According to Variety, AT&T’s pay-TV business has lost a record 351, 000 traditional video customers in the second quarter, with the internet-delivered DirecTV Now service failing to fully offset the losses. From the report: In Q2, historically a seasonally weak period for the pay-TV business, DirecTV’s U.S. satellite division lost 156, 000 customers sequentially, dropping to 20.86 million, compared with a gain of 342, 000 in the year-earlier quarter. AT&T’s U-verse lost 195, 000 subs in the quarter, which was actually an improvement over the 391, 000 it lost in Q2 of 2016. AT&T touted that it gained 152, 000 DirecTV Now customers in Q2, after adding just 72, 000 in the first quarter of 2017. Overall, it had signed up 491, 000 DirecTV Now subs as of the end of June, after the OTT service launched seven months ago. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Tag: at&t
AT&T will launch 5G wireless in two cities this year
AT&T’s 5G wireless network just got much more tangible. The carrier has announced that its ultra-fast wireless will launch in two cities, Austin and Indianapolis, sometime later in 2017. And while it’s still early days, the company is confident enough to set some performance expectations. Initially, these 5G areas will deliver peak speeds of 400Mbps or better. And there’s definite room for it to grow — carrier aggregation and other techniques should push that to 1Gbps in “some areas” this year. The rollout is part of a larger network platform upgrade, nicknamed Indigo, that promises to be more adaptable and responsive. It’ll put more of an emphasis on software-shaped networking (covering 75 percent of the network by 2020) and lean on technologies like machine learning. AT&T is even open-sourcing the code for its network’s orchestration platform, ECOMP. Don’t expect to walk into a store and buy the 5G phone of your choosing once the service is ready. There’s still no 5G standard , for one thing. Also, new cellular wireless technology tends to launch with very limited hardware choices. Remember how Verizon launched LTE with a handful of bulky, compromised phones , and you were more likely to use it in modems and mobile routers? Expect a repeat. Until the technology has had time to mature, it’ll be more of a showcase for the network than a meaningful upgrade. Source: AT&T Newsroom
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AT&T will launch 5G wireless in two cities this year
AT&T no longer works with your 2G phone
We hope you weren’t planning to use your old-school iPhone or BlackBerry Pearl on AT&T’s network for nostalgia’s sake — unfortunately, you’re not going to get anywhere. As promised way back in 2012 , the carrier has confirmed that it shut down 2G services on January 1st, 2017. If your phone only makes GSM calls and uses EDGE for data, you’re stuck. The move won’t hurt very many people (even basic phones have been using 3G and LTE for years), but it’s hard not to shed a little tear for a technology that had been around for so long. As it stands, you probably won’t mind much given what AT&T has in store. It’ll repurpose that newly freed spectrum for LTE, and the move will ultimately create more headroom for 5G wireless . Just as with the end to analog cell service , the small sacrifice you make now will likely pay much larger dividends down the road. The shutdown is also a reminder of just how far mobile data has come since 2G hit the scene (in the US, at the turn of the millennium). EDGE was considered fine at a time when any mobile data was a relative novelty, and the most you did with it was check email or surf the most basic of websites. Now, even a modestly-sized app or photo download would absolutely crush 2G — the modern mobile internet depends on speeds that are orders of magnitude faster. We can only imagine what it’ll be like when 3G bites the dust and LTE is considered the baseline. Via: The Verge Source: AT&T
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AT&T no longer works with your 2G phone
AT&T Wants to Sell You a Hundred Streaming Channels for $35 a Month
AT&T—the same people trying to buy Time Warner—announced Tuesday that it will be launching an online-only TV service dubbed DirecTV Now . It’s cheaper than cable, too. Read more…
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AT&T Wants to Sell You a Hundred Streaming Channels for $35 a Month
AT&T Gigabit Internet Coming To 11 More US Regions
AT&T is bringing its gigabit Internet service to 11 new metro areas. Currently available in parts of 29 cities around the country, the ultra-fast network — which the company is now calling AT&T Fiber — is expected to reach another 45 locations by the end of this year, reads a PCMag article. From the report: That includes 11 new markets: Florida: Gainesville and Panama City, Georgia: Columbus, Kentucky: Central Kentucky, Louisiana: Lafayette, Mississippi: Biloxi-Gulfport and Northeast Mississippi, Tennessee: Southeastern Tennessee and Knoxville, and Texas: Corpus Christi. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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AT&T Gigabit Internet Coming To 11 More US Regions
AT&T Wants to Blanket the Nation With Gigabit Wi-Fi From Utility Poles
Fiber-based internet service is great (ask any jealous New Yorker not eligible for FiOS) but laying fiber cable costs tens of thousands of dollars per mile. Infrastructure projects to bring it to every household in a given area so expensive, even Google can’t foot the bill . So AT&T decided to use stuff most places had already to piggyback a wi-fi signal. Read more…
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AT&T Wants to Blanket the Nation With Gigabit Wi-Fi From Utility Poles
