Don't Give Up Your Unlimited Mobile Data Plan

Consumers and service providers alike, are thrilled about the future, most notably in the exciting implications of a ‘connected world’. Consequently, reasoning between the two groups will most certainly vary. Mobile users, listen to my words - DO NOT GIVE UP YOUR UNLIMITED DATA PLAN. Sure T-Mobile and others still offer it, but the cellular savvy knows that other companies like Verizon and AT&T are essential ‘where it’s at. For starters, carefully scrutinize all ‘new offers’, weighing your decision before taking an attractive subsidy on a free phone, rendering your hard-earned unlimited data plan moot by being forced into a tiered/family plan. There are a number of paths to go here, and in this case, I’d recommend the one less traveled for the purposes of saving money and long-term entrapment.

By all means, continue to enjoy HD video, rich media, and robust offerings – with discretion and planning of course. Naturally, all of these great things consume exorbitant amounts of data, and it's especially difficult to keep track of such usage since these numbers are not as cut and dry as minutes. Though companies like AT&T and Verizon offer online data calculators to give ballpark figures for data use, it is hardly an exact science. Alas, you may quickly find yourself speeding towards or exceeding your cap, racking up an exorbitant bill in the process (Note: AT&T and Verizon charge $10 per GB in overages) All things considered, it’s simply impossible to keep track of usage progressively, with apps running in the background and data spikes incurred from streaming high definition video or audio – so what’s the problem if I’m holding onto my unlimited data plan, you ask?

Well, big providers have mulled this over for a long time, and are truly never losing on the infinite media playground. In fact, both AT&T and Verizon were found to have throttled the top 5 percent of data users. Once you’ve been marked as a heavy data user, your access will be slowed during congested network times to free up bandwidth. What does this mean? It means you should definitely use Wi-Fi hotspots wherever possible to bypass the provider network. In the event you need to upgrade in the future, make sure your phone supports 4G LTE (with more becoming available as the technology matures). The reasoning for this? In short, unlimited users will not have to deal with that limit as both Verizon and AT&T have noted handling of less than half their mobile data traffic on the 4G LTE network last year – this equates to less network strain, higher efficiency in data streaming, and zero governance over the enjoyment of a right you’ve earned - unlimited data.

Still, the number of unlimited data customers is beginning to dwindle – while usage is predicted to grow 13-fold over the next half-decade, according to Cisco. In the report, the networking giant predicted that mobile data traffic will expand to about 46 times the total amount of mobile IP traffic since 2010, with more than 10 billion connected devices by 2017. In the meantime, service providers will continue to throw out lines with attractive offers attached to lure consumers into abandoning their boundless access which will cost them and not you in due time [better yet, cost them less while costing you the same].

For now, companies are trapped into continuing to offer unlimited data to existing customers by abiding to the original terms of the contract or face legal backlash. The catch-22 is that this long-time, loyal subscribers won’t be able to fully enjoy new rollouts with an outdated phone that struggles to run them. I offer this advice: for the avid user of advanced features (who still has an unlimited data plan), it simply makes sense to hold on tight to that infinite data allowance by purchasing new devices on eBay (or comparable online marketplace) for a one-time fee and selling old ones to mitigate the total cost. For the rest of us, high expectations are going to naturally come with likewise prices. Without vigilance, the term pays now or pay later comes to mind in more than a literal sense. Whatever your circumstances, I wish you the best.

This article was written by Michael Roden, a VoIP Enthusiast & writer at GetVoIP.com, a VoIP Provider directory and service comparison guide.

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Which Cell Signal Booster is Best for AT&T

AT&T has a femtocell device to help their customers extend coverage inside their homes and offices.  

How Many AT&T Microcells Have Been Sold?

In just 2 years AT&T now has 350,000 Microcells on their network compared to 256,000 cell phone towers.   Sprint has 250,000 femtocells on their network as well.  Microcells are growing a lot faster than cell phone towers despite the poor reviews from customers.  Many AT&T customers experience the Microcell dropping calls which is distributed by Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) & designed by IP Access.  Microcells sell for $150-$200, however, many people are learning how to complain to AT&T and get a free Microcell. 

It is also going to be interesting to see how the T-Mobile customers will be affected by the merger and the change in culture towards femtocells.  T-Mobile does not believe in the femtocell concept and has stuck with WiFi calling which works great.  T-Mobile has always maintained the position that they will have their customers use WiFi to make phone calls onto the network when cellular reception is non-existent.  

AT&T has 256,000 traditional cell phone towers which AT&T claims to have and says is growing to 500,000 but I don't believe them.  This would only happen if they would acquire T-Mobile and thus would be many overlapping sites.  AT&T would likely divest many of these towers in the process.  So why all the hype about 4G infrastructure when connectivity is getting fragmented onto WiFi?  Why are carriers hyping 4G  when G still stinks and that WiFi is not secure and therefore you should always connect through their network?  The costs of a Microcell vs Cell Phone Tower makes you think that there could be other alternative forms of unlicensed communication in the future through WiFi for free. 

