If you find this metric as astonishing as I do, consider this: The increase in Bay Area data traffic is actually below the national average–significantly below. According to AT&T (T) CTO John Donovan, 3G data traffic on the company’s wireless network has risen nearly 5,000 percent in the past 12 quarters nationally (see chart below; click to enlarge).

“Today, we’re seeing unprecedented growth in mobile broadband traffic,” Donovan said during his keynote at the Open Mobile Conference on Nov. 5. “This growth has required extensive rethinking of wireless networks as we know them, as well as significant advances in the supporting IP backbone and other infrastructure.”

A 5,000 percent increase in 3G data traffic: That’s an astonishing figure. Seems to me it’s entirely likely that any carrier that had been first with the iPhone–including catcalling rival Verizon (VZ)–would have suffered network troubles similar to those that plague AT&T today.

No other U.S. carrier offers a super-smartphone that has sold as well as the iPhone and that people use much like a laptop. Sure, Android and Palm (PALM) webOS devices are used in this way as well, but there are far fewer of them and they have significantly fewer data-hungry apps.

Research in Motion (RIMM) offers some BlackBerries that are used this way, but only some, and there are only 3,000 or so apps available for them. iPhone owners have 100,000 apps from which to choose. And while it’s obvious that there are more BlackBerries in use than iPhones, some of these rely on AT&T’s network, which only compounds the carrier’s problems.

So, really, any carrier that had been first to market with the iPhone would have seen its network overtaxed, especially after Apple (AAPL) launched the iPhone 3G and the iTunes App Store. Those events effectively upended traditional planning models for network capacity in a way that no one was prepared for.

Perhaps other carriers would have fared a bit better. Verizon’s 3G network, even back in 2007, was much deeper and broader than AT&T’s. But could it really have supported a 5,000 percent increase in data traffic without incident? I’m not so sure.

Which is not to say that AT&T is blameless. Its network has lagged and continues to do so, and the iPhone and the massive surge in data traffic it brought with it are not entirely responsible for that.

But they are obviously a big factor. It will be interesting, then, to see how Verizon’s network holds up in comparison if and when the carrier gets the iPhone.

[Image Credit: Morgan Stanley Managing Director Mary Meeker]

According to Oracle (ORCL) CEO Larry Ellison, Sun (JAVA) is already losing $100 million a month as it waits for regulatory approval, and judging from the price of the company’s stock today, it may be losing even more than that. Shares in Sun slid to $8.11–about 15 percent below Oracle’s offer price and a far cry from the $9.18 they hit in mid-October.

Clearly, investors are alarmed by this latest turn of events, though industry observers say there’s little reason for them to be. Morgan Stanley, for example, believes Oracle’s acquisition of Sun will win EU approval with few, if any, modifications to the MySQL database software about which regulators are so concerned.

“Based on our diligence, we believe the EC is likely to approve the deal with no remedies or remedies pertaining to MySQL’s licensing,” the research house said in a note to clients today. “It is highly unlikely that Oracle restructures the deal (e.g. spins MySQL) or walks away.”

Morgan Stanley’s call: The deal will go through and at $9.50 per share. As the firm notes, the EU hasn’t blocked a U.S.-based transaction since GE/Honeywell in 2001.

In a research note issued this morning, Huberty–noting that the iPhone’s market share grew 136 percent in France when Apple switched to multicarrier agreements there–said iPhone sales could more than double if the company took a similar tack in other countries.

“We expect Apple to broaden iPhone carrier distribution over the next two years and believe this opportunity is under-appreciated by the investment community,” she wrote. “This total opportunity is substantial–it adds up to an incremental 20.3M iPhone units and $3.76 in adjusted EPS, 100 percent and 41 percent of iPhone units and adjusted EPS respectively.”

Adding further details to her projections, Huberty continues: “In the top six iPhone markets that are still exclusive, we believe that Apple’s market share could rise to 10 percent, on average, in a multiple carrier distribution model from 4 percent today. These six markets represented almost 70 percent percent of iPhone shipments in C2Q09.”

