Consumers' love of all things wireless is overburdening the networks of some phone companies, but Canadian carriers may have greater resilience than some of their counterparts in the United States.
AT&T Inc. ATT-N, the second-largest player in the United States, has been hit with a barrage of customer complaints about its congested wireless network in urban centres. The chief culprit is the iPhone, from Apple Inc., which in addition to driving up AT&T's fortunes has bogged down its network with an unprecedented flow of data traffic.
AT&T, which has exclusive rights to sell the popular iPhone in the United States, says about two-thirds of the $18-billion (U.S.) it has committed to spend on capital this year is going to upgrade wireless and land line broadband networks to provide more speed, coverage and capacity. But the carrier has also admitted that it has had a difficult time predicting how customers will use the new technology in their hands, making it even harder to plan capacity on their network.
Regular cellphone customers and smart-phone owners use their devices very differently, said Kaan Yigit, president of Solutions Research Group Consultants Inc. in Toronto.
"Smart-phone users show slightly obsessive learned behaviour," he says. "The more they learn what they can do with the technology, the more they want to do it."
That means the pressure on phone company networks comes not just from robust sales of new smart-phone devices, but also from consumers changing patterns.
U.S. carriers are further ahead than Canadian operators in terms of adding smart-phone customers, and some of them are clearly at the crossroads, Mr. Yigit said.
By the numbers
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Smart-phone growth in Canada is going to demand that phone companies keep pouring money into their networks. About 20 per cent of Canada's 22 million mobile-phone subscribers have already made the jump to a smart-phone device. Within the next year, 26 per cent of regular cellphone users will upgrade, adding about 4.5 million more smart phones to the country's wireless networks, he said.
Rogers Communications Inc. RCI.B-T, the lone carrier selling the iPhone in Canada, has avoided the customer backlash that AT&T is facing.
Robert Berner, executive vice-president and chief technology officer for Rogers Communications Group, says the company has used a long history of customer usage patterns in both land line and wireless to predict how smart phones will tax the network.
"We've been spot-on in forecasting iPhone traffic to date. We have been available to provide sufficient capacity in all our network nodes," he said. "There are no surprises."
In fact, the other major players in Canada's wireless industry, Bell Canada and Telus Corp. T-T, have also been ahead of the curve for smart-phone usage, investing in their networks so that they don't fall behind, Mr. Berner said.
The demand is still unpredictable, but watching how customers use high-speed Internet connections in their homes gives Rogers a good window on where mobile data usage is going, he said.
