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AT&T Nearly Doubles Wireless Data Speed

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By RICHARD MULLINS | The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 15, 2007

TAMPA - Next week, customers of AT&T wireless may notice their cell phones have a little more zip when sending messages.

The Bay area will be among the first few markets where No. 1 U.S. carrier AT&T will nearly double the speed at which its phones can upload photos, e-mail, text messages and video. The boost allows AT&T roughly to catch up with its two primary rivals, Sprint/Nextel and Verizon Wireless, which have made similar speed upgrades in the Bay area recently.

"A few years ago, the downlink speed was all that mattered," said Richard Burns, AT&T's national president of network services for wireless. "Now everyone has cameras built into their phones. Everyone on the planet is a kind of news reporter, and they're uploading video to places like YouTube and MySpace."

AT&T's upload speeds will increase 300 to 500 kilobits per second to between 500 and 800 kilobits, meaning a standard camera phone photo could take roughly 10 seconds rather than 20, depending on its resolution. There are many variables (coverage, message type, signal strength), but in theory, AT&T's system roughly would match those of Sprint Nextel Corp. and Verizon Wireless.

So-called "peak" speeds can be higher with each wireless system and are more variable. Sprint, for instance, has a system that can peak at 1.8 megabits per second, about twice the speed AT&T will offer. Verizon officials say their system can peak at 2.1 Mbps upload.

Since acquiring Cingular, AT&T is the nation's largest cell phone service provider, with 63 million wireless customers. During the past few years, AT&T has poured about $15 billion into upgrading its wireless network, Burns said, with much of it geared to helping enhance multimedia.

AT&T's own wireless flow of messages and Internet data doubled during 2006, and is up about 80 percent from January this year, Burns said.

Data increasingly are an important part of the cellular phone market. Nationwide, text messaging nearly doubled last year to 158 billion messages, according to the wireless association CTIA, twice the volume from the year before. Multimedia messages such as photos and video grew to 2.7 billion messages in 2006, more than doubling from the year before. That growth likely will continue "significantly" this year, said Joe Farren, spokesman for the CTIA.

Reporter Richard Mullins can be reached at (813) 259-7919 or rmullins@tampatrib.com.

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