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| AT&T's Siegal: Our DSL Network Sucks. He's Lying, I Believe |
| Sunday, 13 March 2011 17:55 |
 Mark Siegal, AT&T's top flack, hung up the phone on me when I said his comment to the Wall Street Journal was apparently a lie. It's prohibitively unlikely their DSL cap "is to ensure the quality of the customer experience" necessary to solve "congestion in certain points of the network and interfering with other people's access." I'm certain that far less than 1% of the time do AT&T DSL customers have any impact from congestion. I'm pretty confident it's less than 1/10th of 1% and probably less than 1/100th of 1%. My sources that wireline congestion on AT&T is minimal include statements from two CTOs of the company. Cheng, now a veteran in D.C., knew the comment was misleading at best. A mantra in D.C. is "wireline may not have congestion but wireless is different." It was Sunday and perhaps hard to factcheck, but he'll easily confirm the problem on Monday. AT&T has long maintained they have a more robust network and cable is the one with "bandwidth hog" problems. But Comcast's cap was 60% higher than AT&T and Comcast has said they will raise it. T has gone 13 years without caps on their DSL network because they said they didn't need them. Traffic growth is actually down slightly (Cisco, Odlyzko) so there's only one reason to impose caps now: their video service, U-Verse, has become a $5B business. They don't want people to be able to cut the cord and watch all their video over the net. 150 gigabytes is 40-80 hours of U-Verse quality TV, far less than the average U-Verse user watches.
Mike Powell, conservative Republican deregulator, hit the ceiling when AT&T (then called SBC) wanted to limit user's video choices. Here's how I reported it then:
"SBC does not plan to give meaningful preference (in terms of bandwidth allocation) to any particular video service or video content provider. We don't plan to limit access from computers or give bandwidth preference to content."—Michael Coe, speaking for SBC on the record.
SBC's commitment to an open network, above, may prove the most important two sentences ever published in DSL Prime. This story goes beyond business and technology, to the heart of freedom of speech. Mike Powell's finest moment was when he affirmed, "consumers should have access to their choice of legal content." I pressed SBC for a clear statement, because the WSJ reported, "SBC and EchoStar plan to restrict the box's Internet access to just a few movie and music sites." Almar Latour, Andy Pasztor, and Peter Grant made the issue clear "Giving subscribers broad access to the Web could make it less likely they would pay extra for premium channels such as HBO and Showtime sold by Dish Network." The same Journal article infuriated the highest levels of the FCC, I learned at the PFF Aspen conference.
In the next issue of Future of TV, Jennie will report Larry Babbio's comments, including business reasons to offer the world's best choice of video on his network. Some telcos, we fear, will instead try to recreate a cable style "walled garden" through QOS and other technical mechanisms. Their technical and business planners are deaf, dumb, and blind to the fear of "media concentration," a hot issue in Rome, London, and Washington D.C.
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I kept Powell's name off the record back then as a courtesy, but seven years later I can set the record straight. In 2005, Kevin Martin discussed with me the issue of what he would do if AT&T favored U-Verse. I believe he felt he would have to act, but at that point hoped competition would prevent him from facing that decision. Now AT&T's multi-million dollar uber-lobbyist Jim Cicconi has presumably told them Julius Genachowski is sufficiently under control he won't do anything about this.
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| Last Updated on Monday, 21 March 2011 21:58 |