Posts Tagged: ‘AT&T’
Things are about to get a lot more interesting in the mobile phone business, and I don’t think the carriers are going to like how this one turns out. I was just reading an article in BusinessWeek by Olga Kharif, who said that in a hearing yesterday, the Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski called for comments from smartphone developers. The question is this: Are mobile phone carriers inhibiting smartphone application development?
That may seem frivolous to you. Why should the FCC get involved with smartphone applications? For years people have been complaining about wanting this or that cool phone that’s only available at another carrier. The ability to switch carriers and port your number over was one concession, but it’s very difficult for anyone to prove that just because the, oh, I don’t know, let’s say iPhone for example, is only available through AT&T, that the exclusive contract is anticompetitive.
To everything (churn, churn, churn) there is a season. For several cell phone carriers in the United States, the current season appears to involve losing lots of subscribers. We call this phenomenon churn. A company’s churn rate refers to the percentage of overall customers who have left the service over a specific time frame. A high churn rate can indicate customer dissatisfaction. If a company’s churn rate is greater than the rate at which it attracts customers, that results in a net loss of subscribers. In business terms, this is what we call a Bad Thing.
Pinpointing the source of a cell phone carrier’s churn rate isn’t always easy. Perhaps the company’s service suffered some outages or other problems. Maybe the phones the carrier supports aren’t as innovative or exciting as its competitors. Sometimes a company will push a particular phone or service plan only to find out the customer base just isn’t interested in it.
I first heard the story about the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism requiring incoming freshmen to own an iPhone or iPod Touch on CNET’s Buzz Out Loud podcast. Blogs across the Web covered the story from practically every angle. Many focused on the “requirement” aspect of the announcement — would the University penalize students who didn’t own or purchase an iPhone or iPod Touch?
The Recording Industry Association of America and AT&T have reached an agreement under which the enormous Internet service provider will help stop sharing music files online.
Greg Sandoval at CNET wrote about the agreement, which AT&T executive Jim Cicconi told an audience at the Leadership Music Digital Summit conference in Nashville that his company had started issuing notices to its customers to take down music files they had made available. This jibes with the new antipiracy policy of the RIAA, which was announced in December. The organization said at the time that it would stop suing people and focus on working with broadband ISPs to eliminate music file sharing. CNET had already reported that Comcast and AT&T were on board with the new program.
Sandoval said the program is probably a test run for a stricter version to come later on. It’s possible that repeat violations could prompt ISPs working with the RIAA to cancel accounts — which seems counterintuitive to ISPs, who need their customers to stick around.
For a tech nut, one of the cool things about South by Southwest Interactive has got to be the fact that you’re surrounded by other technology fans. There are tons of other folks with whom you can get your geek on. On the other hand, when a bunch of gadget users are in one place and one of the favorite gizmos doesn’t work, that means a lot of people are sharing their woes with one another and broadcasting them to the world via blogs, text messages and Twitter.
Daniel Terdiman of CNET said that iPhone users are having a difficult time reaching out and touching someone. And by iPhone users, Terdiman said, that’s quite a lot of people at SXSWi. It was “nearly impossible” to make a call in the Austin Convention Center – but not to Twitter or send instant messages or use the Web.
They’re Rolling Out 4G? I’m Already, Like, a Whole G Behind!
by Chris Pollette | February 18, 2009
Apparently there are at least two American wireless carriers planning on launching fourth-generation wireless broadband networks: Verizon in 2010 and AT&T in 2011. And here I am, still making calls with my dumbphone.
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