A Sprint White House speaking at the 4 gigabyte World Conference in Chicago Thursday used AT&T as the bill nipper for 3 K wireless web that ca n’t keep up with the increase datum demands of smartphone user .

Sprint ’s president of bodied initiatives and CDMA , Keith Cowan , adjust up the punch course with a duet of interesting statistics about the increase demands localize on wireless networks . He first cite ComScore ’s reflection that mobile broadband use has increased 71 per centum from January 2008 to January 2009 . He summons another story saying that the phone number of people doing social networking on mobile machine will increase to 730 million in 2013 , from 54 million in 2008 .

Then : “ It ’s also clear that 3 g-force ca n’t do it , as AT&T is quickly get word , ” Cowan said during his tonic . Cowan was referring to user andmedia reportsof boring and/or undependable AT&T 3 guanine service for the iPhone .

Cowan say pitiable web performance can take the playfulness out of even the funnest gimmick . “ As our friends at AT&T are learning , it does n’t matter to consumers if they have the coolest machine if the web is so jammed up that it is virtually useless . ”

InPC World’sown13 - city 3 gee performance testing , which took place in March and April , the AT&T net scored an average dependability of just 68 percent across 13 wireless marketplace . Competing 3 gravitational constant services from Sprint and Verizon had average reliability score of around 90 percentage in the same grocery . A SeptemberNew York Timesstoryseemed to suggest that AT&T ’s web challenges are mostly confined to New York City and San Francisco , where a proportionately higher number of iPhones trust on the web .

For months , the tech media has been increasingly decisive of AT&T and Apple , over everything from connection performance issues to AT&T’sno - tethering policyto the recentnon - admittanceof the Google Voice app into the iPhone app memory board .

Two days after the New York Times article come out , AT&T release acarefully - produce television , that , while ostensibly foretell AT&T ’s newMMS service , spent most of its time acknowledging critique of the AT&T 3 chiliad connection , and explicate its drive to gripe the thing up to good support data - hungry smartphones like the iPhone . While the video never on the nose admitted any AT&T shortcoming , it peck of damage mastery .

Nobody , an AT&T spokesperson state me , could have predict the wild popularity of the iPhone , or the massive amount of money of data iPhone owners would use .

Of course Sprint ’s Cowan was only using the AT&T 3 G connection as a whipping son to make the tar for his own company’s4 G connection offer . Sprint is rolling out 4 G WiMax service over the Clearwire web , which the companies say will be available in 80 city by the end of 2010 .

But Cowan ’s stats say more about the need for 4G — now — than they do about any one company ’s offer . Sprint and Clearwire are the first to sell 4 G service in the US , and that ’s important . Hopefully AT&T is being move by Sprint ’s and Clearwire ’s amphetamine to market — and its own need to ply more bandwidth and dependability to iPhone users — to speed its own move to 4G.

But , alas , what I ’m hearing here today is that 4 G ’s “ big year ” wo n’t come until 2011 .