Fake Steve put forward some interesting arguments yesterday in his answer to AT&T around operation Chokehold. To make it short he accused AT&T of hoarding the growing revenues generated by wireless data instead of reinvesting in its infrastructure.
The guys over at Gizmodo looked into AT&T’s financials to set the record straight and came up with a nice infography:
It really doesn’t look good for AT&T.
Furthermore according to the Wall Street Journal today, AT&T is actually trying to scale its offer down, instead of improving it:
A senior AT&T Inc. executive dismissed speculation that the telecommunications carrier is planning to change the way it prices data plans for its wireless customers, but said it will give customers incentives to limit their use of its wireless network for surfing the Internet or downloading mobile applications.
Surprised?
They tout having the most mobile applications ( which has nothing to do with the network other than that the network is there for the data connection ) but they want users to limit using data ?
Big ” HMM “.
I own a iPhone on AT&T and am bothered by this just a little.
I pay too much for this shit already.
I Second that Ed!
If the google phone rumors are true, I am so jumping ship. Enough of this crap.
I’d just like to point out it’s too early to make any statements about this. Corporations don’t hoard profit they also pay out dividends to regular joe shmoe shareholders. Dividends had been constantly increasing so the plowback ratio was obviously going to go down whereas the payout ratio increases
It’s hard to say if there is a direct increase/decrease but I have a gut feeling that it was definitely an important factor.
Another possibility for this is that AT&T has farmed out a lot of their GSM network stuff to Ericsson. This would explain the rather sensationalist infographics made from AT&T’s financials.
Someone mentioned this on the gizmodo thread, but the comment has mysteriously been removed. Hmm.