DanielDecker said:
Didn't notice you were the author. Way to treat a customer! I have been coming to this site likely longer than you have been employed at Macworld.
I am heartbroken and disappointed in your lack of professionalism. I consider the staff of Macworld to be brothers in arms, and you attack me. Real. Nice.
I made no remarks about the content of the article. It presented facts, and discussion ensued. I choose to participate in the discussion and you, the author lambaste me.
I am shedding real tears of sorrow. Crocodile tears.
Dude, if you're going to storm into a forum, make absurd statements with a defensive swagger, and then rage against people stating things contrary to you, you'll get some sarcasm. That's the law. I don't pretend to understand the law, I just enforce it.
I'm not a Macworld employee.
The reason I and others called you a troll is that you're asserting as truth something that's just plain contrary to the facts and experience of most of the rest of us. The iPhone was the first smartphone in the U.S. that treated upstream as equally important as downstream. You can transfer in both directions over Wi-Fi and cell data. Before this, smartphones in the U.S. (less so elsewhere) were about us being consumers, not producers of creative content. Thus, we were, as you note, only making HTTP requests and sending email.
The iPhone's philosophy has now infected all the other smartphone makers that sell in the U.S. market, and there are an increasing number of basic features (like video) that requires higher uploads speeds to take full advantage. While 384 Kbps didn't seem slow to you when uploading a video, the more you use and rely on the feature, the more the constraint on the 3G uploads will probably become more frustrating. If I'm out with my phone for a day and record 1 GB of video, uploading it at 1 Mbps is going to seem far better than 384 Kbps. The flip side is that if I'm uploading that much, i should probably have my phone plugged into power, and I am probably leaving my phone sitting somewhere to carry out the task.
As for functions that aren't build into the basic featureset but added through applications, you can just scan through and see how many programs are more useful with faster, symmetric broadband. If you don't plan to use any of those, then having faster upload speeds doesn't buy you anything. However, based on the kinds of applications that are sold, i expect many users would benefit from faster uploads speeds.
Since we can use Wi-Fi at high upload speeds, you can contrast the same experience over Wi-Fi as over 3G.
Finally, as to you point that a lot of people have 384 Kbps upstream over broadband, that's incorrect. The tens of millions of cable customers and a large portion of DSL customers and all fiber-backed customers all have 768 Kbps and much higher upload rates. I have 2 to 5 Mbps upstream at home via Comcast through their cheapest service, as do some many millions of their customers.



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