AT&T Is A Big, Steaming Heap Of Failure
When Om Malik of GigaOM said he was breaking up with his iPhone 5 months ago because of the failures of AT&T, I must admit, I thought he was overreacting. I was wrong. — Since I switched to AT&T from Verizon just over 2 years ago to get the iPhone …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second act of a story that began at the iPhone's 2007 launch, when AT&T activations melted down and early adopters waited days for working phones (Big iPhone headache: Waiting for AT&T activation). Two years ago this week, GigaOM's Om Malik wrote his iPhone confession warning that AT&T had more problems coming — then publicly dumped his iPhone over its service.
The author of this piece switched from Verizon to AT&T just over two years ago solely to get the iPhone, and now concedes Malik was right rather than overreacting. When the most iPhone-devoted voices in tech blogging start defecting over the carrier rather than the device, that is a reputational problem for AT&T, not a one-off complaint.
First-order effects
- AT&T is absorbing public blame for the iPhone experience from precisely the influencers who championed the device — Om Malik's defection five months ago is now being echoed by another convert who chose the carrier only for the handset.
- iPhone owners on AT&T face the direct cost of the failure: unreliable service on the one US network where the phone can legally be used, since the exclusive deal leaves them no carrier alternative without leaving the platform.
Second-order effects
- Verizon, which lost the original iPhone bid, gains a ready-made pitch to defecting iPhone users — the author himself came from Verizon, making it the default landing spot for the disillusioned.
- Apple faces growing pressure around its single-carrier strategy: if AT&T's network becomes the story attached to the iPhone brand, the exclusivity deal that drove US adoption starts reading like a liability.
Third-order effects
- Exclusive handset-carrier deals are being re-priced against network capacity: as smartphones push always-on data usage onto 2007-era infrastructure, the carrier bottleneck threatens to cap the very devices it locks in, a tension regulators and rivals both have reason to probe.
The trend: Smartphone data demand is outrunning the capacity of the exclusive carriers that won flagship handsets, turning network quality into the deciding factor in carrier-device partnerships.