enjoyingsilence
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 Originally Posted by Badandy127
You'd think. I do know that ATT is in the beginning stages of a new multi-billion dollar initiative to upgrade the firmware at their towers to enable 7.2 mbps download speeds while also constructing a TON of new towers all across the U.S. to decrease the load that each tower has to carry. Should be a pretty incredible network in 6 months or so...
the iPhone effect (as I call it  ) will still be there. You can update firmware on a cell site itself to support 7.2 HSPA, however, if the back-end bandwidth isn't there to carry it across, things still wait in a queue. Of course, rules still apply to this. The "faster" the service from a wireless site to a wireless handset, the more people will try to use it. If the wired bandwidth isn't there (e.g. a T1 line), the more requests will back up, and it will still take 20%-30% longer to deliver information to the wireless handset, than it did before the upgrade.
It's bad enough as it is. The cell sites do not have enough bandwidth. Your connection is only as fast as it's slowest uplink.
As for adding cell sites: you can distribute the network load across cell sites by adding more. But if at&t is adding more cell sites in areas that don't have 3g to begin with, it's not helping. And they're putting more new cell sites in areas that don't have 3g anyway, enabling HSPA 7.2 isn't going to help what they already have.
edit: to further clarify my above paragraph. It's like working in a data center. If you have a t3 coming into the building, and the internet is already slow. You can't add a bunch of switches (managed or unmanaged) to redistribute the network load, in hopes that external network requests (i.e. those that require access to the internet) will be faster. The t3 will still be bogged down, no matter how much you spread the network out. Instead - you add another T3, or a T1 (if you only need another 1.5mb of bandwidth)
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