Friday, January 19, 2007
Unity Will Put Brakes on Wireline Defections
Wasting no time at all since it gained full control of Cingular, at&t is creating one of the largest communities the communications industry has ever seen, in the form of 100 million phone and wireless accounts. at&t Unity, a pricing package that allows its cellular customers to call any AT&T landline customer without incurring additional usage fees or using their wireless minutes, expands the wireless "friends and family" concept to friends, family, business partners and people you don't know."
This is the same company that has an exclusive right to sell the Apple iPhone as well. Unity is available on all wireless plans of at least $59.99 a month.
To subscribe to a at&t Unity plan, a customer would need to have at&t wireless service as well as an at&t landline plan that offered unlimited local and long-distance service. AT&T’s unlimited local and long-distance landline service starts at $40 a month if bought online.
Actions such as this are one reason why even astute cable companies and independent VoIP providers won't be able to keep ripping landline customers away from at&t at high rates forever. At some point, it was inevitable that at&t and other similarly-situated firms would bundle their wireline assets in ways that would compel customers to keep their POTS lines.
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
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