Andre Yoskowitz
5 May 2012 12:10
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has made it clear today that he believes AT&T Mobility should have killed off unlimited mobile data earlier than it did.
The company got rid of the $30 unlimited bandwidth plans last year, moving to a tiered structure instead.
When asked about unlimited data and the iPhone, Stephenson says: "You ask, do you ever look back and ask, do we wish we hadn't [launched the iPhone]? No. No, I never reflect on that. Should we have changed the pricing model sooner? Yes. I wish we had moved quicker to change the pricing model to make sure that people that were consuming the bandwidth were paying for the bandwidth. And so we had a model where the high-end users were being subsidized by the low-end users. We got that model straight ? took a while to get that straight. But no, it has revolutionized our industry, and I don't regret it at all."
The CEO is also delusional after the company lost its multi-billion dollar bid for T-Mobile:
"Make no mistake about it, if you don't find solutions like [acquiring T-Mobile USA], there is nothing but upward pricing pressure in this marketplace. And you're experiencing it and you're living through it today. Since the beginning of the year when that deal got killed, our data prices have gone up 30 percent. You want to upgrade to a smartphone? Every carrier in the industry now has put in place an upgrade fee to try to slow this down. Virtually every carrier is now throttling, meaning when you hit a certain threshold of usage in a given month, your speeds get scaled back to try to reduce the utilization of these networks."