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from: Silicon Valley

June 19, 2006

AT&T: Let your middle finger do the talking

“The commission vote demonstrates a recognition that the merger of SBC and AT&T will enhance competition, help bring new technologies to market faster, and provide real benefits to consumers and businesses. We commend the commission, under the leadership of Chairman Martin, for recognizing the reality of today’s communications marketplace and for fostering an environment where there will be greater choice in communications services and providers.”
– Ed Whitacre, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of AT&T, Oct 31, 2005

AT&T has finally begun offering "naked DSL" - broadband access free of an attached telephone voice service - and it's not nearly as "onerous" a merger condition as the telecom would have once had us believe. How could it be, when the difference in price between a DSL/telephone service bundle and naked DSL is just $1? That's right, $1. AT&T was required by the FCC to unbundle DSL from its phone service in order to win approval of its merger with SBC. Now the company is charging $44.99 a month for standalone DSL. That's about a dollar less than the $46 it charges for its cheapest regular bundle of DSL and phone service.

AT&T insists its post-merger pricing scheme accurately reflects the real cost of DSL and that this isn't a brazen end run around the FCC, which presumably hoped its naked DSL mandate would bring consumers some small degree of cost savings and perhaps even open up the market to increased competition from Voice over IP providers.

"Bundled services continue to deliver the greatest value to consumers," AT&T spokesman John Britton told The San Francisco Chronicle, apparently with a straight face. "Most standalone services will have higher prices than bundled service." Clearly AT& T is intent on forcing telecommunications packages on its customers regardless of their needs. As Mindy Spatt, spokeswoman for The Utility Reform Network notes, AT&T's new pricing scheme seems calculated to discourage people from dropping their phone service. "AT&T only wants to sell bundles of services at the price they choose," she said. "It goes back to their model of, 'We don't care. We don't have to offer what consumers want. We control it all.' " Indeed it does. Which begs the question: how can we ever trust companies like AT&T on the issue of Net neutrality when they are so obviously intent on re-monopolizing the telecommunications market?

Posted by John Paczkowski on 05:37 AM