Your wireless data options are soon to be both more diverse and expensive. Why? Apps and capabilities are creating a usage shift from voice to data on phones. The mobile operating system /device landscape isn’t evolving; it’s morphing.It won’t be long before the complaints voiced about AT&T’s mobile network will be repeated across all mobile network providers as downloading huge chunks of data will far outpace voice calling. Read more…

AT&T apparently has woken up and recognized the impact smartphone users – especially iPhones – are having on their wireless data network. See W. David Gardner’s piece in today’s InfoWeek; even PBS’ Nightly Business Report mentioned it. Incredibly, those pesky iPhone users are sucking up all the bandwidth in places like New York and San Francisco. Uh, guys, remember all those ads that said, ‘there’s an app for that’? Didn’t it occur to anyone in the room that the unprecedented proliferation of iPhones and all its capabilities would have a proportionate Internet demand?

Read more…

Recently, a friend of mine who works at big blue told me on the quiet that AT&T had a major reduction in force – like 10%. I checked it out with a few other sources within AT&T in different cities and it appears to be true. In the first few days of November, as the word goes, managers were calling employees to let them know if they made it or not. Apparently, several weeks before when AT&T was sharing its earnings internally, the word was that there would be big cuts coming before the end of the year. Well…

Interestingly, both Sprint and Verizon have been steadily releasing their numbers in drips and drabs over the last few months. Perhaps the media has lost its appetite for this kind of news. Anyone left out in the cold who can confirm this?

By the way, my condolences to anyone who got shook out of the trees.

The first round of true openness in the wireless world seems to have arrived in the same week. AT&T and Apple will play nice and allow Google Voice calls to be processed on the iPhone; a headline that has included ‘FCC’  for weeks now. The focus of that discussion should shift from who really blocked it to Read more…