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AT&T has been a real pain in the ass lately, what with trying to do in public, educational and government access television, trying to strip local governments of local control over their own local rights-of-way and helping the Bush Misadministration spy on American citizens.
The question you have to ask yourself now is: do I really want to give my hard earned cash to AT&T?
Oh, and whatever happened to that whole anti-trust breakup of AT&T, the great telephone monopoly? They've merged with BellSouth and then with SBC. And apparently the Bush Administration has let AT&T use its monopolistic ways to exploit American troops in Iraq because we all know the government doesn't exploit and rip-off them and their families enough as it is.
From: Networking and Telecom Blog
http://techsearch.cmp.com/blog/archives/2006/04/att_let_us_sell.html?loc=networking_and_telecom
AT&T: Let Us Sell You Video Access Or We'll Sue
AT&T has come up with a unique approach to getting people to sign up for its Project Lightspeed video service: Sue the bejesus out of any city or town that doesn't immediately accede to the company's demands for tearing up its street to lay down fiber.
AT&T is suing three Chicago suburbs -- Roselle, Wheaton and Carpentersville -- because the towns haven't yet given rights of way for Project Lightspeed to dig up municipal streets. Project Lightspeed is a multi-billion dollar fiber upgrade that will let AT&T sell video service to homes.
The towns haven't actually said that AT&T won't be able to deploy fiber. Roselle and Wheaton have in place 180-day waiting periods before they allow the construction permits to be filed. Carpentersville requires that AT&T get a local video franchise before it can build out the network -- the same requirements that cable companies have.
But that's not good enough for AT&T, and so the company is suing the towns.
Call me crazy, but I don't think that suing potential customers is the best way to drum up business.
I'm not alone in thinking this. Brian Washburn of Current Analysis has issued a report warning that the bad PR resulting from the suits will hurt AT&T in the long run.
"Dragging the case through the courts will end up an expensive, time-consuming battle that presents AT&T as a $43.8-billion schoolyard bully that beats up little townships because they do not hand their lunch money over fast enough," he told Telephony Online.
He added, "AT&T can do much more damage to its name and image nationwide than it will ever recoup from serving these small Chicago suburbs. On top of that, AT&T stands to poison its brand in the very communities that would buy its services."
Of course, with everything else AT&T is doing these days, like letting the NSA snoop on millions of its customers, the brand is poison anyway, so maybe AT&T figures it has nothing to lose.
From: Wired
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70619-0.html
Whistle-Blower Outs NSA Spy Room
AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full access to its customers' phone calls, and shunted its customers' internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against the company.
Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician, submitted an affidavit in support of the EFF's lawsuit this week. That class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco last January, alleges that AT&T violated federal and state laws by surreptitiously allowing the government to monitor phone and internet communications of AT&T customers without warrants.
On Wednesday, the EFF asked the court to issue an injunction prohibiting AT&T from continuing the alleged wiretapping, and filed a number of documents under seal, including three AT&T documents that purportedly explain how the wiretapping system works.
According to a statement released by Klein's attorney, an NSA agent showed up at the San Francisco switching center in 2002 to interview a management-level technician for a special job. In January 2003, Klein observed a new room being built adjacent to the room housing AT&T's #4ESS switching equipment, which is responsible for routing long distance and international calls.
"I learned that the person whom the NSA interviewed for the secret job was the person working to install equipment in this room," Klein wrote. "The regular technician work force was not allowed in the room."
Klein's job eventually included connecting internet circuits to a splitting cabinet that led to the secret room. During the course of that work, he learned from a co-worker that similar cabinets were being installed in other cities, including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego.
"While doing my job, I learned that fiber optic cables from the secret room were tapping into the Worldnet (AT&T's internet service) circuits by splitting off a portion of the light signal," Klein wrote.
The split circuits included traffic from peering links connecting to other internet backbone providers, meaning that AT&T was also diverting traffic routed from its network to or from other domestic and international providers, according to Klein's statement.
The secret room also included data-mining equipment called a Narus STA 6400, "known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets," according to Klein's statement.
Narus, whose website touts AT&T as a client, sells software to help internet service providers and telecoms monitor and manage their networks, look for intrusions, and wiretap phone calls as mandated by federal law.
Klein said he came forward because he does not believe that the Bush administration is being truthful about the extent of its extrajudicial monitoring of Americans' communications.
"Despite what we are hearing, and considering the public track record of this administration, I simply do not believe their claims that the NSA's spying program is really limited to foreign communications or is otherwise consistent with the NSA's charter or with FISA," Klein's wrote. "And unlike the controversy over targeted wiretaps of individuals' phone calls, this potential spying appears to be applied wholesale to all sorts of internet communications of countless citizens."
