Steve Jobs “played up the iPad’s ability to stream live baseball games and hit movies during his demonstration on Wednesday,” in The New York Times’ rather infelicitous phrasing.

Great. Streaming baseball and hitting movies. Just what we need to clear up the overloaded data networks out there.

“Think your 3G connection is slow right now? Wait until we see a new wave of apps that can maximize all those new pixels on the iPad’s 9.7-inch display screen,” warns industry observer Kevin Kelleher. “IPad screens are bigger, but the bandwidth hasn’t increased in proportion.”

With baseball it doesn’t matter, of course, since the term “live” is relative there, it’s thirteen minutes of action crammed into three hours, you wouldn’t notice that it’s downloading slowly, you’d think the game was progressing at its normal speed, but no doubt the torrent of smartphones, Kindles, general data traffic, and now iPads, will render everybody’s downloads slower and slower.

“AT&T has been complaining about iPhone users gobbling too much of its 3G network bandwidth,” writes industry observer Kevin McLaughlin. “AT&T subscribers, meanwhile, have been venting about the carrier’s subpar service. So what’s going to happen when the Apple iPad arrives?”

Thanks, iPhone and your 100,000 apps. Hey, got one to speed up downloads? Is there an app for that?

“Carrier networks aren’t set to handle five million tablets sucking down five gigabytes of data each month,” Philip Cusick, an analyst at Macquarie Securities, told the Times.

“An hour of browsing the Web on a mobile phone consumes roughly 40 megabytes of data,” the Times wrote. “Streaming tunes on an Internet radio station like Pandora draws down 60 megabytes each hour. Watching a grainy YouTube video for the same period of time causes the data consumption to nearly triple. And watching a live concert or a sports event will consume close to 300 megabytes an hour.”

No wonder AT&T, the network tasked with handling all iPhone traffic in the United States, has generally ranks dead last in customer satisfaction surveys. It’s not getting better, either, as the Times glumly notes, “analysts expect carriers will generate more than half their revenue from data in three or four years, up from less than 30 percent today.”

As the Christian Science Monitor explained, “the problem, according to the carrier, is that iPhone users are data guzzlers. On average, the feature-heavy phone gulps down 10 times the network capacity of other smart phones. And as users browse the Web, watch videos, download apps, and stream music on their iPhones, the device has strained AT&T’s network.”

Source: tmcnet

Wow! I could never imagine that happen in Malaysia. I mean TMNet is already been slow down by all their current broadband (streamyx)… And I think all 3G/HSDPA provider in Malaysia is on TMNet backbone…. Once iPad reach here, it sure will bring down TMNet…

Well, not really… Because Malaysian is lazy to read, so they wont bother buying iPad to read ebook.