Si, se puede

My second big adventure of 2009 kicks off in a little more than an hour. My bag is packed, my time sheet is submitted, and now I'm roaming the Internet before getting on a plane to Guatemala. My only regret before I ship out? Missing this:

Subject: Operation Chokehold
On Friday, December 18, at noon Pacific time, we will attempt to overwhelm the AT&T data network and bring it to its knees. The goal is to have every iPhone user (or as many as we can) turn on a data intensive app and run that app for one solid hour. Send the message to AT&T that we are sick of their substandard network and sick of their abusive comments. THe idea is we’ll create a digital flash mob. We’re calling it in Operation Chokehold. Join us and speak truth to power!

For the 15% of people I know without iPhones, the experience is like this. You buy a phone that costs more than you know you should spend on a phone, and you pay more to turn it on and operate it than you know that you should, but it's an awesome toy and does cool things. So you suck it up. But then the "unlimited" data plan that you signed up for (literally, like in a contract) prohibits you from operating data-intensive applications. You can only run Skype over wifi. The coverage is conspicuously worse than Verizon. You can't use it like a modem. Calls drop in downtown San Francisco. That sort of thing.

Then fluff articles like this come out in the Wall Street Journal - AT&T to New York and San Francisco: We’re Working on It. But buried in the fourth paragraph are jewels like this:

With about 3% of smart-phone customers driving 40% of data traffic, AT&T is considering incentives to keep those subscribers from hampering the experience for everyone else, he said.

Well, duh. That's how it was marketed. See the experience description above. Why sell something you can't deliver? But then you come across brilliant bloggers like Fake Steve Jobs who have the time to pour through AT&T's public records and find actual numbers.

From fakesteve.net:

Last quarter you spent $4 billion on capex, which was $1.6 billion less than you were spending two years ago, at the end of 2007. Meanwhile your data revenues in the most recent quarter were $3.6 billion, up from $2.0 billion at the end of 2007. In other words, you took in $1.6 billion more on data plans.

The entire post is a fantastic editorial on AT&T's lethargic, "you can't see me because my head is buried in my money pile" capital investment strategy.

Please, someone stream this over AT&T's network at noon PST for me.