Category: Broadband

Comical Cingular (AT&T)

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Where to begin?

Prior to a recent Asia trip, I needed to obtain a SIM Card for my old Cingular (AT&T) phone that would work while on travel. (I now use a Verizon phone due to our experience with Cingular’s poor network coverage – dropped calls on John Nolen Drive, for example).

I called Cingular and explained my requirements: a prepaid SIM Card that would work for 30 days while on travel overseas. The telesales representative explained their different services, including data, worldwide calling and various monthly minute plans.

I provided my credit to close the transaction and a few days later, the Cingular SIM card arrived. I also requested the codes to “unlock” my old phone. Unfortunately, despite our prior long term Cingular arrangement, they insisted that I had to use the phone for 90 days before they would provide the unlock keys. This would prove to be a problem when I found that the SIM card Cingular sold me did not, in fact, work internationally.

Fortunately, a friend let me use an old phone, which would accept any SIM Card – easily purchased in most countries.

I called Cingular upon my return to express my disappointment. Farrah in Halifax was as helpful as could be expected, given their organization. She phoned their “sales” department to see if I could obtain a refund. The “sales” person told her that they “don’t sell SIM Cards”! I mentioned that while I’m unhappy with Cingular, I’m glad she had that experience with sales, particularly while I was on the line.

Bottom line: If you are looking for a world phone, look elsewhere. I’ve heard good things about T-mobile, though your mileage may vary.

AT&T’s Rhetoric on Competition

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Mark Pitsch:

Wisconsin residents would lose their rights to cable television repairs within 72 hours, credit for service interruptions and advance notice of rate increases, under a bill on the fast track in the state Legislature.

The proposal, designed to increase competition in an industry dominated by cable companies, is supported by the lobbying muscle of telecommunications giant AT&T.

It’s part of AT&T’s challenge to cable companies such as Charter Communications, which are licensed by local governments.

There is little agreement on whether the proposal would help consumers or hurt them.

Pitsch mentions this:

But proponents say the bill would lower costs for telecast delivery – whether by cable or AT&T’s fiber optic lines – by up to 23 percent by introducing competition and deregulating the industry.

What fiber optic lines would that be? AT&T has done nothing to upgrade it’s copper based network to the home (other than spend money on lobbying and advertisements regarding the ongoing resale of the old network, something we’ve paid for over and over and over…), unlike Verizon in other parts of the country. Nice to see our politicians continue to “stick it to us”. `

Chinese Dissident’s Wife to Sue Yahoo

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Richard Komen:

Speaking with VOA’s Mandarin Service Wednesday after arriving in Washington, Yu Ling said Chinese police arrested her husband, Wang Xiaoning, partly because Yahoo’s Hong Kong office gave Chinese authorities information about his e-mail accounts.

Yu Ling said she has come to the United States to sue the company for damages and to demand an apology.

Last year, Yahoo provided the Chinese with information about Shi Tao, a journalist who emailed to Western news outlets details of China’s plans to handle the 15th anniversary of Tiananmen Square.

Publicly owned networks are the key to universal access and healthy competition

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Becca Vargo Daggett:

Local governments have taken the lead in U.S. broadband policy. Hundreds of communities of all sizes are making decisions about how to best deliver universal, affordable access to high-speed information networks. Many are offered seemingly attractive arrangements with no upfront cost to the city. They do themselves and their households and businesses a disservice if they do not seriously explore the costs and benefits of a publicly owned network.

In this report, we highlight five arguments for public ownership.

1. High-speed information networks are essential public infrastructure.

Just as high quality road systems are needed to transport people and goods, high quality wired and wireless networks are needed to transport information. Public ownership of the physical network does not necessarily mean the city either manages the network or provides services. Cities own roads, but they do not operate freight companies or deliver pizzas.

The Killing of Wifi?

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John Dvorak:

There is mounting evidence that the cellular service companies are going to do whatever they can to kill Wi-Fi. After all, it is a huge long-term threat to them. We’ve seen that the route to success in America today is via public gullibility and general ignorance. And these cell-phone–service companies are no dummies.