Huberty also claims that if Apple (AAPL) were to end its exclusivity deal with AT&T (T) and add Verizon (VZ) as a second carrier, its share of the U.S. market would more than double, rising to 12.2 percent from 4.9 percent today.

Huberty, it should be noted, isn’t the first analyst to make such a claim. In June, Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi said that a deal with Verizon could more than double U.S. iPhone sales in the near term. Said Sacconaghi: “Verizon’s postpaid subscriber base is not only larger than AT&T’s, but more importantly, is untapped whereas we estimate more than 10 percent of AT&T’s postpaid users already have an iPhone.”

Among those doing so today: Morgan Stanley’s Kathryn Huberty, who lifted hers to $180 from $105, arguing that iPhone demand through 2010 is being underestimated by the market and will help drive Apple’s stock value up. “We believe Apple is emerging as the clear leader in the battle over the mobile Internet,” Huberty wrote in a research note to clients, adding that some future pricing adjustments will only solidify that position. “We expect a price cut to the current generation iPhone to drive 50 percent to 100 percent (two million to four million units) incremental unit demand,” she said. “Our survey data suggests 15 percent plus of the iPhone installed base typically upgrade to a new phone.”

A bullish call, especially for Huberty, whose opinion of Apple has historically been mercurial at best. Shares of Apple (AAPL) rose five percent to $128.60 in early trading this morning.

Tempering Huberty’s exuberant pronouncements today is Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry, who tells Reuters that the iPhone will suffer a bit at the hands of the Palm (PALM) Pre, which is scheduled to arrive at market on June 6. “Investors should not think the upcoming version of iPhone 3 is going to be as successful as iPhone 2.0 because it will have solid competition from Palm Pre, developed by ex-Apple designer Jon Rubinstein,” Chowdhry said. “Palm Pre has a superior operating system than iPhone. It runs on a better network–Sprint CDMA-versus iPhone which runs on GSM.”

What’s larger than the gross domestic product of Sri Lanka, Lebanon or Bulgaria and, when divided by 186,000, more than four times higher than the median U.S. household income in 2006?

The $39 billion in bonuses Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs (GS), Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley (MS) doled out in 2007.

Congratulations on a job well done, folks. You’ve really gone above and beyond the call of duty here.

“To many people, it will be shocking and questionable,” Jeanne Branthover, managing director of Boyden Global Executive Search, told Bloomberg last year. “People in New York in the world of investment banking will understand it. It’s critical that pay is still there or you’re going to lose really good people.”

Of course. God forbid Wall Street’s five largest banks lose any really good people. Who’d be left to manage the government’s $700 billion rescue plan for the financial markets?

Something to think about during this period of “rapid and profound change” on Wall Street.

From the Fed’s announcement:

To provide increased liquidity support to these firms as they transition to managing their funding within a bank holding company structure, the Federal Reserve Board authorized the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to extend credit to the U.S. broker-dealer subsidiaries of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley against all types of collateral that may be pledged at the Federal Reserve’s primary credit facility for depository institutions or at the existing Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF); the Federal Reserve has also made these collateral arrangements available to the broker-dealer subsidiary of Merrill Lynch.”

Extraordinary.

The transformation of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley into traditional bank holding companies effectively marks the end of the investment banking industry as we’ve know it. It puts the two firms squarely under the oversight of national bank regulators. And while this will subject them to new capital requirements and additional supervision, it also will allow them to take commercial deposits. And, of course, it will grant them access to the Fed’s emergency lending facilities. Which must be a wonderful thing to have in this time of “rapid and profound change” on Wall Street, as Morgan Stanley likes to describe it.

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Last week Piper Jaffray (PJC) analyst Gene Munster said the company’s new App Store could end up generating $1.21 billion in revenue. And now Morgan Stanley (MS) is predicting Apple will sell 27 million iPhones in 2009. “We believe the market generally expects a doubling of iPhone units with the lower price point ($199) and we believe this is realistic, if not conservative,” the investment bank said in a note.

At $200 a phone that would generate roughly $5 billion in revenue. And that’s not accounting for whatever subsidy Apple’s collecting from its carriers.