It’s hard to tell if this is a sign of things to come, or just a simple case of AT&T cutting costs.
AT&T has unveiled the first trials of a fixed wireless broadband service in Atlanta the company hopes will replace the aging DSL lines the company isn’t interested in upgrading. According to the AT&T announcement, the service will be creatively named “Fixed Wireless Internet.”
This seems to be a troubling trend lately …
The FCC vote on their new neutrality rules is coming December 21, and nobody (other than we assume the wealthiest stakeholders) know what the rules contain, outside of a general understanding that they echo previous, paper thin proposals by Henry Waxman, Verizon and Google — making a point to exclude wireless. Yesterday we noted how there have been unheeded calls for the rules to be leaked. At least one FCC Commissioner agrees, Meredith Attwell Baker urging the FCC to at least unveil the rules for a brief public comment period, something that would make sense given all the FCC’s talk about transparency:
Sounds like somebody just realized that they’re sitting on top of a public relations nightmare …
Consumer group Free Press is apparently hitting some of AT&T’s buttons this week, if this missive from AT&T lobbyist Hank Hultquist is any indication. Hultquist this week attacked the consumer group as a purveyor of “Da Vinci Code conspiracy theories” for a recent letter the group wrote to the FCC that points out how AT&T’s long-standing dream of “paid prioritization” could be bad for consumers. In it, Free Press notes they don’t oppose intelligent network management, just paid prioritization:
Congress needs to get itself in gear and do what we pay them to do, instead of just sitting around and letting corporations write the laws that are supposed to govern their own behavior.
We’ve already seen how the Goorizon deal is little more than an empty shell, solely designed to keep tougher consumer protections away from wireless networks, while leaving plenty of loopholes open for anti-competitive behavior over wired networks. Now a group of companies including Microsoft, the NCTA, Verizon, AT&T and Skype have “reached an agreement” on network neutrality behind closed doors, with no public, government, or objective expert input. As Mike Masnick at Techdirt notes, such a deal is a blend of hubris and pointlessness:
Smart move; it sounds like AT&T wants to be the Paypal of mobile computing …
AT&T today announced a mobile payment processing service for all of the carrier’s smartphones, that enables vendors to take credit and debit card payments on the go. AT&T is working with Apriva, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based company that provides point-of-sale transaction technologies for the wireless market, to deliver the service. With the new offering, AT&T is looking to own a small slice of the mobile payment market, estimated to generate more than $633 billion in transactions by 2014.
This is indeed very strange … but I bet AT&T gets its way in the end.
According to the Wall Street Journal, AT&T is threatening to slow U-Verse investment if the FCC moves forward with their plans to partially reclassify broadband ISPs under Title II of the Communications Act. Of course threats of slowed investment are the norm for carriers trying to get Uncle Sam to do what they want — so this certainly isn’t particularly surprising. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson stayed fairly vague with the threat, but the message is clear:
