The Story
AT&T announced that it has “taken the steps necessary so that Apple can enable VoIP applications on iPhone to run on AT&T’s wireless network.” This came after the release of a Vonage iPhone application, which allows users to make VoIP calls over 3G if they have a Vonage account. This means that Apple has approved an application which, unlike Apple’s previous claims, actually replaces the iPhone’s basic phone functionality (which is what Apple said was the reason behind their blocking of the Google Voice application).
Remember, this new decision doesn’t just apply to Vonage but to every VoIP application. The Skype blog had some happy remarks as we can probably expect to be Skyping on the go in the very near future.
AT&T’s Beefed Up Network
I know a lot of people are going to say that AT&T should have done this from the start, but really they needed to do a whole lot of network maintenance first. Given the state of the company’s networks for the past few years, it would have been a huge mistake to allow users to Skype all over the place. In New York, the AT&T network becomes unusable every day at around 2:18 pm in certain neighborhoods. That would only be exacerbated by VoIP apps.
Now let’s get back to what AT&T did to wrong. Instead of having a bad network, they should have gone out and spent money to upgrade infrastructure from the start. Build more towers so that people can actually use the data network they’re paying so much money for. If that’s prohibitively expensive, then I want to see evidence to this effect. AT&T has tried to spin both customers and the government before All. If they make a claim, they damn well better provide proof.
