AT&T's network is worst in high density urban markets, and Chicago in particular isn't plagued by signal coverage problems, but rather backhaul network infrastructure bottlenecks. In my neighborhood 4-5 AT&T trucks are feverishly working to upgrade the local loop infrastructure so that they can install fiber backhauled DSLAM equipment at intermediate points between the CO and subscribers' NIDs. That work allows them to offer the ~25Mbps DSL version of U-Verse and compete with Comcast.

AT&T doesn't really feel like they have to compete in Cingular's market, so they aren't going to upgrade the iPhone network. They think they might be able to get some subscribers to pay for picocells to shore up holes in the GSM network.

What we need is a good app to run on jailbroken phones that logs 3G and GSM problems so that we can collect evidence and sue AT&T as a class action to waive early termination and force them to unlock phones (and allow other carriers to support Visual Voicemail). Only then will AT&T feel pressure to compete with T-Mobile.

You sir, are an idiot.

If you knew anything about Verizon's actual service and AT&T's actual service you wouldn't be opening your mouth. The reason AT&T is suing Verizon is because the average user does not understand the difference between the coverages. Verizon's 3G coverage includes the voice side as well, 3G Voice and 3G Data. AT&T's 3G is strictly for Data, The voice section is completely covered on a large scale just like Verizon's. As well as that, Verizon's meaningless and outdated 3G is terrible anyways. AT&T's 3G blows them away without picking up a finger. Hand's down. Please know what your talking about before you open your mouth. BTW, I am an AT&T Employee.

The legal dept gets $xxx a year to spend on legal defenses, legal offenses, etc.

The engineering dept gets $xxx to spend on network upgrades, maintenance, etc.

The marketing dept gets $xxx to spend on various marketing and advertising campaigns, etc.

The departments don't share their budgets with other departments.

The engineering dept will continue to follow their network upgrade plans no matter what the other departments are doing. If the legal department had it in their budget to file a suit against VZW, it won't affect the network upgrade plans of the engineering department.

AT&T filing a suit will not slow down the work they're doing on their network just like NOT filing a suit against VZW will not speed up the network upgrades. If the legal dept doesn't file a suit, that money stays in their dept.

So knock it off with those ignorant comments and let AT&T try to protect their brand name.

I've had every carrier in the US except alltel. I landed on and stuck with AT&T after roaming around the provider circuit because I like their selection of equipment, I've never had a problem with their service, and I used to work for the company six years ago. I've left the iPhone a number of times for other devices and just keep coming back because I enjoy it that much, and AT&T is the provider for me. My coverage is good, my entire national network of friends is on it so my calls are free, and I have no reason to leave. If you want to go just leave and stop complaining. Free up the network resources for the rest of us.

Sorry to hear that you, and the rat in your pocket, have weak AT&T service.

ATnT is the biggest joke of them all. I mean come on, you didn't get MMS intil recently.

... folks viewing this commercial may only see one thing: Verizon has coverage, AT&T doesn’t. That would be misleading.

Well, that's AT&T's whole "misleading" point, not the 3G comparison.

I made this point last week, that average consumers have already been impressed with their friends, family, and co-workers using their iPhones without problems. So, these commercials, as well-done as they are, are two and a half years too late, in my opinion.

As far as what may be misleading, some of the people I talk to, even customers of Verizon and AT&T, don't even know what 3G is or what network provides the service on their own phones. I'm not joking. The average consumer really doesn't look that far into it. They just EXPECT their phone to do as advertised. Some of those folks viewing this commercial may only see one thing: Verizon has coverage, AT&T doesn't. That would be misleading.

Yes the ads are very light hearted, funny, and very effective. Since VZW doesnt seem mean i dount there will be any backlash. Even though they'll probably lose AT&T has to sue since they cannot really counterattack.

@Rudy

VZW picks on AT&T because they pose the biggest threat to them. VZW is starting the inevitable war for subscribers.

picking sides in this so called war is ridiculous, and so is being so wrapped up in the phone you bought that you feel sick when it is criticized on the teevee.

these ads are the best possible thing for iphone owners, since they are extremely well made and will force AT&T to improve coverage.

the "iDon't" ads were dumb and mean spirited and ineffective, but these map ads are legitimately clever, funny and effective. they will land AT&T with a negative public opinion, and they will force it to beef up coverage instead of just sitting on their big pile of iphone money.

kudos to verizon.

And there's probably not much AT&T could do to counter-program them directly. (Just keep running iPhone ads and hope people think of the iPhone and not Verizon's maps...)

