I received an interesting item in my mailbox today, a 16 page magazine called “AT&T Magazine: Special iPhone Edition!” I’ve scanned some of the pages below. (Click to see larger versions.) The advertisement is aimed at current iPhone owners; the inside cover says (emphasis added by me): “Read on for the 10 reasons AT&T and your iPhone are such a prefect fit.” You can see below that a similar statement is on the cover (bottom, right) of the magazine. Thus, AT&T has decided to spend money to send out a slick magazine to current AT&T iPhone customers to try to convince them that they should use an iPhone on the AT&T network. Considering that U.S. customers can only use an iPhone on the AT&T network right now, this entire expensive campaign seems about as necessary as telling people that they should only buy an iPhone that is made by Apple — unless, of course, AT&T thinks that the iPhone is about to come to Verizon. People often ask me whether the iPhone will soon be available on Verizon, and the existance of this magazine in my mailbox tells me that AT&T thinks it might happen soon.
In case you did not (yet) get one of these yourself, here is a summary of the 10 reasons mentioned in the advertisement.
1. Our innovative network. AT&T stresses that it has the “best combination of mobile broadband performance and available services” including “an expansive Wi-Fi network and the ability to let you simultaneously talk and surf the web.”
2. Fastest network. AT&T has already upgraded cell sites and plans to spend another $18 to $19 billion.
3. Expansive network. 360 U.S. cities, 230 million people, 75% of Americans.
4. Talk & surf. Didn’t they just mention this one in #1? Of course, I can undestand why they mentioned it twice if they are worried about Verizon. One of the largest advantages of AT&T’s GSM network is that voice and data transmissions can take place at the same time. Verizon’s CDMA network can only handle one or the other at a time.
5. The Wi-Fi advantage. Didn’t they just mention this one also in #1? This repeats that AT&T has a lot of Wi-Fi Hot Spots around the country that you can use for free with an iPhone.
6. iPhone 4. AT&T touts the advantages of the iPhone 4 and iOS 4. If the point of this is to respond to a potential iPhone on Verizon, I’m not sure how this is relevant.
7. Global coverage. “With more phones that work in more places, it’s no surpise that AT&T received the award for Best Mobile Phone Coverage in the World from Business Traveler magazine.” This is another advantage of using GSM (which is popular throughout the world) versus CDMA (which is rare outside of the U.S.). So once again, this is really just a comparison to Verizon.
8. Family-friendly services. Here, AT&T touts three of its apps and four services. (1) AT&T Navigator, a GPS app for when “you’re lost on the way to a soccer game across town”; (2) AT&T FamilyMap, an app that works in conjunction with the $9.99/month AT&T service that lets you locate two family members with an AT&T phone (or $14.99/month for up to five family members) so you can “stay connected to your newly independent teens”; (3) MyWireless Mobile to manage your wireless account, (4) the ability to add lines to your plan for when “your daughter is ready for her first cell phone”; (5) rollover minutes; (6) unlimited text messages for $30/month; and (7) Smart Limits for Wireless which lets you set limtis on your kids’ web browsing and purchasing on their smartphone.
9. Forward thinking. “With 100 years of innovations, eight Nobel prizes and more than 7,000 pending and issued patents, you know you can count on AT&T to stay on the cutting edge.”
10. Sustainable solutions. Touts some of the envonmental initiatives of AT&T such as recycling and power saving.
I get the feeling that AT&T came up with the number “ten” first and then figured out later how to match up its services with that number, even at the risk of repeating itself, although to be fair many of the listed features are true advantages of AT&T over Verizon. Again, however, what I really got from this advertisement is the feeling that AT&T believes that we are close to a day when Apple offers a Verizon iPhone. The fact that I received this advertisement today doesn’t necessary mean that a Verizon iPhone will happen in the next month, next year, or even next decade. But I can’t imagine why AT&T would send this out unless the possibility was real and on the short-term horizon.
While the iPhone is a wonderful gadget when it works (and yes I am a devoted iPhone 4 user), AT&T’s service has left many big city users (NY, LA, etc) feeling like third class citizens of the mobile nation. As such it has become rather easy to “hack” the iPhone to other networks like T-mobile. I suspect that the idea of being off AT&T’s leash is the main reason why AT&T would want to sell its otherwise exclusive network to its already locked in device owner. While AT&T and apple tolerate you as a customer, making a “jailbreak”, as it is referred to, has them really treating users like fugitives – using a mixutre of honey (like the above mentioned sell piece), and vinegar (in the form of vioding all warranties and Apple withdrawing support for your device) to bring you back into the warm comfortable fold of medicore signal reception and marginally buggy devices. When we all watched that revolutionary “1984” apple commercial, who the sledgehammer was really being thrown through an apple computer…..
Sent from my iPhone
I think folks that are waiting for Verizon to “save the day” are going to be disappointed. If iPhone comes to Verizon, there will be the initial euphoria then the complaints will being. I’ve had Verizon (with a b’berry) and found the coverage no better or worse than I have with AT&T now — I’m in the Southeast US. Perhaps large urban centers (NY, LA) will see some improvement, but it will be fleeting. I just took a trip us the I-85 corridor with my iPhone and a Verizon broadband card for my laptop. I consistently had better 3G coverage on the iPhone than I did on the broadband card.
At the end of the day, the real problem is that the US, despite being technologically advanced in most areas, has a generally poor national wireless system, and its seems to get worse each year. Throttling bandwidth and tiered pricing to slow down consumption is something one would expect for a 2nd or 3rd tier nation. And it’s not any of this demand snuck up on the cell carriers — you remember the dot com 90’s? Everything was about mobile device content, even though mobile devices of the day couldn’t do much. So here we are 2 decades later, the mobile devices have caught up, the content providers have caught up, but our wireless networks have not. So who’s to blame for that?