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AT&T to Leave Residential Business
Herve writes "Just got it from a press release on the AT&T website: 'AT&T will no longer be competing for residential local and standalone long distance customers. The company stressed that existing residential customers will continue to receive the quality service they expect from AT&T; however, the company will no longer be investing to acquire new customers in this segment.'"
I just got a holographic postcard that must have cost a buck each from them advertising their *residential* VoIP service. Maybe they don't want to raise the ire of the feds and their competitors by saying "Hey everybody we were given a thorough beating with a clue stick and now realize that digital delivery to the end user is the way to go."
The end of analog phone service is here.
This spells a desolate future for AT&T residential subscribers. When a company isn't actively going after business, they aren't actively *keeping* business, and therefore the quality of service rapidly declines until that segment is folded. I give it two years of hell and then a skillful withdrawal from the residential market.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Competition is just doing its job. :)
If you are still using AT&T for home phone service, you deserve what you get. This should give these folks the impetus to go out and shop around. Using AT&T for phone service is like using AOL or MSN for internet access (at least from a price perspective). There are soooo many better deals available, why would you even want to use AT&T?
The execs are just reading the tea leaves here, and they have decided that they can't compete. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say!
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
In the press release, ATT seems to justify this decision by saying that:
According to industry estimates, more than 40% of American households have now migrated to some combination of bundled communications services. Recent regulatory decisions make it financially infeasible for AT&T to offer a competitive bundle of services to consumers. AT&T has determined that it cannot effectively compete against bundled competition by selling only standalone LD.
Well, maybe they shouldn't have sold AT&T Broadband.
Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.
Since divestiture in the 80's, technical expertise took a second seat to
climbing the managerial org chart. PHB MBAs rose to the level of their
incompetency, and investment in the future was traded for the next quarter's
profit numbers. Real talent, the people that actually invented things and
did the creative work, either retired or left for greener pastures.
AT&T had deep enough pockets, so they could stumble around and
sell off assets for almost twenty years. It's finally reached the point that
that business model can no longer sustain itself. Shame really.
One Bell System. It Worked.
Not to mention the $150/month it cost to rent an answering machine in the mid 70's.
OTOH, those extortionate prices the government allowed them to charge came with a catch: universal phone service. AT&T had to wire every home and business that wanted phone service, anywhere in the country, no matter how much it cost. If the phone system was always the anarchic mosh pit it is today, large amounts of the country would never have been wired.
(Think of the places that still don't have cable, both remote areas too far from anything, and inner cities where the cable company isn't willing to dig up the streets to wire up the last few buildings.)
because all they're doing is substituting SBC/etc's marketing and accounting weasles for their own. It's the same network, they just give you an additional point of failure for no significant benefit.
Cell phone companies have their own networks. Cable companies doing telephone service have their own network. Reselling a regulated monopoly's service and calling it "choice" is a joke.
Hey AT&T: take your $billions and build us fiber-to-the-home (or close as you can) high-speed Internet access. THAT I'd pay for. But you've probably pissed away too much cash to do that at this point and were never smart enough to begin with.
Quality of service and AT&T in the same sentence? AT&T historically has awful customer service and it is no mistake that they are leaving the residential market. How pathetic.
This company is the father of the Linux you all love to use today.
Not necessarily. Had MIT installed a different proprietary OS in 1984, Stallman would have become fed up with its publisher's policies and would have based GNU on that rather than on UNIX, giving it a different acronym. The Christmas tree guy who wrote the Minix book would probably have cloned some other kernel as well.