Category: Mass Communication Law

Is AT&T to Blame for Poor iPhone Experience and Is Non-Exclusivity the Answer? | The iPhone Blog

This quote, allegedly from the “fake Steve Jobs …describing an entirely fictional, frighteningly plausible conversation between his character and an equally fake AT&T CEO, Randall Stephenson” was too good not to share (the entire original post is worth a chuckle or two):

And now here we are. Right here in your own backyard, an American company creates a brilliant phone, and that company hands it to you, and gives you an exclusive deal to carry it — and all you guys can do is complain about how much people want to use it. You, Randall Stephenson, and your lazy stupid company — you are the problem. You are what’s wrong with this country.

I stopped, then. There was nothing on the line. Silence. I said, Randall? He goes, Yeah, I’m here. I said, Does any of that make sense? He says, Yeah, but we’re still not going to do it. See, when you run the numbers what you find is that we’re actually better off running a shitty network than making the investment to build a good one. It’s just numbers, Steve. You can’t charge enough to get a return on the investment.

The sad thing about this is it might just be true–building a better network might not make good short-term financial sense for AT&T, though one might argue that taking a longer view and using the iPhone as a means to build the best network would be in their best interest.

It’s also possible that, had cellular carriers been forced to standardize on one technology or if the tower building and renting business was unbundled from the carriers, we might no be in this situation.