This one came as a result of a conversation with an old friend on Facebook, in which he notes that he's had no AT&T Wireless service all day on Manhattan's Upper East Side. As he notes:
AT&T Cell Service non-functional between 12 and 8PM at my building today due to a tower that has been degraded since December 30th. 30% of the AT&T 3G towers on the UES are also degraded. The bad AT&T service in NYC has nothing to do with iPhones overloading the network---it has to do with horrific maintenance of their 3G network.
My own belief is that it goes far beyond horrific maintenance, to something that's been percolating for years, since Cingular (owned primarily by SBC) merged with AT&T Wireless as a part of the overall takeover of AT&T by SBC. Though the combined entity took the "AT&T" name, it was really a takeover of AT&T, which had become a horrific mess over the course of many years.
I've had a theory for some time, which says an awful lot about tech mergers and how difficult they are to manage even years after they are "complete."
The current AT&T Wireless pretty much came together from the forced union of the "old" AT&T Wireless (TDMA, non-GSM technology) and Cingular (TDMA, GSM-based technology). From the executive suite, this merger probably looked like it made a lot of sense because the companies tended to be strong in different areas.
But the problem of different technologies forced them to choose, and they chose the Cingular/GSM technology which was better and had a more robust upgrade path. Again, it made sense. "Old" AT&T customers were migrated to new phones on the Cingular/GSM side of the house and infrastructure was slowly repurposed from one to the other. The old phones and network hardware became obsolete.
What I've noticed though, is that years down the road places like NYC and SF where the "old AT&T" was strong are still having problems. Places like LA, where Cingular was a dominant carrierseem to be doing fine. While I have no detailed information to support this, it's as if the places with lots of "old AT&T" facilities are still struggling to catch up.
I suspect it's a lot more than just the technology. "Old AT&T" didn't have a reputation for a great workforce or corporate culture, which is part of the reason they were swallowed up. There are probably many more internal reasons.
But to me, the facts on the ground (or in the airwaves) suggest that years later we are still seeing the effects of a merger that turned out to be a lot more complex than the guys at the top would have had us believe. It's a cautionary tale for anybody who believes the pretty stories about how easy its going to be to merge two technology giants.
-mg
