AT&T Continues Their Pursuit to Lose All Remaining Subscribers ⇥ attpublicpolicy.com

Hey, remember how AT&T wasn’t letting people with iPhones use FaceTime over their cell network unless subscribers bought a more expensive plan? Good news! AT&T is remaining remarkably consistent in their dickishness. Jim Cicconi:

AT&T has by far more iPhones on our network than any other carrier.

For now.

We’re proud of this fact and the confidence our customers have in us.

Hah! “Confidence”. Good one.

In this instance, with the FaceTime app already preloaded on tens of millions of AT&T customers’ iPhones, there was no way for our engineers to effectively model usage, and thus to assess network impact.

Bullshit. AT&T knows how many iPhone and iPad models are on their network, yet Skype was allowed over the cellular network, an app which is not preloaded and therefore no assumption as to the number of downloads can be made.

To do otherwise might have risked an adverse impact on the services our customers expect – voice quality in particular – if usage of FaceTime exceeded expectations.

I didn’t realize AT&T’s call quality could further be degraded.

In the meantime, we are announcing today that we will support FaceTime, not only on our Mobile Share plans, but also on all of our tiered data plans with an LTE device.

Some good news. If you have an iPhone 5 or iPad model from 2012, you can use FaceTime over AT&T. But if you have an iPhone 4 or 4S, you’re out of luck. They’ll probably support that at the same time they fully drop their EDGE network.

AT&T has all of the power of a utility company, yet none of the responsibility.