People over the past couple of years have made fun of me because I carried a Blackberry, why not the I-Phone? OK, now I actually have the Motorola X, DROID, i.e. Android OS. The Motorola DROID is one major league data hog, but not one hiccup with the Verizon network. It is because of the network, stupid I say. ATT and Cingular smashing two companies together and not understanding the capacity requirements. When Apple I-Phone hit the ATT network, data usage shot up 5,000%!!. When that happened the macro cell foot print (sector) shrunk to ensure that the downlink and uplink for voice was preserved, however the smaller sector and data bounced voice calls when roaming…like driving down the road. CDMA of Verizon is better than GSM of ATT, but no doubt Verizon was waiting to up their capacity with LTE. LTE makes a lot of sense for the iPhone, as Verizon CDMA network does not allow consumers (and or healthcare physicians to make calls and surf the network (web simultaneonsly on the I-Phone). And here is the big kicker, 4G will not crubble to it's knees like the 3G network of AT&T. It also will allow for world-wide use, versus having to have a combination CDMA/GSM phone. AT&T cannot build out more capacity on it's macro network, so they are scrambling to put BTS and DAS into every venue that they can to add "capacity". That is why the in-building DAS market is exploding and gone are the days in major metro areas of repeaters sucking bandwidth off the tower. (Well at least in Washington D.C., that is). This problem is not going away anytime soon, as data usage is only going up and up.
The most talked about cell phone in America is the one that does not exist (officially), the Verizon I-Phone. As Fortune magazine recently said, "consumers have yearned for the Verizon iPhone as if it were the second coming. The first hint of this was when Verizon started selling the I-Pad, most recently. The CEO Ivan Seidenberg of Verizon is a genius. For healthcare applications on a broadband model he has made a major coup. Early this year he persuaded Google to issue a joint policy framework supporting Verizon's right to prioritize traffic on it's wireless networks, altering Google's long-held stance that all data should flow freely on wired and wireless systems. Thus, you could not have a kid's 40MB video file overshadow a broadband wireless medical application.
