Verizon has already stated they will be capping data usage plans. If you’re on an unlimited data plan you’ll be grandfathered in, but the days of unlimited cellular data usage for Verizon are coming to an end with the iPhone. Same as with AT&T.
They’ve already breezed through this with the scads and scads of Android phones they sold - which when you consider how much data is used are an excellent comparison to iphone users.
As I said, mark my words.
I’m just confused. Why would using more bandwidth mean less reception? I get it meaning less bandwidth, but reception should be a constant, right?
IME, AT&T just seems to have a gigantic dead zone just south of Detroit. making a call with my (work) AT&T Blackberry is a crapshoot; the best was when I was at my customer’s site and trying to call someone who worked there (they had an iPhone.) it was a comedy of dropped call after failed call, in both directions.
meanwhile my (personal) Verizon Droid Incredible has yet to have an issue with phone calls.
so if you iPhone (expletive-deleteds) screw this up for the rest of us I’m going to go on a rampage.
Maybe it is because I don’t live in a HUGE city but my iPhone on ATT works great I live in St Louis not NY or San Francisco where everyone complains about theirs not working. I pretty much never have a dropped call, I think I have had a few but if you keep reading I think it was because of the person below’s phone not having bars…
My boyfriend on Verizon, he can’t ever get a signal where he lives, and they have Verizon towers in his city IIRC. He lives in the town I went to college in and when I was a freshman I had Verizon and I had to switch because I was roaming - no towers - and then the next year Verizon swooped in with towers and service and 3 phone stores. But his Droid X at his house, nope, we can hardly talk 
Things to note:
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Yes, Verizon has a ton of Android users. However, compared to iPhone users, they don’t even use CLOSE to the same amount of data. This month two important statistics came to light: #1: Android is now the most popular smartphone OS in the world. #2: iPhones account for 2.05% of worldwide web traffic. Android? 0.45%. So, even though there are MORE Android phones out there than iPhones, iPhones account for quadruple the amount of web traffic. Total data use, including non-web traffic, is still nearly 2:1 in favor of iPhones, even though they have fewer devices.
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AT&T sucks in some big cities, but certainly not everywhere. I live in Columbus, OH. Not a HUGE city, but not small (15th largest in the US)…I’ve had an iPhone for 9 months on AT&T, 4 with a 3Gs, 5 with an iPhone 4. I’ve dropped fewer than 10 calls total in those 9 months, and a few of them were because I or the person I was calling was driving out in the boonies and hit a dead spot.
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Verizon’s network will almost certainly be tested here. How much, I don’t know. I’m sure the NY and SF AT&T users hope that a big group jumps ship to ease the crappy service in those cities, and it just might. It will be interesting when both Verizon and AT&T have most of their customers on the LTE networks in the next few years to see if they are good to handle those super fast data speeds with the increasing crush of smartphone users.
Verizon is doing two things that ATT didn’t. First, they’re going to eliminate the unlimited data plan after a while (which is something that ATT eventually did). Second, they’re going to throttle or slow the connection for heavy data users.
Interesting…goes against the global data…wonder who’s right? Or are both right (and Verizon users account for an uncharacteristically large slice of total Android data usage)?
well, the global data’s not too meaningful when we’re looking strictly at the US market.
AFAIK VZW has been by far the heaviest promoter of Android (through their Droid brand) in the US.
Android aside, Verizon has a shitload of Blackberry users - mostly because of business and it was also the only decent smartphone option they had for years. This “mark my words” attitude seemingly pretends that the iPhone is the first data heavy and popular cell on their network when that’s plainly not the case.
nothing exists until Apple does it.
Ever use a pre-iPhone portable web browser? Stuff may pre-exist Apple, but I swear sometimes that Apple used to be the only company that actually had people USE their stuff before it shipped to stores.
Verizon sells out of iPhones the first day;
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110205/ap_on_hi_te/us_verizon_iphone
This little gem at the bottom of that second one;
“It also said it will conserve data capacity by recoding all online video requested by data subscribers. It said the effect on image quality should be minimal.”
CNN/Fortune reviews;
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/02/03/verizon-iphone-the-reviews-are-in/?hpt=Sbin
Half of Verizon smart phone users say they’ll switch to the iPhone;
I loved one of the snarky comments on these stories. “Apple: Technology with Training Wheels”. Yes, and 98% of the people out there need the training wheels. Let’s not mistake the needs of the very small tech proficient minority with the needs of the very large tech ignorant majority.
I’ve known quite a few people who use a Blackberry for business. You know what they all have in common?
The vast majority of the time, they use their Blackberry as—wait for it—a phone. The rest of the time, they tend to use relatively low-bandwidth applications like: email; calendars and scheduling; sending and receiving documents. Even when doing the latter, most of the documents they deal with on the phone are fairly basic Word, Excel, PDF and similar office-type documents.
Most of these documents aren’t that big. A Word or PDF file of comprising dozens of pages often only takes up a few hundred kilobytes, unless it’s jam-packed with images. And, even when the documents are larger, they still generally don’t involve the constant bandwidth use involved in doing things like watching YouTube, playing online games, browsing the internet, etc. etc.
I’m not arguing that no-one in business uses a lot of bandwidth. I’m sure there are plenty who do. But the nature of business use generally mitigates against the sort of constant, network-crippling usage that recreational smartphone owners inflict on their networks.
probably because until OS 6 the BlackBerry Browser sucked ass.
Not really.
It was actually because the things i described are the things they needed their Blackberry to do for them in order to help them with their work. For the most part, their work-related needs were communication and organization; even if the Blackberry browser had been perfect, they didn’t have smartphones in order to be able to play on Facebook or fill out a Sudoku or watch some guy break his arm falling off a skateboard.
There’s nothing wrong with using a phone for those things, but for many business users those weren’t, and still aren’t, the priorities.
This isn’t a fanboy thing. This is a shattering the record for most Verizon phones sold in one day thing. It doesn’t take the reality distortion field to see that Verizon is going to sell several million iPhones on release day, on top of whatever they’d normally be selling. That, and I would imagine (though I admit I haven’t looked it up) that anyone looking to get a smartphone is probably going to get an iPhone, so not only will they have the new-phone excited that everyone has, they’ll have “you mean I can watch MST3K/stream baseball games/download Super Mario Bros on this thingy?” excitement.
Like I said, maybe Verizon will rewrite history as far as iPhone reception goes, and I hope for you Verizon folks’ sake they do. I just don’t think there’s any reason to expect otherwise.
There are two reasons, actually. First, they can see what happened to AT&T and plan for it in advance. Second, their big advertising tag line is reliability, and they would have to be extremely clueless to ignore something which would make that a joke. Articles I’ve read give the Verizon management pretty good marks for their reaction to AT&T’s exclusive on the Jesus Phone, so they don’t appear to be that stupid.