After asking for a preview copy of the documents last week, the government did not object to the EFF filing the paper under seal, although the EFF asked the court Wednesday to make the documents public.
One of the documents is titled "Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco," and is dated 2002. The others are allegedly a design document instructing technicians how to wire up the taps, and a document that describes the equipment installed in the secret room.
In a letter to the EFF, AT&T objected to the filing of the documents in any manner, saying that they contain sensitive trade secrets and could be "could be used to 'hack' into the AT&T network, compromising its integrity."
According to court rules, AT&T has until Thursday to file a motion to keep the documents sealed. The government could also step in to the case and request that the documents not be made public, or even that the entire lawsuit be barred under the seldom-used State Secrets Privilege.
AT&T spokesman Walt Sharp declined to comment on the allegations, citing a company policy of not commenting on litigation or matters of national security, but did say that "AT&T follows all laws following requests for assistance from government authorities."
From: GigaOM
http://gigaom.com/2006/03/14/how-big-is-att
How Big is AT&T?
The post-BellSouth merger AT&T is going to be one honking company… but do you know how big? It will control 22% of all consumer dollars spent on telecom services (including video services) and 34% of dollars spent in the business market. Yeah… that big, according to a study by TNS Telecom, a telecom consulting group. The study points out that after the deal is closed, three of the nation’s top telecom providers - AT&T, Verizon and Comcast - will control 49% of the total consumer market and in the business market AT&T and Verizon will represent 55% of spending. The funny thing is that they are not even calculating the future scenarios… but clearly the big are getting bigger, if not better ;-)
How does it stack up internationally? Folks at Telegeography crunched some numbers and says while the company would be the largest in the US, it would be the third largest behind China Telecom and China Netcom; ninth largest wireless operator behind multinational groups such as Vodafone and would have only one-third of the broadband subscriber base of China Telecom. Further, in terms of revenue, the new AT&T’s $69.4 billion in 2005 revenues are far from Japanese giant NTT that raked in $99.9 billion.
From: Fractals of Change
http://blog.tomevslin.com/2006/03/att_is_ripping_.html
AT&T is Ripping Off American Soldiers
It’s bad enough that they overcharge domestic customers but we have alternatives. The soldiers don’t because, according to The Prepaid Press, AT&T has an EXCLUSIVE contract to put payphones in PXes in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, you ask, can’t the soldiers get cheap calling cards to call the US? No! Because AT&T is using (abusing!) its position as monopoly supplier of payphones to block the 800 numbers necessary to use nonAT&T calling cards.
This blocking is illegal in the US but, AT&T told our friend Gene Retske, editor of The Prepaid Press, the rules are different in Iraq. Right.
The soldiers could probably call cheaper if they used Iraqi pay phones. But, assuming there are any working payphones on the streets of Iraq, it’s still not a good idea for American soldiers to be standing on the corners talking on them. That’s why there are phones in PXes. Too bad the soldiers have to pay $.21/minute to call home on them.
The wholesale rate for calls to the US is less than one cent a minute. Skype charges about 1.5 two euro cents RETAIL to call the US from anywhere in the world. You can buy prepaid cards almost anywhere in the world to call the US for less than two cents a minute. AT&T charges soldiers in Iraq twenty-one cents.
Since AT&T isn’t very good at using the Internet, it may cost them another penny to get the calls back from Iraq to the US over traditional circuits. They argue that payphones cost money to put in (BTW, I have nothing but respect for whomever went to Iraq to install the payphones). Of course, you’re not supposed to recover the cost of payphones by overcharging for a calling card; that’s called doubledipping and abuse of monopoly power.
So let’s say AT&T, since it’s not very efficient, has three cents a minute of cost. How does that justify charging the soldiers twenty-one cents?
I asked Gene if the soldiers could simply use Skype on computers or Vonage ATAs. He said his son’s experience was that the IP available to the troops (which is not provided by AT&T) is barely adequate for email so not an option for voice.
Mary and I first became aware of the AT&T rates when we got a VFW solicitation to buy AT&T calling cards as gifts for soldiers – that’s a nice idea. But we’re old telco folk so we looked at the price per minute. Did I mention that it’s twenty-one cents? That’s a gift to AT&T.
