saying Verizon’s 3G coverage of mountains and lakes is impressive for the fish and eagles, but they think they have the humans and their “cities” covered just fine, thanks."
I think it's funny how AT&T only cares about those who live in densely populated areas. I for one was close to jumping ship to the iPhone a while ago, only to find out that where I live (population 5,000), the AT&T 3g is non existent. Meanwhile I have a full 5 bars of EVDO 3g sitting in my house with Verizon.
Easy choice.
Forgive me if I am wrong, but isn't it impossible to do voice and data if you are on EDGE anyways? If so, than that kinda doesn't matter anways, since the majority of places 3G doesn't work.
@pureplayan >> "but something NOBODY mentions is that CDMA won't do simultaneous voice and data."
Almost every Blackberry I see that people have for business are on Verizon or Sprint ---> CDMA. They obviously don't miss simultaneous voice and data. Hell, neither do I... I have a Verizon Blackberry Curve.
Since Verizon is the biggest cell phone carrier in the USA... does that meant it's not that big of a problem? Or is it just a talking point when discussing AT&T's "superior" network?
I am on Verizon network, and not only my phone does simultaneous voice and data, it also does simultaneous voice and tethering, so I can browse Internet on the laptop and receive voice calls at the same time.
@steve I take it your comment is aimed at the iPhone? I'm assuming you have not used one. It's quite simple to use maps, email, safari etc whilst simultaneously having a phone conversation (multitasking). Just put the call on speaker, press the home button and open the app you require. The call is indicated at the top of the screen by a green glowing bar which you can press to return to the phone app.
@Steve
I'm assuming you are trying to point out the multitasking problem with an iPhone. While true, it won't run multiple third party apps at the same time, an iPhone running on AT&T's 3G network has no problem with having someone be in the middle of a call while also using any application on the phone. Any application will still have the normal internet functionality during that time, so even if you are blabbing away to someone for 2 hours, e-mail still comes through, maps still work, and even updates to facebook could be posted. I'm actually kinda annoyed by this at times, as the iPhone will still vibrate to indicate new e-mail when it's next to your face during a phone call.
The same is true if the phone has WiFi access.
Yes, it is a valid point to bring up, as no phone on Sprint or Verizon can do this via 3G. Does it overcome AT&T's network issues in certain places that only certain people are troubled by? Depends on the person. I personally have no issues with AT&T in Austin, outside of the congestion problems when tons of iPhone users are in one place.
I'm on Verizon and it works pretty well. Only thing is, where I'm at I only seem to get 1xRTT or EV-DO Rev.0 speeds, which is somewhat equivalent to GPRS and EDGE. When I do get EV-DO Rev. A speeds, it's still not as fast as what I would get with AT&T.
That is, not including all the dropped calls and whatnot...
I guess I'd prefer a better reliable slow connection than a spotty faster one.
I wonder how Verizon's network would be if all the current iPhone users were on their network. Although VZ has excellent coverage, I hear they might not have a capable enough backend network to handle tons of data...