It appears AT&T Wireless has configured their RNC buffers so there is no packet loss, i.e. with buffers capable of holding more than ten seconds of data. Zero packet loss may sound impressive to a telephone guy, but it causes TCP congestion collapse and thus doesn’t work for the mobile Internet!

This is a pretty geeky article about packets across networks, but it’s important as it does highlight the fact that it’s very difficult to optimize a network for web traffic and voice traffic (latency issues, experience, etc).