Technology All The Way

AT&T has released a new iPhone called 'Mark The Spot' to enable customers to report areas of bad coverage in their network. No, the application is not just another spam application that missed the watchful eyes of the iPhone application approval process. Its official and is meant to bring to notice to AT&T the network problems that users face and to pinpoint the location in which these problems can occur.

After a long a shameful battle, of advertisements between AT&T and Verizon, this seems to be a step in the right direction. At least AT&T has got itself to admitting that their network is unable to manage the immense amount of data that is being consistently being sent around.

The issue of network problems became prominent after the iPhone was launched for the carrier. The iPhone, which is capable of handling a number of multimedia tasks on the web and these applications motivated users to use their mobile phones for primarily interacting with the web for their daily activities. The brought about a deluge of network issues as AT&T was clearly unable to handle the amount of traffic these applications generated. And with the size of the iPhone app store continuing to grow every second, the chances of improvement are bleak if something is not done soon.

Though the 'Mark The Spot' application is a useful reporting application, it has to be noted that this application is only for the iPhone. Other AT&T phone have nothing to report similar issues except the age old 'customer support'. Once the user is in a bad network area, the user can simply report the spot at which the network went down, and also report the type of network failure. It seems that the application will submit the report after the customer has reached an area where the network is reachable.

This is only the beginning, at least we hope it it. What need to be seen is how AT&T is actually going to 'resolve' the problems in those areas once they know about it and will they be able to do it quickly enough to keep their customers loyal to them and win back the hearts of millions of other disappointed users?