No longer the exclusive iPhone carrier, AT&T is frequently knocked as a poor carrier with lousy wireless service, but if you ask their CEO, it sounds a bit like the customers are the ones taking advantage of them.
The New York Times published an interesting report over the weekend which sheds some light on controversial decisions made by AT&T, such as ditching the unlimited data plans that made the iPhone so popular in the first place. As it turns out, the company's CEO would have made the move much earlier -- or in hindsight, maybe not at all.
"My only regret was how we introduced pricing in the beginning, because how did we introduce pricing? Thirty dollars and you get all you can eat," AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said during an on-stage interview last week at the Milken Institute's Global Conference. "And it's a variable cost model. Every additional megabyte you use in this network, I have to invest capital."
Unlimited data plans have been dead for nearly two years now, and the capped packages that replaced them are clearly working out for the carrier, who reported $6.1 billion in revenue from mobile data alone in Q1 2012 -- particularly since 70 percent of the people using them are "paying for the more expensive options."
Stephenson is equally regretful about "disruptive" new technologies such as Apple's iMessage or Microsoft's Skype, both of which the CEO consider a threat to their current business.
"You lie awake at night worrying about what is that which will disrupt your business model," the CEO elaborated. "Apple iMessage is a classic example. If you're using iMessage, you're not using one of our messaging services, right? That's disruptive to our messaging revenue stream."
These complaints aside, Stephenson has no such regrets about the "unique opportunity" to become the first carrier for the iPhone -- despite the company's board of directors being nervous about the handset possibly transforming the carrier's business model.
"I remember asking the question: Are we investing in a business model, are we investing in a product or are we investing in Steve Jobs?" Stephenson concludes. "The answer to the question was, you're investing in Steve Jobs. Let's go after this thing. And we went after it, and the rest is history."
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