T-Mobile Worries G3 Network Not Up To Snuff For Android
Analysis
Sep 25, 20083 mins
T-Mobile reversed a decision about the Google Android G1 phone this week. One of the under reported aspects of the Google Android G1 phone was that T-Mobile would throttle data rates for users who exceeded 1GB per month. Excuse me? Now there’s a dumb decision and it looks like T-Mobile has realized the errors of their ways, backing off that decision. So you have to ask why T-Mobile made such a decision in the first place. Two likely possibilities jump to mind: Either T-Mobile anticipated it might be overwhelmed with customers buying and using the G1 Android phones to surf the Internet, trying out and showing off their new SmartPhone doodad, or T-Mobile has genuine concerns about the capacity or resilience of their new G3 network. Which is it? Only T-Mobile’s hairdressers knows for sure.
I can certainly understand T-Mobile not wanting to experience a repeat of the Apple iTunes server provisioning problems during the iPhone G3 launch. What a mess that was. But I don’t think we’ll see long lines of consumers with G1 phone images dancing in their eyes, salivating to get their G1 phones. Not that they won’t be popular, or do well — I expect the G1 to do reasonably well in the short run and Android phones to do very well in the long run. But it would be shocking if T-Mobile saw the number of units move that Apple did with the iPhone and iPhone 3G launch.
But T-Mobile left themselves an out, just in case the G3 T-Mobile network isn’t up to snuff. Here’s a excerpt from T-Mobile’s statement about removing the data usage cap.
The specific terms for our new data plans are still being reviewed and once they are final we will be certain to share this broadly with current customers and potential new customers.
Now, there’s a backdoor option just waiting to be used if things get hairy. If T-Mobile exercises this option it will bring a lot of unwanted attention to T-Mobile’s ability to deliver through their G3 network. Look, if you want to play with the big boys and be the first Google Android phone on the block, you’ve got to be able to deliver the goods. T-Mobile doesn’t want to have to go there with customers and lets hope that doesn’t happen. It would be a disservice to Android should T-Mobile’s network bring a dark cloud to customers’ experience using Android phones
Looks to me like T-Mobile still has concerns about high data usage on their network.
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