A source familiar with the VFW’s efforts to help soldiers call home told Mary that they had run a test with another carrier which supplied cheaper minutes but AT&T was using their position as payphone provider to exact a $1.50 per call surcharge (note that this is different than reports of AT&T blocking other carriers completely. We can’t independently resolve this apparent contradiction. It is possible they took different steps at different time but I don’t know that). Also according to our source, who wishes to remain anonymous, VFW is looking at making a deal with a company which operates Internet cafes in two Iraqi cities where AT&T doesn’t have a presence. They are talking about four cent a minute calls, much more reasonable although still, I’m sure, quite profitable.
That’s when we emailed Gene.
Turns out his son was in Iraq and he was already on the story. Gene understands the economics of the prepaid business better than anyone I know. He contacted his congressmen and senators. They said they’d look into but went no further than the first bland excuses from the FCC and DoD. This isn’t Halliburton ripping off taxpayers, you know; it’s AT&T ripping off the soldiers directly. The Prepaid Press article last year estimated AT&T’s take at $46 million/year – peanuts in their grand scheme of things.
If I sound foaming-at-the-mouth mad it’s because I am.
The Newark Star Ledger did some investigative reporting following up on Gene’s lead. Their embed reporter, Wayne Wolley is the one who calculated the twenty-one cent a minute rate; charging on the card is not exactly straightforward. Some more congressmen said they would look into it. No action. You suppose the inaction has anything to do with lobbies and PAC contributions?
But there is some hope according to the latest article in the Feb. 15 issue of ThePrepaid Press. The American Legion does listen to complaints from soldiers. Jeanne Gilbert, the Co-Chairman of Public Relations for the American Legion Department of New York State, is leading an effort there to gather the information on the ripoffs from soldiers’ reports and blogs. The goal is a resolution at the national convention in June.
The Prepaid Press quotes Gilbert as saying: “With the resolution put in place and passed. The American Legion will vigorously go through the legislative process. I feel it the American Legion’s responsibility, at the very least, to inform the citizens of the United States of exactly what is going on when they are going to the stores to purchase these products, even knowing that AT&T is the only game in town right now, and what they are buying.”
Of course, now that at&t wants to extend its monopoly over more of the country, it’s a good time to ask how at&t uses monopoly power.
To be fair, this all started in the old AT&T – the one with capital letters. Ed Whitacre and the old SBC may well not have known this was happening when they bought the company. So the questions to him are: now that you know, what are you going to do about it? lower prices? give rebates? assure that such things never happen again?
These would all be good questions to ask in hearings.
The question you have to ask yourself now is: do I really want to give my hard earned cash to AT&T?
Oh, and whatever happened to that whole anti-trust breakup of AT&T, the great telephone monopoly? They've merged with BellSouth and then with SBC. And apparently the Bush Administration has let AT&T use its monopolistic ways to exploit American troops in Iraq because we all know the government doesn't exploit and rip-off them and their families enough as it is.
From: Networking and Telecom Blog
http://techsearch.cmp.com/blog/archives/2006/04/att_let_us_sell.html?loc=networking_and_telecom
AT&T: Let Us Sell You Video Access Or We'll Sue
AT&T has come up with a unique approach to getting people to sign up for its Project Lightspeed video service: Sue the bejesus out of any city or town that doesn't immediately accede to the company's demands for tearing up its street to lay down fiber.
AT&T is suing three Chicago suburbs -- Roselle, Wheaton and Carpentersville -- because the towns haven't yet given rights of way for Project Lightspeed to dig up municipal streets. Project Lightspeed is a multi-billion dollar fiber upgrade that will let AT&T sell video service to homes.
The towns haven't actually said that AT&T won't be able to deploy fiber. Roselle and Wheaton have in place 180-day waiting periods before they allow the construction permits to be filed. Carpentersville requires that AT&T get a local video franchise before it can build out the network -- the same requirements that cable companies have.
But that's not good enough for AT&T, and so the company is suing the towns.
Call me crazy, but I don't think that suing potential customers is the best way to drum up business.
I'm not alone in thinking this. Brian Washburn of Current Analysis has issued a report warning that the bad PR resulting from the suits will hurt AT&T in the long run.
"Dragging the case through the courts will end up an expensive, time-consuming battle that presents AT&T as a $43.8-billion schoolyard bully that beats up little townships because they do not hand their lunch money over fast enough," he told Telephony Online.
He added, "AT&T can do much more damage to its name and image nationwide than it will ever recoup from serving these small Chicago suburbs. On top of that, AT&T stands to poison its brand in the very communities that would buy its services."
Of course, with everything else AT&T is doing these days, like letting the NSA snoop on millions of its customers, the brand is poison anyway, so maybe AT&T figures it has nothing to lose.
