I rarely feel pity for AT&T Wireless as I sit looking at my iPhone 3G displaying a "No Service" status because I'm in an AT&T dead zone. However, after looking at the information reported by TechCrunch in...

How The iPhone Is Blowing Everyone Else Away (In Charts)

...I can appreciate how AT&T network engineers might have been caught off guard by the immense increase in data traffic after the first non-3G iPhone was introduced in mid-2007 and then accelerated even more after the iPhone 3G became available in the summer of 2008. It looks like the EDGE-only 1st generation iPhone caused wireless data traffic to triple. Then, the iPhone 3G and the introduction of iPhone apps created an even larger increase in data usage. The result is a 4,932% increase in data traffic over a 3 year period that includes 2 years of iPhone driven growth.

Could anyone have predicted that kind of growth in wireless data use? Even I have to admit that this would have sounded far fetched back in 2005 or 2006. But, here we are today. And, though I don't actually pity AT&T Wireless, I do have some sympathy for their network engineers.