Next Generation of Wireless — 5G — Is All Hype
Many people have promised us that 5G will be here very soon. And it will be the best thing ever. To quote Lowell McAdam, the CEO of Verizon, 5G is “wireless fiber, ” and to quote SK Telecom, thanks to 5G we will soon be able to “transfer holograms” because the upcoming standard is “100 times faster” than our current communications system 4G LTE. But if we were to quote Science, the distant future isn’t nearly as lofty as the one promised by executives. Backchannel explains: “5G” is a marketing term. There is no 5G standard — yet. The International Telecommunications Union plans to have standards ready by 2020. So for the moment “5G” refers to a handful of different kinds of technologies that are predicted, but not guaranteed, to emerge at some point in the next 3 to 7 years. (3GPP, a carrier consortium that will be contributing to the ITU process, said last year that until an actual standard exists, ‘”5G’ will remain a marketing & industry term that companies will use as they see fit.” At least they’re candid.) At the moment, advertising something as “5G” carries no greater significance than saying it’s “blazing fast” or “next generation” — nut because “5G” sounds technical, it’s good for sales. We are a long way away from actual deployment. Second, this “wireless fiber” will never happen unless we have… more fiber. Real fiber, in the form of fiber optic cables reaching businesses and homes. (This is the “last mile” problem; fiber already runs between cities.) It’s just plain physics. In order to work, 99% of any “5G” wireless deployment will have to be fiber running very close to every home and business. The high-frequency spectrum the carriers are planning to use wobbles billions of times a second but travels incredibly short distances and gets interfered with easily. So it’s great at carrying loads of information — every wobble can be imprinted with data — but can’t go very far at all. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Next Generation of Wireless — 5G — Is All Hype
Netflix is the one limiting its video quality on AT&T and Verizon
Last week as T-Mobile CEO John Legere announced that his company’s Binge On program would expand to cover YouTube, he mentioned a strange point: that even the “mobile optimized” 480p Netflix streams T-Mobile offers were higher-res than what you get streaming via AT&T or Verizon. Executives from those companies said they don’t reduce the resolution of videos on their networks, although tests revealed that Legere was right — Netflix does only stream at 360p on AT&T and Verizon. Now the Wall Street Journal has reported that the culprit behind this restriction was actually Netflix itself. 7/ @TMobile has been listening to customers and thanks to a little partnership, @YouTube is now a #BingeOn partner! https://t.co/VQVZoM86Jh — John Legere (@JohnLegere) March 17, 2016 In an odd wrinkle on net neutrality discussions over whether or not broadband providers might restrict video quality of streaming companies they compete with, Netflix chose to limit its own quality on those two networks. Through a blog post and statements to WSJ , Netflix explains that it set a cap at 600kbps to avoid using up too much data under the caps set by those providers for their customers. Sprint and T-Mobile were apparently exempt because of a history of “more consumer friendly policies.” It all makes sense considering how quickly users can chew through bandwidth caps with HD video on mobile, although it seems odd that it wasn’t made clear until now. According to Netflix, this hasn’t been an issue for its users, who are more concerned about saving bandwidth than quality. However, it will soon introduce a “data saver” feature on its mobile apps to let users choose what bandwidth they want to stream over cellular networks — just in case you’re willing to burn a few GB so you can actually see what’s going on in Daredevil . Source: Netflix Blog , Wall Street Journal
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Netflix is the one limiting its video quality on AT&T and Verizon
AT&T matches Verizon’s $650 offer to swap carriers
AT&T has announced that it’ll hand you up to $650 in credit should you choose to switch from another mobile carrier. If you’re prepared to jump through the various hurdles, you’ll be entitled to a pre-paid gift card equal to the value of your ETF or device balance. In addition, the network is letting you pair the deal with its buy one, get one free offer, enabling you to grab two shiny new devices at the same time. The offering is the latest in a long series of credit offers, with Verizon pushing its own offer to $650 last December . America’s mobile market is now so saturated that customers that are willing to switch provider are worth their weight in gold. At first, it was just ETF-based skirmishes between T-Mobil e and AT&T , but things really warmed up when device subsidies went out the window. Then, every network was using its spare cash to get you out from under the yoke of their rivals . It wasn’t long before everyone was escalating the amount of money they’d promise you, and now $650 seems to be the new normal . Of course, the question we feel we have to ask is: how sustainable is all of this? Source: AT&T
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AT&T matches Verizon’s $650 offer to swap carriers
AT&T Brings Back Unlimited Data
For the first time in ages , AT&T will offer customers an unlimited data plan. The catch? You need to pay for TV service as well. Read more…
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AT&T Brings Back Unlimited Data