The always-entertaining Pew Internet & American Life Project ran a survey, and the results show that 34 percent of Internet users have gone online with a Wi-Fi connection or one of those newly popular and overpriced cell-phone services. Two years ago, this number was 22 percent. Another factoid from the survey: 19 percent of all users have Wi-Fi in the home. This number was a mere 10 percent just one year ago. The last tidbit from the survey worth noting is that only 56 percent of the people who have PDAs that hook to the Internet have actually gone on the Net via their PDA. The same goes for the people who have cell phones with Internet capability; not much more than half have actually used it.

Fear and Loathing the Cable Company

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Jeff Jarvis:

But then, that’s not news. I’ve been trying to get Joost working at home and was cursing it, but I was cursing the wrong party. Joost works fine at work. I can’t wait until Verizon finishes laying fibre on my street so I can get FIOS. Except Verizon hired the worst contractor imaginable to get the job done. They have been at it for more than two months on a street with fewer than 20 homes; they’ve managed to cut our cable and gas line and a neighbor’s electric line and they’re not nearly done. I’m about to go out with a shovel myself just so I can get rid of Cablevision sooner.

At least Jarvis can look forward to fiber to the home, via Verizon. Locally, AT&T is content to spend money on advertising and resell us the copper lines we’ve paid for over and over and over.

Google’s Arrogance in North Carolina: Learning from AT&T?

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Ed Cone:

But it turns out that there was a lot more to the story. Google leaned hard on North Carolina lawmakers and officials, not just to get the fattest deal possible but to choke off the flow of information along the way.


According to documents obtained by The News & Observer of Raleigh, the company went beyond reasonable expectations of confidentiality to demand absolute secrecy while negotiations were under way, even asking participants to sign nondisclosure agreements; some legislators and local officials did so, but Department of Commerce officials did not. Google executive Rhett Weiss badgered Commerce Secretary Jim Fain about the state’s adherence to process, complaining, for example, when lawmakers wanted an estimate of the cost to North Carolina in lost tax revenue, and threatening to kill the whole thing if Google didn’t get its way.


Businesses need some measure of confidentiality when putting together this kind of transaction. Fair enough. But this is the people’s business, and Google’s high-handedness is an affront to the people of this state.


And then there’s that whole “Don’t be evil” thing. Google spokesman Barry Schnitt told me that the company’s negotiations with the state were “very standard.” If that’s the case, and this is standard operating procedure for the company, then something has gone wrong in Silicon Valley.

Barry Orton keeps up with AT&T’s Wisconsin Lobbying.

Yet another reason to use the excellent Clusty search engine.

Missouri Telecom Bill Tunes Out Customer Needs

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J. Scott Christianson:

The Missouri Senate is considering one of the best-written pieces of legislation to come before it in some time: Senate Bill 284, the Missouri Video Franchise Bill. It should be a good bill, considering how much money AT&T spent to write it.
The video franchise bill has something in it for every large telecommunications company: reducing public oversight, eliminating local control, cherry-picking high-profit customers and protection from prying public auditors. It would be wonderful – if it weren’t such a complete betrayal of the public trust.
SB 284’s most important feature is to strip local government of its authority to regulate companies that offer video services. Right now, local cable television companies receive their licenses to operate from the municipalities they serve. Cable TV companies get to use a city’s rights of way for running their lines. In return, local municipalities receive a franchise fee and are provided a few channels for local citizens and government to use, so-called PEG – for public, education and government access – channels. Until now, this arrangement seemed like a reasonable exchange for the huge benefit of accessing city rights of way.

iPhone / Apple Phone Tea Leaves

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Cringely parses Apple and Cingular as they introduce an interesting new phone:

This leaves us with the mystery of why Apple deliberately hobbled the cellular Internet capability of its iPhone, Apple Phone, whatever. As described this week, when the iPhone ships it will only work with Cingular’s EDGE network, which is its 2G Internet service that maxes out at 170 kilobits per second on not just a good day but on a day that is so good it never happens. I’ve used the EDGE network and it feels like dial-up to me.


The iPhone is this amazing connectivity quad-mode device that can probably make use of as much bandwidth as it can get, so making it suck through the little straw that is EDGE makes no sense from a user perspective. But remember that the parties involved here are Apple and Cingular, neither of which is 100 percent allied with user interests. Cingular has a 3G network called BroadbandConnect or “MediaNet” if you buy Cingular’s associated Cingular Video service.