Fred Devereux at the Mobile Future Forward conference

It is pretty well known that AT&T faces a serious congestion problem. Just too many customers making calls, downloading apps and browsing the Web from their connected devices. Fred Devereux, president of the west region for AT&T, admits that the wireless carrier is "not the most revered" right now. But, in remarks today at the Mobile Future Forward conference in Seattle, Devereux pledged that things will get better.

"We have a lot of work to do. I call it a success-based problem," said Devereux. "When you have 5,000 percent increases in anything -- whether that is traffic, customers, data usage -- you have a problem that the best engineers in the world will have trouble trying to figure out."

Nonetheless, he said that AT&T is tossing "unbelievable amounts of resources" against the problem. Nationwide, the company is spending $18-$19 billion on wireless and wireline improvements this year, a 5-10 percent increase over last year.

"Of the four major carriers in the U.S., we carry half of the mobile data traffic," he said. "So, we put a lot of cars on our freeway and we are trying to build bigger, faster freeways really fast."

Things certainly have changed from when Devereux entered the business in 1990. In his remarks today, he recounted with a bit of awe how the industry once charged customers $45 per month for voice service and then -- on top of that -- 45 cents per minute. At the time, wireless penetration in the U.S. stood at just five percent. Today, he said "we put a T-1 in your pocket, we put a PC in your pocket and now we put a TV in your pocket."

The race for delivering those data services has to what Devereux dubbed "hyper competition."

"This is like a mixed-martial arts steel-caged match with unbelievable speeds and 3G and 4G and all kinds of competing values out there," he said.

One of the biggest competitors -- and potential partners -- is coming in the form of Android. Devereux was complimentary of the new mobile platform, noting that they've seen huge momentum in recent months around Android devices.

In fact, he noted with some surprise that the Blackberry Torch -- which he called the best Blackberry ever -- had not received faster adoption.

"I think the headline is that Android has strong momentum and people really like it," he said. "And my competitors did a great job making Android matter like we did ... making 3G and iPhone matter. And now it is certainly more than a two horse race, but it is not just about the iPhone anymore. So, we like that we can offer all of them."

With the competition heating up around mobile devices, Devereux said that the consumer demand for smartphones is truly amazing. As an example, he cited a statistic about the decline in bad debt among AT&T customers over the past 12 months. At first, given the tough economy, Devereux thought the data was just wrong.

"What's happening is -- for smartphones -- people are moving up the prioritization of payment so high. So, you pay for where you live, and then you pay for your phone and then maybe your car payment and groceries. It is that important," he said. "So, when you have a bad debt that is running literally about half of what it used to, it is phenomenal and I still scratch my head at it.... I see that smartphones really matter."

Previously on TechFlash: AT&T upgrades include boosts for Husky Stadium, Qwest Field