will iPhone 5 bring down Sprint and T-Mobile networks?

With the iPhone 4 having found its way to two of the nation’s four major cell carriers, logic dictates that it’ll find its way to the other two eventually, with the potential for an iPhone on Sprint and/or T-Mobile to be a reality as soon as the iPhone 5. This begs the question, hypothetical for now, of whether the arrival of the iPhone on the third and fourth largest U.S. cellular networks would drag down those networks. Or as one Beatweek reader put it, sarcastically: “Oh great – T-Mobile’s Blackberry users are already having trouble sending and receiving data in some cities. Now we’re going to have to compete with the ultimate bandwidth hog that’s responsible for screwing up the AT&T network (iPhone).”

So is there any truth to this? Could the arrival of the iPhone 5 in quantity on T-Mobile or Sprint cause not just those users, but all of that carrier’s users, to suffer? Generally speaking, the more phones trying to make calls on the same network at a time, the more potential for call quality or reliability to degrade – but only once a given tower or backbone has reached its limit. What would be needed for noticeable negative results would be a lot of additional phones in the mix and calls being made. But then again, a Sprint iPhone 5 or a T-Mobile iPhone 5 would be quite popular beasts. The same theory applies to data usage: put enough users on the same network and have them all check their email at the same time, and it’ll eventually hit a point where everyone sees slower data speeds.

What’s important to keep in mind here, is that the fear in the minds of users of other carriers (such as the reader quoted above) is largely based on the major decline in the quality of the AT&T network once the iPhone got popular. One little problem, however: that never actually happened. In one of the more bizarre common misperceptions of the digital era, users of Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile are largely under the impression that iPhone users have been struggling with the AT&T network. Ask the typical iPhone user about this however, what has been done in study after survey after study, and one quickly learns that such problems don’t actually exist, or only exist in some small fraction of the proportion to which they’ve been blown up to. For instance, while customers of the other three carriers in San Francisco are largely convinced that an AT&T iPhone is all but unusable in their city, iPhone users in San Francisco can only shake their heads in disbelief when they hear such nonsense being spouted by people who’ve never even used an iPhone, as iPhone users in San Francisco simply do not have the problems they’re routinely branded as supposedly having. This surreal phenomenon may be traceable to the fact that when the iPhone launched on a single U.S. carrier back in 2007, users of the other three carriers (most of whom were contract-bound at the time and couldn’t move to AT&T even if they wanted to) needed to come up with some kind of rationalization as to why the iPhone wasn’t worth it anyway. Assuming that AT&T was unusably bad, and then spending years repeating it to each other until it became a known (false) fact, allowed them to explain away why they remained on a competing carrier even though they wanted an iPhone – and somewhere along the way they came to believe the nonsense they’d made up about AT&T being unusable. Nevermind that none of their iPhone-using friends have any actual problems with AT&T; it’s enough that they knew “someone who had a RAZR once on AT&T” which allows them to claim to know what the AT&T iPhone experience in 2011 is all about.

The upshot of all of the above is that despite a metric ton of misinformation on the matter, the iPhone never killed the AT&T network, as iPhone users simply are not having the problems which customers of competing carriers imagine them to be having. As such, the recent arrival of the iPhone in Verizon isn’t going to bring any pain to existing customers, nor will the eventual arrival of the iPhone 5 (if it happens) on Sprint or T-Mobile. Every network has its limits. But if tens of millions of iPhone users on AT&T didn’t cause any real problems for its customers, then users of other carriers have nothing to worry about. Here’s more on the iPad 2.