This post was published 2 years 7 months 14 days ago which may make its actuality or expire date not be valid anymore. This site is not responsible for any misunderstanding.

Even as the Net Neutrality debate rages in Congress and the FCC, it seems that iPhone user’s complaints about AT&T’s network may be coming home to roost. What’s more, AT&T is taking a page from their partner Apple’s book and declaring all the problems not the fault of the network or even the iPhone, but the fault of the USERS. This reminds me of Apple saying all exploding iPods are due to mistreatment by users. What, bad taste in music makes the things detonate?

Anyway, AT&T Wireless CEO Ralph de la Vega is at CTIA in San Diego and spoke to wireless industry insiders the other day. He had some things to say in his presentaton that iPhone users will not like.

PCWorld reports it as follows…

…But all that data usage is not evenly spread across AT&T’s wireless customer base, De la Vega says–far from it. He cited AT&T research showing that just 3 percent of AT&T’s smartphone customers [read iPhone users] use 40 percent of all smartphone data, that they consume 13 times the data of "the average smartphone customer," yet represent less than 1 percent of AT&T’s total postpaid customer base.

That makes sense…between the App Store and social networking and email and endless little doodads that hit the net to check movie times and phases of the moon and what not on iPhones, the devices tend to use a lot more data services than even your average smartphone. Adding all that push to Gmail didn’t help much and MMS too? Forget about it. Of course right now we are only taking into account data use by non-jailbroken iPhones. Jailbreak the little darlings and start tethering your laptop to them and things REALLY go through the roof.

Clearly, AT&T has to do SOMETHING…

So what does AT&T propose doing? Expanding the network, adding bandwidth, improving technology, providing incentives for off-peak data use? No, all of those things would cost money according to de la Vega as well as time, and they need cheap immediate solutions.

…Without the proper management of these networks, De la Vega said, regular data users will be “crowded out” by the small number of users [read iPhone users] who use massive amounts of data.

“We have to manage the network to make sure that the few cannot crowd out the many,” De la Vega continued. He said the words “crowded out” at least five times in that part of his keynote address.

As someone who is very familiar with the bandwidth management industry and the net neutrality argument, that definitely sounds to me like he is floating a balloon about applying solutions to the AT&T network that would allow AT&T to control the amount of bandwidth and traffic that is reserved for and used by iPhones. They could do this in many different ways, to name a few they could limit iPhone traffic to a certain percentage of their network then offer it on a first come first serve situation, impose a flat out traffic limit per day or month on each iPhone user, use a sliding fee scale that charges users who use massive traffic more or more during peak hours, or implement a classic “throttling” scenario using QoS where the more traffic you use, the less bandwidth you get meaning that as you pile on the GBs to your iPhone it gets slower and slower and a lower and lower priority on the network.

If you are a non-iPhone using AT&T customer some of that may sound quite fair and I might be inclined to agree with you…the problem comes however when you consider that iPhone users did not agree to such limits when signing their contracts, and while the fine print may allow AT&T to do what it likes with it’s network, this sort of bait and switch is almost certain to put AT&T in FCC chairman Julius Genachowski‎’s sights. It also may push Apple to take on other US service providers just to quiet the Fanboi rage.

Just like Barney Fife, it definitely looks like AT&T is preparing to take a bad situation and make it worse by ill-conceived actions.