I think there’s less of a problem than people think, and to be fair, this is a concern about AT&T, not Apple, and is more of a non-issue now that Verizon is coming into the picture.

Sure, if you live in New York City, you’re going to get bad reception. That’s been a given for a few years. AT&T was bandwidth-shocked when the iPhone became so popular and I don’t think anyone at AT&T imagined as many people would bog down their networks with so much traffic. As of late, I think AT&T’s gotten their act together though. They made a clear delineation in data packages instead of just giving everyone Unlimited plans, so now that people who use the most bandwidth, pay for the most bandwidth. AT&T also waited to allow tethering because they knew their networks across the country weren’t ready for it. AT&T has also had a greater presence at national events; for example at SXSW this year, AT&T setup WiFi hotspots all over the city, portable 3G towers, and distributed antenna nodes all over the convention center. Why? Because the year before they learned that 10,000 geeks and nerds on their iPhones at the same time really brings a standard network to its knees, so they made certain not to let the same mistake happen twice.

Over the last 18 months that I’ve had my iPhone, I just haven’t seen the problems that others have seen. At first, I was more than happy to join the parade of people taking shots at AT&T all of the time, but I quickly realized that sometimes a call just gets dropped because you’re walking into an elevator. And that’s what happens when you go into elevators, regardless of who your carrier is.

When I took advantage of AT&T’s app, Mark the Spot, which gives you a channel by which you can report dropped calls, crappy reception, or any other network problems to AT&T, I noticed that a lot of the time I was making reports, it was more common that I was in the lower depths of a building that used to be a parking structure — the equivalent of a bunker. But at work, on the street, in my car, at home, or in a standard building, I haven’t had any problems. I’ve driven 35 miles while on the phone with someone, going from Milwaukee to home, and have had the call not get dropped despite the fact I was bumped between numerous cell towers along the way.

If I had to guess what the real problem with AT&T is, it’s that they didn’t get on the ball fast enough. They were like the RIAA clutching onto CD’s when MP3 players got big, and like newspapers when RSS feeds and blogs became popular. AT&T was late to the game and they’ve been dumping money left and right into getting their networks scaled up appropriately and that doesn’t happen overnight. While today I would say that aside from a few cities, AT&T is actually doing quite well, a culture of knocking them for every little thing has snowballed into a goat-sacrificing bloody hatefest of apocalyptic doom. With such a widespread mutual hatred that people built up early against AT&T, now even when they do things right a lot of people are still complaining because they didn’t do the right thing right. They improved cell coverage in that city but not my city.

But the culture that’s built up around knocking AT&T for bad service blows normal problems out of proportion. Walking into an elevator and having a call dropped gets instantly labeled as a problem with AT&T that AT&T should know how to prevent, and because of the exclusivity of the iPhone, anyone who hears any complaint about a dropped call on an iPhone automatically thinks it’s AT&T’s fault, even though you walked into an elevator or were making your call from the equivalent of an underground fallout shelter (which are the number 1 and number 2 places I have calls dropped). Any other phone on the market, people don’t make such a sudden connection — blame doesn’t automatically point at the carrier. If I’m on my no-name pay-as-you-go el-cheapo phone and I make a complaint to my friends about my phone dropping a call — nobody will know or care the difference about who the carrier is. If I say my iPhone dropped the call, though, everyone likes to take a moment to make a mockery out of AT&T, because it’s easy to make fun of AT&T, because people have been mocking AT&T for several years now because of the iPhone reception.

And what do I think is going to happen when Verizon gets the iPhone? I think they’ll either do spectacularly well in comparison because they’ll have learned from AT&T’s mistakes and have had several years to build up their network infrastructure (plus now the iPhone users of the country will be split among two networks instead of all sucking up the bandwidth on the same network), or they’ll do spectacularly awful because so many people will flock to them at first that they’ll also be bandwidth-shocked. Either way, it plays out better for them because people will consider them the underdog, and more importantly, people will think of them as not AT&T. Meanwhile, in places where AT&T doesn’t have enough supply for all of the demand in cell coverage, I think coverage will improve when network traffic is divided between two networks.

With all of that said — through my travels and my 18 months of never being more than 20ft. away from my phone for more than a few minutes at a time, I just don’t think I’ve found a lot of reasons in my personal experiences to complain about that I’d blame AT&T or Apple for.