I think, real reason is iPhone5 wait..

In my view it is all non-sense.. I think lot of customers are simply waiting for iPhone5. Samsung's Galaxy III turned out to be bummer and wasn't able to generate any new refresh cycles.

Nevertheless, ATT, should pour in some of these profits back and improve system health and call quality and poor coverage.. Otherwise whatever they do they won't be able to survive for long..

AT&T posts record profit for wireless

NEW YORK (AP) — AT&T on Tuesday posted the best profitability ever in its wireless arm, paradoxically because it sold fewer smartphones.The largest telecommunications company in the U.S. said its subscribers are now holding on to their phones longer: The rate of upgrades to new phones was at a record low in the second quarter. That’s good news for the company because it subsidizes each smartphone by hundreds of dollars to be able to sell it to customers for $99 or $199. iPhones, in particular, are expensive to sell, because Apple charges AT&T an average of about $650 apiece. In March last year, AT&T started telling subscribers they had to stay on contract for 20 months before they would be eligible for a new phone at the fully subsidized price. Before that, some high-paying customers had been eligible for upgrades after just 12 months.

“It appears our policy is working,” John Stephens, AT&T’s chief financial officer, told analysts on a conference call. He said another big contributor to the low upgrade rate was that many people upgraded late last year, when the latest iPhone debuted.

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CX MATIASH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A low rate of upgrades by smartphone users helped boost profit for AT&T’s wireless division.

Now Windows / Nokia Phone..

Has any one tried it out. I was big fan of Nokia Cell phones. Just Phone part.. I used to love it. There were the best.. In past, they were best phones when it comes to voice quality or working even in poor signal area. I rarely had any call drops on it. As compared to iPhone or even previously, those flashy Sony Ericson or even my Samsung Blackjack (anyone even remembers it :-) ).

I rarely see Nokia phones here in US. They are still very much popular in India and may be rest of the world. In US, due to dominance of Cell Providers, Nokia had almost zero market share. For some reasons, they failed to come up with any agreement with them. May be they were happy with non-US market.

Now with Microsoft alliance, I am guessing they are coming back. Nokia is known to be best in terms of hardware. However, we will have to see how there machines works or marry with crappy Microsoft OS. It will be interesting to watch and track how do they perform. I guess, future and reputation of two once upon a time best companies is at stake. I hope that they will come up with better cell phone and more importantly better overall experience for users and customers. Now a days, more important thing is overall experience and ecosystem around it. All thanks to Apple iPhone, customers are more demanding and levels are set much higher.

I guess, MS and Nokia should also come up with some thing like iPod touch type. With Skype in their bag, they can easily come up with good competitor for non cell phone type of devices to extend product range similar to iPhone, iPod-touch and even iPad. They can freely and aggressively sell and try it out. There is still ample of diet for good tablets. Especially for MS, if they can some how link their tablet to Desktop/Laptop.. May be MS tablet can introspect your desktop and bring applications and media on tablet automatically either on memory or may be thru their cloud. There could be great synergy for them. MS is still defacto leader in desktop area. If they help users migrate and ease pain by keeping data/application/media in sync they still might have some good story and can still successfully get good pie of the market.

AT&T to sell $100 Nokia phone

Rival to iPhone and Android devices will have LTE speed

By Scott Moritz

Bloomberg News

AT&T plans to start selling a Nokia smartphone with Microsoft software for half of what it charges for the iPhone, as the device’s makers seek to break Apple and Google’s dominance of the U.S. market. The Lumia 900, which runs on AT&T’s network using faster, so-called longterm- evolution technology, will start selling for $99.99 on April 8, the second-largest U.S. wireless carrier said Monday in a statement. The latest iPhone and newest handsets running Google’s Android software typically start at $199.

Nokia is counting on Microsoft’s Windows Phone software to reignite sales in the U.S., where the iPhone, Android makers such as Samsung Electronics and Research In Motion’s Black-Berry control 92 percent of the market. Microsoft is trying to increase its share of the mobile software market to expand beyond the slowergrowing personal-computer market.