From: Wired
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70619-0.html
Whistle-Blower Outs NSA Spy Room
AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full access to its customers' phone calls, and shunted its customers' internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against the company.
Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician, submitted an affidavit in support of the EFF's lawsuit this week. That class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco last January, alleges that AT&T violated federal and state laws by surreptitiously allowing the government to monitor phone and internet communications of AT&T customers without warrants.
On Wednesday, the EFF asked the court to issue an injunction prohibiting AT&T from continuing the alleged wiretapping, and filed a number of documents under seal, including three AT&T documents that purportedly explain how the wiretapping system works.
According to a statement released by Klein's attorney, an NSA agent showed up at the San Francisco switching center in 2002 to interview a management-level technician for a special job. In January 2003, Klein observed a new room being built adjacent to the room housing AT&T's #4ESS switching equipment, which is responsible for routing long distance and international calls.
"I learned that the person whom the NSA interviewed for the secret job was the person working to install equipment in this room," Klein wrote. "The regular technician work force was not allowed in the room."
Klein's job eventually included connecting internet circuits to a splitting cabinet that led to the secret room. During the course of that work, he learned from a co-worker that similar cabinets were being installed in other cities, including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego.
"While doing my job, I learned that fiber optic cables from the secret room were tapping into the Worldnet (AT&T's internet service) circuits by splitting off a portion of the light signal," Klein wrote.
The split circuits included traffic from peering links connecting to other internet backbone providers, meaning that AT&T was also diverting traffic routed from its network to or from other domestic and international providers, according to Klein's statement.
The secret room also included data-mining equipment called a Narus STA 6400, "known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets," according to Klein's statement.
Narus, whose website touts AT&T as a client, sells software to help internet service providers and telecoms monitor and manage their networks, look for intrusions, and wiretap phone calls as mandated by federal law.
Klein said he came forward because he does not believe that the Bush administration is being truthful about the extent of its extrajudicial monitoring of Americans' communications.
"Despite what we are hearing, and considering the public track record of this administration, I simply do not believe their claims that the NSA's spying program is really limited to foreign communications or is otherwise consistent with the NSA's charter or with FISA," Klein's wrote. "And unlike the controversy over targeted wiretaps of individuals' phone calls, this potential spying appears to be applied wholesale to all sorts of internet communications of countless citizens."
After asking for a preview copy of the documents last week, the government did not object to the EFF filing the paper under seal, although the EFF asked the court Wednesday to make the documents public.
One of the documents is titled "Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco," and is dated 2002. The others are allegedly a design document instructing technicians how to wire up the taps, and a document that describes the equipment installed in the secret room.
In a letter to the EFF, AT&T objected to the filing of the documents in any manner, saying that they contain sensitive trade secrets and could be "could be used to 'hack' into the AT&T network, compromising its integrity."
According to court rules, AT&T has until Thursday to file a motion to keep the documents sealed. The government could also step in to the case and request that the documents not be made public, or even that the entire lawsuit be barred under the seldom-used State Secrets Privilege.
AT&T spokesman Walt Sharp declined to comment on the allegations, citing a company policy of not commenting on litigation or matters of national security, but did say that "AT&T follows all laws following requests for assistance from government authorities."
From: GigaOM
http://gigaom.com/2006/03/14/how-big-is-att
How Big is AT&T?
The post-BellSouth merger AT&T is going to be one honking company… but do you know how big? It will control 22% of all consumer dollars spent on telecom services (including video services) and 34% of dollars spent in the business market. Yeah… that big, according to a study by TNS Telecom, a telecom consulting group. The study points out that after the deal is closed, three of the nation’s top telecom providers - AT&T, Verizon and Comcast - will control 49% of the total consumer market and in the business market AT&T and Verizon will represent 55% of spending. The funny thing is that they are not even calculating the future scenarios… but clearly the big are getting bigger, if not better ;-)
How does it stack up internationally? Folks at Telegeography crunched some numbers and says while the company would be the largest in the US, it would be the third largest behind China Telecom and China Netcom; ninth largest wireless operator behind multinational groups such as Vodafone and would have only one-third of the broadband subscriber base of China Telecom. Further, in terms of revenue, the new AT&T’s $69.4 billion in 2005 revenues are far from Japanese giant NTT that raked in $99.9 billion.
From: Fractals of Change
http://blog.tomevslin.com/2006/03/att_is_ripping_.html
AT&T is Ripping Off American Soldiers
It’s bad enough that they overcharge domestic customers but we have alternatives. The soldiers don’t because, according to The Prepaid Press, AT&T has an EXCLUSIVE contract to put payphones in PXes in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, you ask, can’t the soldiers get cheap calling cards to call the US? No! Because AT&T is using (abusing!) its position as monopoly supplier of payphones to block the 800 numbers necessary to use nonAT&T calling cards.
