Tuesday, November 1, 2011

The future? AT&T puts texting before voice

In February, AT&T began offering unlimited mobile to mobile minutes with some of its voice plans.  Then in August, the giant US operator rolled out unlimited texting plans for the vast majority of its customers (who still have the option of paying per text).

In this ad from September, AT&T combined the two:


This flips our traditional way of looking at voice and texting upside down, by putting voice on top of texting.

Is this the new way forward?  Has voice really become less important than texting?

While AT&T used some humor to push this big step, the commercial above hasn't gone over that well with some viewers, who think the wife is too hard on the earnest husband.
Posted by The Voice on Telecom at 9:51 AM
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3 comments:

  1. AnonymousNovember 1, 2011 at 4:13 PM

    Texting should be free, considering how little it costs the operators to provide it. Check out the research of Professor Srinivasan Keshav (University of Waterloo, Ontario.) He's shown that as texting requires so little of a mobile network's infrastructure, the related operator costs basically round to zero.

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  2. The Voice on TelecomNovember 2, 2011 at 11:45 AM

    And texting is certainly heading towards free, isn't it? WhatsApp just said that there were a billion messages a day going through its app. So what can operators do to differentiate their texts?

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousNovember 3, 2011 at 7:36 AM

    Good question. Operators trying to differentiate a service that they give away for free will incur only costs...

    ReplyDelete

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