“The pricing is aggressive,” said Avi Greengart, an analyst at research firm Current Analysis in Teaneck, N.J. “They are hoping to use price to get people to buy a product with an operating system they aren’t familiar with.”

To get the $99.99 price, customers need to sign a twoyear contract with AT&T. The Dallas-based carrier will also sell the phone without a contract for $449.99, said Steven Schwadron, an AT&T spokesman.

Those price points suggest that AT&T is subsidizing each Lumia by about $350. That compares with a $450 subsidy for the cheapest version iPhone 4S, which sells for $199 with a contract and $649 without one.Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, a former Microsoft executive, started rebuilding the Espoo, Finland-based company’s smartphone strategy around the Windows Phone operating system last year. Nokia had previously focused on its own MeeGo and Symbian operating systems.

Nokia and Microsoft have said they are willing to spend money to fuel sales. Microsoft said last year it would pay Nokia $1 billion to develop and promote Windows phones. Elop said in October that marketing spending on the Lumia series would be triple the money spent on previous product sales promotions.

Suicide note from AT&T

Here is suicide note from our beloved AT&T.. Instead of fixing their own problems and giving bold statements that they will take care of old commitments by upgrading and fixing their system they are not only running away from the problem but also telling customers that they are stupid and dumb to stick to them even now..

This stupid and dumb category customer includes your beloved "Shai" as well!!! I was hoping that sooner or later AT&T will fix their mess and come back to senses and fix network and call drop outs. Alas, these type of new statements only gives me shudders from the company whose network is deteriorating day by day and on top of it, instead of fixing it they are committing to suicide.

I think, going forward, I will stop buying these contract phones on subsidy and later on give them premium every month. I will buy unlocked world phones and and hopefully I can easily switch my carriers in response to such stupid and suicidal statements from them..

I hope I don't have to write RIP blog about AT&T soon..

EXPLOSION IN CONTENT

AT&T caps ‘unlimited’ data plans

Wireless carrier plans to markedly slow access once subscribers exceed 3 gigabytes on the 3Gnetwork

By Troy Wolverton

twolverton@mercurynews.com 

AT&T on Wednesday spelled out the limits on its so-called unlimited wireless data plans, which are legacies of the company’s effort to lure early iPhone customers.

The wireless carrier announced it would cap data usage by subscribers to these unlimited plans at 3 gigabytes on its 3G network or 5 gigabytes over its new LTE network. AT&T plans to markedly slow data access to customers who exceed the caps.

Already the company was slowing service to customers whose data consumption was in the top 5 percent of all users. But it had left vague where exactly it was drawing the line on data use, and some users complained that the caps for customers of the nominally unlimited plans were below those of AT&T’s more recent metered plans.

The official cap on 3G usage under the $30-a-month unlimited data plan is now in line with AT&T’s midrange metered plan, which also costs $30 a month.

AT&T said in a statement it was announcing the limits to give unlimited customers “clarity” about when they would hit the limits. It said it needed to impose the limits to better manage the traffic on its network, and noted that subscribers of the unlimited service can continue to consume an unlimited amount of data even after they hit the cap, albeit at a much reduced rate.

“Because spectrum is limited and data usage continues to soar, we manage our network this way to be as fair as possible and so we can provide the best possible mobile broadband experience to everyone,” the company said.
But some customers have complained that the throttling effort has made their service significantly worse. Once they’ve exceeded the caps, loading Web pages and even email becomes painfully slow, and data-intensive tasks such as watching streaming video become impossible.

Last week, a Ventura County Superior Court judge awarded $850 to an AT&T customer who sued the company in Small Claims Court, complaining that because of the data caps, he wasn’t getting the unlimited service the company promised. 

“If throttling back stops you from using the service, then you’re not really getting the unlimited data you contracted for,” said Jeff Blyskal, senior editor of Consumer Reports. 