Flattering??? I'm with AT&T I don't think it's flattering. They pick on AT&T because they have the iPhone. They want to compeat with the top selling phone so why not?? iPhone is a great phone but the network is sucks. Competition I'd good for business. AT&T just wants to quiet verizon from speckeling their phone service but it's the truth. AT&T had a choice which is cheaper suing or upgrading the network? Guess what chose? F@#k AT&T more power to you verizon.

AT&T = Fail.

Please insert .25 cents and try again.

"In other words, AT&T is saying Verizon’s 3G coverage of mountains and lakes is impressive for the fish and eagles, but they think they have the humans and their “cities” covered just fine, thanks."

I think it's funny how AT&T only cares about those who live in densely populated areas. I for one was close to jumping ship to the iPhone a while ago, only to find out that where I live (population 5,000), the AT&T 3g is non existent. Meanwhile I have a full 5 bars of EVDO 3g sitting in my house with Verizon.

Easy choice.

hate Verizon ads, they are boring, they make me feel sick. At the same time I'm perfectly fine with Apple "Hello, I'm a Mac" ads, they are funny and full of good points. It's a war out there, and you have to choose sides.

AT&T has the interstates pretty well covered by EDGE. That I have seen. But rural? It's not hyperbole in Nebraska. 20 miles out of Lincoln. All AT&T coverage is gone. 20 miles of Interstate 80 is the same story. Well known here that if you need rural coverage you go with Verizon.

go look up verizon 3g or (cdma rev. a) coverage there whole network is 3g by cmda standards.

go look up att its piss poor to boot and even verizon got the map from att.

I live in one of those tiny blue 3G islands in the middle of the country. If I get 20 miles outside of that island, i don’t even have EDGE coverage.

Odd. I drove all over the country for the last two summers and there were only a few areas that I found that didn't have Edge, and those had GPRS.

There was exactly two deep canyons in Texas that had no cell courage at all. ]

The absolute maximum range for standard GSM is 35 km. This is dictated by the Time slots allocated for each phone. You can actually extend this out to 70KM but at the expense of servicing half as many concurrent calls. They do that in Australia in some sparse places.

So driving 20 miles away and getting no Edge seems like a bit of hyperbole to me.

Warning: I'm an armchair lawyer, too

That said, I have read the complaint, but as a layman I think it is highly unlikely that AT&T will win this case. The ads are bareknuckle-bruising, to be sure, but, since Verizon mentions "3G" at every opportunity, they do not cross the line any more than does the "I'm a Mac" campaign. Of course, that is just my opinion, and the judge's opinion is the only one that matters.

For the real lawyers out there -- in the event an injunction is granted, would it have to contain language identifying what crosses the line/what Verizon could modify to get them back on the air?

I love my phone and have been an AT&T customer for ten years. Before the iPhone, my old phones had a strong enough antenna to work fine. iPhone antenna? Sucks. Hard. When Verizon gets the iPhone, you can bet on seeing a large shift of AT&T customers in the Midwest.

correct, ATT is claiming a Lanham Act violation and certain Georgia laws for false advertising and deceptive trade practices. Not EVERY case requires a factually incorrect issue, there are these little things could suits in equity which injunctions fall in to.

People would rather be armchair lawyers without a stitch of legal education then actually take time to at least read the linked complaint in its entirety.

Nice cut and paste job.

Wouldn't it have been proper to post the attribution?

http://tinyurl.com/yk37zu5 WiFi Net News...

That said, in the absence of any outright lie, the "general impression" standard is obviously subjective, and very hard to prove even to a sympathetic court. (If it were, Microsoft would have sued Apple many times over, for John Hodgeman's character implying all Windows PCs were virus written dungheaps, when only some of them are ).

I can see how its misleading to the average person. White spaces gives an impression of "nothingness" ie. nothing is there, no coverage nothing. While the maps may be accurate, thats NOT what ATT is even claiming. Read up on the complaint itself, theyre claiming its misleading to the average person. And i can certainly see their point how it would be.

Further , the map shows sheer land area and NOT how many people it covers. ATT claims their 3G covers 75% of the population which the map certainly doesnt depict. A LOT of that white space is mountains, farmland, and open land- not populated. Why would anyone care if they have 3G in farmland nothingness of the US? What should REALLY matter is the % of the population covered.

Sure, VZW covers a little more % of the population with 3G, but the map certainly doesnt give that impression what so ever.

So yes, I can see the point how its a misleading thing to show

Hells yeah I feel the same about apple attacks on windows. Apple has something to fear from windows. They have been around for a long time and as far as I'm concerned windows is the main competitor of apple. Not just talking about mobile platforms. Windows is the only compitition so apple compairing themselves to windows is flattering for windows.

