Writing

Cue the violins for American Telephone & Telegraph

The New York Times today looks upon the plight of poor AT&T, saddled with millions of new customers paying thousands of dollars a year. Jenna Wortham writes:

Slim and sleek as it is, the iPhone is really the Hummer of cellphones. It’s a data guzzler. Owners use them like minicomputers, which they are, and use them a lot. Not only do iPhone owners download applications, stream music and videos and browse the Web at higher rates than the average smartphone user, but the average iPhone owner can also use 10 times the network capacity used by the average smartphone user.

If that 10x number didn’t come from AT&T, where did it come from? Seems like they might be starting a “we didn’t want the iPhone anyway” campaign so that investors treat them more nicely when they (are rumored to) lose their carrier exclusivity next year.

The result is dropped calls, spotty service, delayed text and voice messages and glacial download speeds as AT&T’s cellular network strains to meet the demand. Another result is outraged customers.

So even with AT&T’s outrageous prices, they can’t make this work? This week I’m canceling my AT&T service because it would cost $150 a month to get what T-Mobile charges me $80 for. (Two lines with shared minutes, texting on both lines, unlimited data on one, and even tethering. I also love T-Mobile’s customer service, staffed by friendly humans who don’t just read from scripts.)

With nine million users paying in excess of $100 a month apiece, they’re grossing a billion dollars a month, and they’re complaining about having to upgrade their network? They could probably fund rebuilding their entire network from scratch with the $15/month they charge to send more than 200 text messages. (Text messages are pure profit, because they’re sent using extra space in packets sent between the phone and the carrier.)

All of the cited problems, of course, would be lessened without carrier exclusivity. Don’t want 9 million iPhone customers clogging the network? Then don’t sign a deal requiring that you’re the only network they have access to. Hilarious.

But! The real reason I’m posting is because of the photos that accompany the article, including a shot of the AT&T command center and its big board:

who turned the lights off?

A few thoughts:

  1. If they’re gonna make it look like an orchestra pit, then I hope the head of IT is wearing tails.
  2. Do they get night & weekend minutes because the lights are out? Wouldn’t the staff be a little happier if the lights were turned on?
  3. And most important, I wonder what kind of coverage they get in there. It looks like the kind of underground bunker where you can’t get any signal. And if I’m not mistaken, those look like land lines on the desks.
Thursday, September 3, 2009 | bigboard, mobile  
Book

Visualizing Data Book CoverVisualizing Data is my 2007 book about computational information design. It covers the path from raw data to how we understand it, detailing how to begin with a set of numbers and produce images or software that lets you view and interact with information. When first published, it was the only book(s) for people who wanted to learn how to actually build a data visualization in code.

The text was published by O’Reilly in December 2007 and can be found at Amazon and elsewhere. Amazon also has an edition for the Kindle, for people who aren’t into the dead tree thing. (Proceeds from Amazon links found on this page are used to pay my web hosting bill.)

Examples for the book can be found here.

The book covers ideas found in my Ph.D. dissertation, which is the basis for Chapter 1. The next chapter is an extremely brief introduction to Processing, which is used for the examples. Next is (chapter 3) is a simple mapping project to place data points on a map of the United States. Of course, the idea is not that lots of people want to visualize data for each of 50 states. Instead, it’s a jumping off point for learning how to lay out data spatially.

The chapters that follow cover six more projects, such as salary vs. performance (Chapter 5), zipdecode (Chapter 6), followed by more advanced topics dealing with trees, treemaps, hierarchies, and recursion (Chapter 7), plus graphs and networks (Chapter 8).

This site is used for follow-up code and writing about related topics.