AT&T introduced unlimited data plans when it joined with Apple to launch the original iPhone in 2007. The unlimited plans were a way to address one of the obstacles to consumer adoption of smartphones — the fear they might see sky-high charges if they didn’t closely monitor their data, said Charles Golvin, an analyst with technology research firm Forrester. 

But with the soaring popularity of the iPhone, AT&T soon found its network overwhelmed with data traffic and complaints from customers about dropped calls, slow data speeds or inaccessible service. Partly in response, AT&T in June 2010 introduced data plans that explicitly limited consumers’ usage, affecting the plans of all new smartphone and tablet customers. But the company allowed older subscribers on its unlimited plans to retain them even if they bought new phones. 

The company’s move to make the data caps explicit for unlimited subscribers is its “next step to try to contend with those recalcitrant customers,” Golvin said. The company appears to be trying to strike a balance, he said, attempting to “not let heavy users overrun their capacity and still (deliver) on the promise of unlimited data.” 

But AT&T should have known it couldn’t deliver on its promise of unlimited data without limiting such users, Blyskal said. And it could have solved the problem by limiting the number of smartphones it sold, he added. 

“Consumers were at a disadvantage,” he said. “They were promised one thing and it doesn’t appear that they’re going to get it.” 

One problem with data caps and throttling is that they don’t directly address the problem they seek to solve, said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, a senior vice president at Media Access Project, a public interest law firm specializing in telecommunications law. The capacity constraints that plague the wireless networks tend to affect them at particular times of the day or in particular places. But the data caps say nothing about when or where consumers use data, Schwartzman noted. Even when someone’s usage is throttled, they could still be taking up space on the network during key times. 

“There is strong evidence that slowing down data delivery does not significantly reduce spectrum usage,” he said. Worse, the data caps discourage wireless operators from directly addressing the problem by adding capacity, Schwartzman said. And by discouraging consumers from using their mobile gadgets, they discourage app innovation, he said. 

“This is creating a less useful wireless Internet,” Schwartzman said. 

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

Amazing and innovative but little scary peek into future..

I was watching podcast on economist about futuristic Contact lenses.. Some very innovative and amazing research into this area...

Generally it is going in right direction of making our lives easier but at the same time I any how feel toooo much connected and wired and these things will make me zombie in future..

On Funnier note.. I am hoping that they won't be driven by Windows OS ;-) or connected using ATT network ;-) I don't want them to crash in my eyes or drop connection in the middle of my meeting/discussions and all of a sudden I become blank.. Just kidding.. but I am sure there will be many more different kind of problems.. Biggest I see is EMP burst.. as we are more and more connected and wired.. we are more and more vulnerable to this force of nature.. Which is very real possibility in any time and can create real havoc on our planet. Nothing to worry about it..

Here are links for details:
http://www.economist.com/node/18750624

this is for video:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/multimedia/2011/06/smarter-contact-lenses

Is end of Mobile Competition in US near?

If AT&T and T-Mobile's merger goes through, I think it will be catastrophic for Cell consumers in US. What ever the reason may be, as of now US consumers pay one of the highest charges for what may be at the best called shabby service in Cellphone market. I think, after this merger it will be even worse. I remember, when AT&T had purchased, SBC's cell phone business and promises were made about improved and great service as a result of that merger. Yeah.. we did got iPhone on AT&T.. and I think that was it it.. In the name of improved service we only got more dropped calls and continued to get poor reception and same higher rates or even higher...

I don't know.. In case, Obama administration's FTC/FCC allows this merger.. I am going to hate this administration forever. I believe, it won't be just me, there will be millions of AT&T's subscriber who will hate it.. Not that T-Mobile's service is any great, but as long as there are two players in GSM mobile area, there was hope that things may be better. IF, this merger goes through.. nobody will have any hopes of better cellphone service ever in US..

I hope administration will see how past mergers in this area has resulted in so called better pricing for consumers and will decide accordingly.