Carl Hutzler's Blog

Corporate hypocrisy is terribly commonplace these days. So the fact that another huge, oligopolistic, company is at it again might not even be worthy of me passing gas much less taking the time to continue writing about it.

But I finally realized a couple of things about AT&T and their lack of service that made me realize why I am so ticked at them….

1) AT&T requires absolutely every iPhone user to purchase a data plan. There is no choice. $30 bucks every month for 2 years. Period.

2) The data plan is unlimited. It says so on the AT&T website. Don’t believe me?

Go to their website and order an iphone. The data plan is checked and mandatory. There is even a threat that if you do not have a data plan… AT&T may add one automatically if they detect you are using an iPhone.

3) And now that the iPhone is successful and adding millions of customers to AT&T’s revenue stream, AT&T wants us to stop using the data. What a joke!

So instead of scaling the network as they sold more iPhones, revenues climbed, and as they saw data traffic increasing, they sat on their asses and enjoyed the money train. And AT&T continues to enjoy signing up more and more iPhone customers every day. And they keep selling mandatory data plans too. But their network can’t service the customers.

Hypocrisy? Yup.

My guess is that they are thinking, “We never expected people to use their mandatory unlimited data plans. We just wanted the money from selling it.”

So what next? Seems like AT&T is willing to do everything EXCEPT build out capacity.

- Create iPhone apps to let users report problems which AT&T already sees in bright red in their network operations center. (chuckle)

- Offer free wifi at McDonalds.

- Blame heavy users (of their unlimited data plan).

- Blame iPhone hardware. Hire contractors to test iPhones and determine they are flawed devices from an RF standpoint. Makes sense given this is the third generation of the device. Guess the issues have been around for a long time (3 years now).

- Run ads attacking rivals for not being able to handle voice calls and data at the same time (when AT&T can’t do either half the time!!).

I don’t know how this will all come to pass. But something’s got to give. Class action lawsuit about the data plan or about AT&T’s exclusive contract? Apple moves the iPhone to other carriers? Congress gets involved? FTC?

It shall be fun to watch.