Ahh, AT&T, you’ve under-provisioned your network and all those iPhones you are more than happy to sell contracts for are making it easy to, you know, do stuff. And you apparently didn’t count on that. For three years running. The result: lots of data in your under-provisioned network. Who do we blame for this oversight? Why, the customers of course:
The carrier has had trouble keeping up with wireless data usage, leading to slow load times and dropped connections. It is upgrading its network to cope, but AT&T’s head of consumer services, Ralph de la Vega, told investors at a UBS conference in New York that it will also give high-bandwidth users incentives to “reduce or modify their usage.”
Translation: usage caps and overage charges, here we come. You iPhone users need to be hobbled like the rest of our customers! It’s like AT&T is fundamentally determined to go into a death-spiral the second ‘Merican iPhone users can go to another network. Which, it appears, is most likely to be T-Mobile. Sure took a long time for Fucktardia to figure out that Verizon is built atop an incompatible network, didn’t it? But just why is AT&T so dependent on iPhone? Weren’t they turning a profit before? Yes, but:
iPhone accounted for roughly 68 percent of [AT&T’s smart-phone/3G] sales [that make up the lions share of overall sales revenue]
[-and-]
Wireless revenues were up 37.2 percent, driven by “messaging, internet access, access to applications and services,” or [the iPhone]
These are very data users (and the attendant revenue spike) that AT&T is both dependent on and has resolved to infuriate. The plan, in a nutshell, is
“Gentlemen, we’ve run our brand into the ground on the back of notoriously poor service, especially in the dense urban environments where our 3G network actually, you know, exists. Lets really, really take it to the next level by nickel and diming these same users in the last year or two of their contracts. That way, north of 40% of our new revenue streams will head for the exits the second exclusivity ends.”
Great plan. So long, AT&T. Been so nice knowing you.
All that said, it’s still unclear to me why Apple doesn’t just buy Sprint, turn it into a dumb-pipes company, and reap the ridiculous profits that result. Mayhaps they (still) will.
Lemkin 