Wireless Network Armageddon in 2012

The analysis compiled three notable studies on mobile data traffic growth from Cisco Systems, Coda Research, and the Yankee Group. The average of these three studies estimates mobile data traffic to grow 5x between 2009-2011, 20x between 2009-2013, and 35x between 2009-2014. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski indicated that these studies were done before the iPad/tablet boom and therefore the growth may actually be understated. Our study shows that cell site growth is 7% while decelerating and Wi-Fi growth is accelerating to around 40%. in the U.S.

There is obviously going to be a spectrum deficit and the pain that consumers are feeling is going to get even worse. Some solutions trying to tackle the problem include hardware at each cell site to optimize the radio networks, offloading data to Wi-Fi and femtocells. Media optimization and compression will likely be used as well and might be more cost-effective.  However, ultimately there will be 10-20 times more Wi-Fi networks and soon there will be more organic Wi-Fi management companies like Boingo, Fon & Google Wifi (TBD) to help users access the almost free networks.

How to Get a Free AT&T 3G MicroCell

AT&T's "most valuable customers" are now receiving free MicroCells or mini-cell phone towers to boost their home or office cell phone signals.  

AT&T MicroCell Customers Complain Here

I have started receiving numerous emails from frustrated AT&T Wireless customers about their new MicroCell (aka Mini Cell Phone Tower or Femtocell for your home). Thousands of frustrated AT&T Wireless customers are starting to emerge who have been tricked into buying the MicroCell for $150 that does not work in some areas. We want to find out where?

As we have seen in the past the only way to get the attention of the telecom giant is to complain about service as a group.  Think of Deadcellzones.com as the Groupon of complaints about cell phone coverage and poor service.  Here are some sample emails I have received from customers around the US.  Please send me your emails or post your experiences in the comments section below.

From a San Diego AT&T Customer - "I found your website after fighting on the phone with AT&T about their coverage here at my house located at ______, San Diego Ca 92117. Started having problems with my iPhone for the past 3 months.  I called AT&T and they told me to go buy one of their cell phone reception boosters for $150.00! So now I paid them $160.00+ tax for service + a monthly fee that doesn't work.  Is there a problem with the AT&T network because my TV provides is AT&T U-Verse as well? Sorry for the rant but I am livid, anyways you can add that address to your map."

From a San Francisco Customer - "I love your website because it gives me the ability to vent my frustration with AT&T's ineptitude and overhyped coverage.  I live in the city and would like to use my iPhone at home but AT&T's network is always congested near my apartment.  I went out and purchased the AT&T MicroCell and currently, I am very disappointed with the amount of dropped calls.  It seems like the macro network is looking to interfere with the microcell network and they are fighting for control.  What will fix the problem because I am thinking about going back to Wi-Fi and Skype for voice."

Related Stories:
Is Cell Reception Getting Worse?
Steve Jobs Cronies Hype: AT&T Getting Better
Why is AT&T's MicroCell Dropping Calls?
AT&T to Spend $1B on Free Femtocells
AT&T's Microcell U-Verse Set-Top Box
AT&T Home Cell Tower or MicroCell

Home Cell Towers
AT&T Customers Will Soon Be Happy
AT&T Service Plans and Coverage Review

San Francisco Has the Worst AT&T Reception

San Francisco has been awarded with the worst AT&T reception in the US according to our users.  The map above shows where customers have complained about dropped calls, data congestion and poor voice quality consistently and its only getting worse.  Search the AT&T Deadcellzones.com Consumer Generated Coverage Map by typing in your zip code or city name.  Ironically, one of the worst locations for reception is the AT&T building where Twitter's headquarters is. This building has very dense population of iPhones in the City and with 1.7 million iPhone 4 units sold in the first three days its not going to get any better.

AT&T Executives partly blame the San Francisco City Council and zoning laws, claiming that they are limited by 4 foot antennas.  I am not sure if I believe this excuse because back-haul, signaling and switching seem to be the carriers biggest challenge in other areas of the US.  Can AT&T make densely populated iPhone areas work properly with larger antennas and more fiber back-haul similar to SXSW in Austin?   AT&T executives claim that if they could put 6 foot antennas onto buildings that could would be better for all customers.  I would like to see a beta test in Downtown San Francisco of using larger antennas to test and see if it improved coverage. If successful, the San Francisco City County could use our database of complaints to measure the amount of complaints in an area as documented proof.