No offense, but your lawyer friend practice in an unrelated field of law. For AT&T to have a case, there must be something factually incorrect about the ads, and Verizon has to have known it was incorrect. AT&T may have had a case for injunctive relief for the "out of touch" statement in the very first ad, but Verizon removed it after the initial complaint, and it has not appeared in any other ad.

All maps have clearly been labelled '3G Coverage Area, ' and all subsequent statements have explicitly referred to 3G areas. AT&T may prefer that Verizon label the rest of the country in lighter blue to show that AT&T has an edge network presence, but Verizon is under no obligation to show AT&T in a good light, just to state no falseshoods intentionally. The maps, as depicted in these ads, are factually correct. AT&T may not like the conclusions they invite customers to draw, but tough noogies. That is advertising. No lie, no case.

Verizon's advertisement doesn't necessarily have to be untrue to be deemed misleading. If a judge believes that "average consumers" may be mislead, deceived, or persuaded into purchasing something that they might otherwise avoid, because of claims which are unfamiliar to them, he/she could side with the AT&T.

Fundamentally, though, we're seeing a battle between the last advantages of the Qualcomm EVDO standard compared to the GSM evolved HSPA family of standards. When Verizon installed 3G, the company did it in a big way, upgrading a large majority of its 2G 1xRTT nodes to EVDO Rev. 0, and later pushing those to Rev. A for the current footprint and speed. Sprint did likewise.

Verizon had to, because AT&T and T-Mobile had intermediate 2.5G and 3G steps that would have left Sprint and Verizon at a competitive disadvantage. AT&T and T-Mobile pushed out EDGE, which is several times faster than 1xRTT (which runs at fast dial-up modem speeds), and did so relatively inexpensively. AT&T Wireless and Cingular, at the time separate entities, had distinct plans to test and deploy UMTS, the 384 Kbps low-end 3G standard on the road to HSPA. (GSM 3G HSPA standards are broken down into downlink and uplink and there are flavors and steps there, but it's nice to just say HSPA to encompass the realm.)

For AT&T, EDGE was good enough outside metro areas, because it competed effectively with 1xRTT before Verizon and Sprint had a full EVDO footprint (even with Rev. 0). The company then essentially stalled because of first the Cingular/AT&T Wireless merger, and then the 60-40 ownership split between what was then SBC and BellSouth. The two companies didn't see eye-to-eye on spending on 3G. AT&T's 3G plans really only took off after the BellSouth merger, which also gave it 100-percent control of the cellular division. Any rational wireless firm would have spent billions during the good times to get a competitive 3G footprint with the CDMA competitors.

If Verizon and Sprint had limited 3G upgrades just to major metropolitan areas, they would have been way behind the ball--and AT&T would be running ads now laughing at the companies' sub-EDGE speeds in the country, and slower than HSPA rates in the city. (T-Mobile dropped out of this speed war for a few years while it acquired 3G spectrum and deployed its HSPA offering. The firm intends to have the fastest 3G network while 4G networks are being built with a test of 21 Mbps HSPA already underway.)

Verizon has to be aggressive right now, because it's switching to LTE for its 4G network, a GSM-evolved standard. It will be years before it has a national footprint for 4G using LTE (over 700 MHz spectrum). During that time AT&T will have bumped its 3G network nationally to 7.2 Mbps HSPA, and potentially even going to 14.4 Mbps HSPA (that requires more hardware upgrades, so hard to tell), and also pushing out LTE over 700 MHz.

In a couple years, AT&T will have the bragging rights on speeds, will start having a better 3G and 4G map to compare with Verizon, and Verizon will seem like the sucker. At least briefly.

Read this

This ad, in many ways, is misleading.

While tech geeks can understand what the ad is talking about, many average consumer may end up thinking that at&t has poorer 3G coverage, while Verizon has 3G coverage anywhere in America.

This is what at&t is concerned about, Verizon misleading that at&t has poorer coverage, when in fact, at&t and Verizon has the same amount of 3G coverage. This makes perfect sense for a lawsuit.

I talked about this with my friend, who happens to be a lawyer, and this lawsuit makes perfect sense.

http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2009/11/12/technology/circuitsemail/index.html?8cir&emc=cir

The fact that verizon shows so much concern for their compitition that they’ll air so many adds against them it almost flattering.

Is that also what you feel about the Apple attack ads on Windows, or is there a double standard going on here?

AT&T: sack up, accept that you've got nothing on VZ as far as sole 3G capability goes, and upgrade your network. People don't buy smartphones simply to make calls and check voicemail.

Agreed. Instead of wasting time and money suing VZW, ATT should just beef up their network and then let the coverage do the talking.

Even if you have the "people" covered...obviously it's very shitty where they are anyways. So come on AT&T. Stop the childish antics and get to work.