Chris Eissens
AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson seemed to have many things to say about the iPhone at a wireless industry conference earlier this week. The New York Times reports that Stephenson was upset that high-volume smartphone users were costing the carrier so much that the lower-volume users had to subsidize their usage.
“My only regret was how we introduced pricing in the beginning, because how did we introduce pricing? Thirty dollars and you get all you can eat,” he said in the on-stage interview at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference on Wednesday. “And it’s a variable cost model. Every additional megabyte you use in this network, I have to invest capital.”
Since then AT&T has discontinued offering unlimited data plans to new customers.
Stephenson is also concerned about services like Apple’s iMessage texting service and Skype affecting AT&T’s existing business models.
“You lie awake at night worrying about what is that which will disrupt your business model,” he said. “Apple iMessage is a classic example. If you’re using iMessage, you’re not using one of our messaging services, right? That’s disruptive to our messaging revenue stream.”
\\ tags: apple, AT&T, CEO, data plan, iMessage, Randall Stephenson
May 7th, 2012 at 4:34 pm
So, in other words, he is saying:
“My only regret is that I didn’t rip off my customers for more money when I had the chance”
As for iMessage, I would love it Apple would set it up to detect what carrier the number that you are sending a text to and send it to the email address that receives text messages for that carrier, this would bypass AT&T’s text messaging completely on the iPhone user’s end and would be a good thing.