While the rumor of a Verizon iPhone floats every six months or so, it appears we may really be coming down the home stretch now. As a seasoned Apple fan (dating back to an original Macintosh, and even passing through a Newton en route to present day), my gut sense confirms that we’ll actually see a Verizon iPhone at the start of 2011. And, when we do, I’ll still be sticking it out with AT&T.

Sure, service on AT&T blows goats. But not because there are fundamental flaws with AT&T’s network. Instead, it’s because all the iPhone users are on the same network, totally overwhelming AT&T’s infrastructure.

A dropped call, for example, isn’t a network flaw – it’s a feature. Let’s say you have network capacity for two calls, and three people dialing away. You can piss off all three by connecting all of their calls, sharing the bandwidth equally, and making all three calls equally unintelligible. Or you can make two calls work perfectly, and simply boot the third off the network. That’s what most cell networks do. So, how do you fix the problem? Increase the capacity of the network. Which, in fact, AT&T has been doing quickly over the past few years. Problem is, Apple has been selling iPhones and iPads even more quickly. Net net, that leaves AT&T’s network falling even further behind.

Of course, the other solution is to keep the network the same, but to get rid of users. Imagine if, as some recent surveys indicate, half of all iPhone owners jumped to Verizon, given the chance.

At that point, AT&T’s network would work great. They’d have tons of bandwidth to spare.

Whereas Verizon’s would suddenly be the network blowing goats, overwhelmed by the huge deluge of incoming iPhone users.

And the kicker: a large percentage of those escapees would have paid hefty termination fees for the privilege of heading to the now shittier network.

In other words, as ever, a combination of sloth and totally ignoring the problem turns out to be the best possible choice.