Also, we also think every AT&T iPhone purchaser (especially San Francisco) will eventually get a free 3G femtocell similar to Softbank in Japan when more competition starts to challenge their Apple monopoly.  AT&T's MicroCell may not be the complete solution to fix the problem but they certainly should not be charging for data or the device considering all of the complaints we are hearing about on their network.   Consumer reports across the country seem to be a very mixed bag about the AT&T MicroCell the tech capital of the World, San Francisco seems to be suffering the most. Some say the MicroCell works, some say it doesn’t (even when the network is up) and some say it drops calls all of the time.  The common issue seems to be interference with the Macro network and control for the signal is increasingly becoming a challenge for customers who are installing the mini cell phone tower.  Will AT&T stick with Cisco Systems as the MicroCell manufacturer or will they look for alternative femtocells?  

Apparently, AT&T looks like they are being selective about who they are selling their new MicroCell to as well.  Apparently, TechCrunch is trying to purchase a MicroCell one but has been denied.  AT&T managed to sucker in two of the biggest names in San Francisco to purchase their new Microcell,  Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Salesforce's CEO Marc Benioff.  Both could be great advocates  had AT&T's network been prepared but apparently there were problems.  Benioff posted on his Facebook:  “Bought 2 AT&T MicroCells and apparaently installation won’t complete. Called AT&T. They said they are having a national MicroCell outage since Friday. It won’t work for 2 more days." Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook: “I got one and it seems to work pretty well." “Pretty well” isn’t exactly a rave review.

Related Stories:
Is Cell Reception Getting Worse?
Steve Jobs Cronies Hype: AT&T Getting Better
Why is AT&T's MicroCell Dropping Calls?
AT&T to Spend $1B on Free Femtocells
AT&T's Microcell U-Verse Set-Top Box
AT&T Home Cell Tower or MicroCell
AT&T Customers Will Soon Be Happy
AT&T Service Plans and Coverage Review

AT&T to Spend $1B on Free Femtocells

AT&T To Give Away 10 million Microcells (Femtocells)

AT&T plans to spend $4B to enhance its network and $1B of this to be allocated at giving away 10 million  Microcells at $100 each.  This is only 12% of their entire customer base and we speculate that its' loyal small business customers who desperately need home or business coverage will get priority.  We are simply foreshadowing the inevitable news that AT&T seems to be avoided as they can sell early adopters this first iteration of the Cisco manufactured AT&T Home Cell Tower or MicroCell for $150.

AT&T has rolled this out in about a half dozen markets and claims they will go Nationwide later this spring or summary.  I think they are testing the market to see how early adopters are just willing to pay $150 and $20 per month for enhanced in-building coverage.  We speculate they are going to be forced into giving away a minimum of 10M femtocells (Microcell mini cell phone towers) to its' customers that cost them $100 each because of pressures from the cable operators and the smaller operators.  These mini cell phone towers will fix the horrible coverage more than 40M of AT&T's customers have indoors. 10M microcells would only be a fraction of their customer base of 80M that actually needs the product or may switch to another dump pipe operator in the near future.

See our related posts about the Microcell:  AT&T Customers Will Soon Be Happy,

Mobile Video 66% of Data Traffic by 2014

Video Will Account for 66% of Global Mobile Data Traffic by 2014 

Cisco's Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2009-2014  Mobile data traffic will double every year through 2014, increasing 39X between in 5 years.  The advent of laptops and high-end handsets onto mobile networks is a key driver of data traffic, since these devices offer the consumer content and applications not supported by the previous generation of mobile devices. Chief among these new sources of traffic is video, but other applications such as peer-to-peer (P2P) are already making an impact. As shown below, a single laptop can generate as much traffic as 1300 basic-feature phones, and a smartphone creates as much traffic as 10 basic-feature phones. iPhones, in particular, can generate as much traffic as 30 basic feature phones.

High-End Handsets and Laptops Can Multiply Traffic 

Cisco has estimated the amount of smartphone traffic that can be offloaded through dual-mode devices or femtocells see below. The offload factor for each country is a combination of smartphone penetration, dual-mode share of smartphones, percentage of home-based mobile Internet use, percentage of dual-mode smartphone owners with Wi-Fi fixed Internet access at home. In many developing countries and regions, the offload percentage declines, while in developed regions, the offload factor steadily rises throughout the forecast period. The declining offload factor in developing markets is due to a decreasing number of mobile data users with Wi-Fi at home. Since dual-mode devices are primarily smartphones, the overall offload amount in the current year is much smaller than shown above, since non-smartphones still account for approximately half of handset traffic.

Dual-Mode and Femtocell Traffic Offload as a Percentage of Smartphone Traffic

Comments appreciated on this topic below.

