iPhone
AT&T says it’s ready for SXSW this year
By Jim DalrympleMarch 1, 2010, 6:35 am PT
AT&T says attendees of this year’s SXSW will have a much better experience using its wireless network than they did last year.
During the popular event in 2009, users literally brought AT&T’s 3G network down, making it impossible to use. AT&T said at the time that the demand for data was unprecedented, but that did little to help users stay connected to the network.
This year, Chris Penrose, vice president and general manager of AT&T South Texas, says the company has done a lot of work to make sure it doesn’t happen again, according to the Statesman.com. Antennas have been installed inside the Austin Convention Center and they have added some portable transmission sites to help with the expected heavy traffic.
Penrose said AT&T’s data traffic grew 5,000 percent of the past three years. Coincidentally, the same time the iPhone became a popular device.
Earlier this year, AT&T’s network failed users of the NAMM trade show as 80,000 attendees descended on Anaheim, Calif. Many users couldn’t use data connections or make phone calls during the show.
Please take a minute to Tweet, Like, or Share this post with your friends.
TweetShare
Email This Post
⋅ 
Print This Post
⋅ Post a comment
Discussion
6 comments so far
6 Responses to “AT&T says it’s ready for SXSW this year”
Leave a Reply
AT&T says it’s ready for SXSW this year
By Jim DalrympleMarch 1, 2010, 6:35 am PT
AT&T says attendees of this year’s SXSW will have a much better experience using its wireless network than they did last year.
During the popular event in 2009, users literally brought AT&T’s 3G network down, making it impossible to use. AT&T said at the time that the demand for data was unprecedented, but that did little to help users stay connected to the network.
This year, Chris Penrose, vice president and general manager of AT&T South Texas, says the company has done a lot of work to make sure it doesn’t happen again, according to the Statesman.com. Antennas have been installed inside the Austin Convention Center and they have added some portable transmission sites to help with the expected heavy traffic.
Penrose said AT&T’s data traffic grew 5,000 percent of the past three years. Coincidentally, the same time the iPhone became a popular device.
Earlier this year, AT&T’s network failed users of the NAMM trade show as 80,000 attendees descended on Anaheim, Calif. Many users couldn’t use data connections or make phone calls during the show.
Please take a minute to Tweet, Like, or Share this post with your friends.
TweetShare
Email This Post
⋅ Print This Post
⋅ Post a comment
Discussion 6 comments so far
6 Responses to “AT&T says it’s ready for SXSW this year”
Leave a Reply
It might be nice if somewhere in the article, SXSW or NAMM were actually defined, for those of us who don't know.
There's this k-rad tool called "Google" that you can punch those letters in. It will define them for you.
There's this k-rad profession called "journalism", in which professional writers are trained to write clearly and define their terms and background information at some minimum level, so as not to shut out any part of their readership. You might want to keep this in mind the next time you read an article about something you know nothing about.
My apologies, I should have said what they stand for. SXSW = South by Southwest and NAMM is the annual music show in Anaheim.
Every time there's a hockey game in downtown San Jose, my phone stops working at home. AT&T doesn't seem to think that areas capable of holding 15k-20k people could cause problems to already over-loaded networks. For the life of me, I'll never understand why they don't feel the need to beef up capacity around coliseums and convention centers…
[...] up. The problem is that they didn’t really fixed the underlying problem. AT&T put in mobile cell towers to handle the extra bandwidth consumed at the show, but the network is still broken. That’s what needs to be [...]