Traditionally the way that carriers deal with bandwidth congestion is to wait until people start screaming (and networks start breaking) before they invest in i

Traditionally the way that carriers deal with bandwidth congestion is to wait until people start screaming (and networks start breaking) before they invest in innovation. There are a bunch of technologies that could ease congestion and deliver significantly better wireless performance but they would require an investment that doesn't make sense for carriers (it's not like carriers can extract more money from you if the network is better...). That is to say, subscriber ARPU does not increase with network investment, so why invest in the network until it becomes a drag on subscriber growth? Source: I was a manager at ATT when the network in San Francisco basically died with the introduction of the iPhone 3G. It stayed that way until ATT added new towers and upgraded the software on the towers for better spectrum utilization.