List of Femtocell Manufacturers

The combined list of femtocell manufactures have raised approximately $270M from various VCs and strategic investors over the last 2 years.  This list was compiled using Crunch Base numbers as well as news articles.  My biggest concern for these companies is the lack of consumer awareness that the companies and their products have in the marketplace.  How many consumers have heard of any of these companies below discussed in the media or know what a femtocell is?  The answer is virtually zero.

• Airvana: $83 million (AIRV) IPO and now going private for $530M purchased by 72 Mobile Holdings, S.A.C. Capital and Blackstone Group
• Vanu: $32 million Norwest, Charles River, Tata
• PicoChip: $31 million AT&T, Intel, Highland, Atlas, Samsung
• RadioFrame: $28 million Eastven, Vantage Point, Ignition, Samsung 
• Tatara: $26 million Highland, North Bridge
• Ubiquisys: $25 million from Accel, Atlas and Google & T-Ventures 
• Kineto: $15.5 million round from Venrock, SutterHill, Oak, Motorola & NEC
• Percello: $12 million Granite, T-Venture, Vertex
• AirWalk: $10 million TL Ventures, Seven Rosen, Nedelco
• ip.access: $10 million Scottish Equity, ADC, Cisco, Qualcomm

For the last two years I have noticed a pattern of frustration from executives at these companies who vent their frustration having to sell their femtocells through the carrier channels.  It troubles me that all of these companies continue rely on incompetent marketers (the carriers) to sell their products and educate consumers that they exist.  Cannibalization of your customers marketing just might be the only way to get ahead in business.   I strongly suggesting that each of these companies will need to "steal a page from the Google Nexus One Phone" and start doing some demand side research of who needs the product and where.  Its obvious that the carriers have very little financial incentive to push femtocells to their customers for fear of cannibalizing their existing businesses.  Yes I am suggesting that femtocell marketing executives start thinking like Cannibal Lecter in order to make their companies successful. Sometimes cannibalization of your own customers is the only way to succeed and rise about the crowd.

Consumer Reports Has No Credibility in Mobile

Do 50,000 people (teenagers) filling out surveys for money justify AT&T deserving the worst customer service rating from Consumer Reports?  I am not trying to defend AT&T but I would argue that the Consumer Reports survey methodology is flawed.  Service and coverage is a local issue and no one should trust surveys that represent .02% of the entire U.S. wireless market.  They need to provide more transparency about who is filling out the survey based on this quote: "AT&T ranked the lowest in overall consumer satisfaction in 19 of the 26 surveyed cities (which), ranging from New York and San Francisco to (as FierceWireless points out) Atlanta, Cleveland, and Houston. Verizon, meanwhile, ranked first in all 26 cities in the Consumer Reports survey. Ouch."

Deadcellzones.com has far more visitors and contributors that contribute to local and objective views about service.   Consumer Reports is drinking the same Kool-Aid all of the carriers want you to drink and trust surveys and coverage maps.  Wireless is a local issue and you shouldn't care about customer service if your phone works, the price is competitive and you have coverage in your home, office, and places you frequently visit.

Femtocell Companies Funded In 2008

The femtocell market has seen a few large investments in recent months, showing that the industry has strong market potential and there are lots of home and commercial dead zones to fix. Prominent players (e.g. Airvana, Ticker: AIRV IPO in July of 2007 for $60M, picoChip $27M, Ubiquisys ($25M) were funded in 2007, the emerging industry appears to be reasonably well capitalized for the turbulent times ahead and growth. Investors are hoping for more commercial deployments of femtocells during the next 12 months, setting the stage for mass market deployments during 2010. Here are a few companies that were successful at raising money in 2008.

October 2008 - Kineto Wireless $15.5M, which includes substantial amounts from NEC and Motorola.

September 2008 - Percello raised $12M to fund development of their femtocell chipset, bringing to $18M the total investment raised.

August 2008 - RadioFrame raised $26M to expand their picocell and femtocell range, bringing investment up to $100M since 2001.

May 2008 - Qualcomm and other venture capitalists invested an undisclosed amount in ip.access

January 2008 - Airwalk received $10M

Updated list from 3G in Home Blog

• Airvana: IPO
• AirWalk: $10 m
• ip.access: strategic investment from ADC, Cisco, Qualcomm
• Kineto: $15.5 million round including Motorola & strategic investment from NEC
• Percello: $12 million
• picoChip: strategic investment from Samsung
• RadioFrame: $28 million
• Tatara: $6.5 million
• Vanu: $32 million
• Ubiquisys: $25 million round including VC money and Google as a strategic investor; further strategic investment from T-Ventures.

DeadCellZones.com sits in a unique position based on our brand recognition and utility to educate the market about femtocell technology as control of in-building-coverage is suddenly in the hands of consumers and not carriers any longer. The masses are still not very familiar with the technology but its starting to trickle down to early adopters and we hope to provide a source of information for these companies where the coverage pain exists.