This blocking is illegal in the US but, AT&T told our friend Gene Retske, editor of The Prepaid Press, the rules are different in Iraq. Right.
The soldiers could probably call cheaper if they used Iraqi pay phones. But, assuming there are any working payphones on the streets of Iraq, it’s still not a good idea for American soldiers to be standing on the corners talking on them. That’s why there are phones in PXes. Too bad the soldiers have to pay $.21/minute to call home on them.
The wholesale rate for calls to the US is less than one cent a minute. Skype charges about 1.5 two euro cents RETAIL to call the US from anywhere in the world. You can buy prepaid cards almost anywhere in the world to call the US for less than two cents a minute. AT&T charges soldiers in Iraq twenty-one cents.
Since AT&T isn’t very good at using the Internet, it may cost them another penny to get the calls back from Iraq to the US over traditional circuits. They argue that payphones cost money to put in (BTW, I have nothing but respect for whomever went to Iraq to install the payphones). Of course, you’re not supposed to recover the cost of payphones by overcharging for a calling card; that’s called doubledipping and abuse of monopoly power.
So let’s say AT&T, since it’s not very efficient, has three cents a minute of cost. How does that justify charging the soldiers twenty-one cents?
I asked Gene if the soldiers could simply use Skype on computers or Vonage ATAs. He said his son’s experience was that the IP available to the troops (which is not provided by AT&T) is barely adequate for email so not an option for voice.
Mary and I first became aware of the AT&T rates when we got a VFW solicitation to buy AT&T calling cards as gifts for soldiers – that’s a nice idea. But we’re old telco folk so we looked at the price per minute. Did I mention that it’s twenty-one cents? That’s a gift to AT&T.
A source familiar with the VFW’s efforts to help soldiers call home told Mary that they had run a test with another carrier which supplied cheaper minutes but AT&T was using their position as payphone provider to exact a $1.50 per call surcharge (note that this is different than reports of AT&T blocking other carriers completely. We can’t independently resolve this apparent contradiction. It is possible they took different steps at different time but I don’t know that). Also according to our source, who wishes to remain anonymous, VFW is looking at making a deal with a company which operates Internet cafes in two Iraqi cities where AT&T doesn’t have a presence. They are talking about four cent a minute calls, much more reasonable although still, I’m sure, quite profitable.
That’s when we emailed Gene.
Turns out his son was in Iraq and he was already on the story. Gene understands the economics of the prepaid business better than anyone I know. He contacted his congressmen and senators. They said they’d look into but went no further than the first bland excuses from the FCC and DoD. This isn’t Halliburton ripping off taxpayers, you know; it’s AT&T ripping off the soldiers directly. The Prepaid Press article last year estimated AT&T’s take at $46 million/year – peanuts in their grand scheme of things.
If I sound foaming-at-the-mouth mad it’s because I am.
The Newark Star Ledger did some investigative reporting following up on Gene’s lead. Their embed reporter, Wayne Wolley is the one who calculated the twenty-one cent a minute rate; charging on the card is not exactly straightforward. Some more congressmen said they would look into it. No action. You suppose the inaction has anything to do with lobbies and PAC contributions?
But there is some hope according to the latest article in the Feb. 15 issue of ThePrepaid Press. The American Legion does listen to complaints from soldiers. Jeanne Gilbert, the Co-Chairman of Public Relations for the American Legion Department of New York State, is leading an effort there to gather the information on the ripoffs from soldiers’ reports and blogs. The goal is a resolution at the national convention in June.
The Prepaid Press quotes Gilbert as saying: “With the resolution put in place and passed. The American Legion will vigorously go through the legislative process. I feel it the American Legion’s responsibility, at the very least, to inform the citizens of the United States of exactly what is going on when they are going to the stores to purchase these products, even knowing that AT&T is the only game in town right now, and what they are buying.”
Of course, now that at&t wants to extend its monopoly over more of the country, it’s a good time to ask how at&t uses monopoly power.
To be fair, this all started in the old AT&T – the one with capital letters. Ed Whitacre and the old SBC may well not have known this was happening when they bought the company. So the questions to him are: now that you know, what are you going to do about it? lower prices? give rebates? assure that such things never happen again?
These would all be good questions to ask in hearings.
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Date: 2006-04-15 03:34 pm (UTC)From: