Get ready to pay more if you use a lot of mobile data, as AT&T’s Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson said the second largest U.S. carrier may have to implement tiered pricing in order to better manage its network.
Speaking at a Morgan Stanley conference Tuesday, Stephenson said 40% of the company’s network capacity is being used by 3% of its smartphone users and these subscribers would inevitably have to pay more. This is actually on par with what other bigwigs in the company have been saying and I agree with it to a certain point. If you use a jailbroken iPhone to tether and torrent all day, then maybe you should be charged a bit more. What sticks in my craw is that we’re all paying for “unlimited” data even though you only get 5GB a month. A fair tiered-pricing model with proper data measurement tools could wind up saving a lot of people money, but I have a sneaking suspicion we won’t see massive price drops.
Despite all the guff AT&T gets from iPhone users in New York and San Francisco, the company has poured billions into its 3G infrastructure and this appears to be paying off. A recent performance test from PCWorld rated AT&T as the best overall carrier for mobile data and Stephenson said he expects the company’s 3G network to be “sufficient to handle data traffic for the next few years.” Rivals Sprint and Verizon are rushing to deploy 4G networks but Stephenson said AT&T is sticking with its plans to roll out 4G based on Long-Term Evolution technology in 2011.
As for the iPhone, Stephenson expects it to be a strong part of AT&T’s business for a long time but wouldn’t definitively say it will remain exclusive over the long haul. Apple’s smartphone has poached away millions of lucrative customers over the last few years, so if I were AT&T, I would bend over backwards to keep Steve Jobs happy.
AT&T will also be the exclusive provider of U.S. mobile data for the upcoming iPad but Stephenson expects the majority of users will use the tablet on WiFi. This makes a lot of sense because the WiFi-only version will be about $130 cheaper and the iPad isn’t the most portable of devices.
[Via AppleInsider]