Evidently caps are a problem after all, since the US government is now going to investigate cable providers’ use of them to stifle Internet video.
Anyways, this is good, but what would be better is to not have the conflict of interest in the first place. ISPs should only be in the business of transmitting and receiving bits for its customers, but that won’t happen as long as there’s a mono/dupoly on broadband.
…pro-cap.
Not that it should be much of a surprise to anyone (since the people on the FCC have come from telecom companies in the past and all) but yeah.
A proposal asking that AT&T commit to operating its wireless network without the ability to privilege, degrade or prioritize any traffic was defeated by a vote of 94.1 percent against to 5.9 percent in favor.
It appears that AT&T is finally going to allow its customers to unlock the iPhone starting on Sunday. There has to be a catch, right?
Yep. If you’re currently in a two year contract with them, you won’t be able to until after the contract’s up. By then, you’ll probably have purchased a new iPhone. In other words, this changes very little.
Oh well, back to jailbreaking if you want to use it overseas without paying their insane roaming rates, it looks like.
AT&T can’t catch a break. Now it seems that the DoJ has filed another lawsuit against the telecom giant. Turns out that AT&T isn’t doing enough to combat fraud over the Telecommunications Relay Service (aka the teletype system for the deaf).
The United States alleges that AT&T violated the False Claims Act by facilitating and seeking federal payment for IP Relay calls by international callers who were ineligible for the service and sought to use it for fraudulent purposes. The complaint alleges that, out of fears that fraudulent call volume would drop after the registration deadline, AT&T knowingly adopted a non-compliant registration system that did not verify whether the user was located within the United States. The complaint further contends that AT&T continued to employ this system even with the knowledge that it facilitated use of IP Relay by fraudulent foreign callers, which accounted for up to 95 percent of AT&T’s call volume. The government’s complaint alleges that AT&T improperly billed the TRS Fund for reimbursement of these calls and received millions of dollars in federal payments as a result.
Heh. As Ron Paul would put it, “don’t steal–the government hates competition”.. But yeah, if DoJ proves this in court, AT&T is screwed.
It seems that AT&T has changed their smartphone data plans. More bandwidth is always good, right? Well…
Old plans (for the iPad):
250MB: $15/mo ($60/GB)
2GB: $25/mo ($12.50/GB)
New plans:
300MB: $20/mo ($66.67/GB)
3GB: $30/mo ($10/GB)
5GB: $50/mo ($10/GB)
It seems to be only a better deal if you buy the higher tiered data plans. The low usage people seem to get hosed. For a company that had to institute caps to control their out of control data usage, you’d think they’d make the cheaper plan, well, cheaper to encourage less 3G/LTE usage.
Heh. Now that AT&T withdrew their application from the FCC’s consideration, the judge hearing the DoJ’s lawsuit against AT&T is considering dropping the lawsuit as well. This means that the T-Mobile deal is dead if this happens:
Lawyers for AT&T and T-Mobile, saying the government’s suit against them had turned into their best hope to complete the transaction, urged U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle in Washington to keep the case on track for a Feb. 13 trial. The U.S. argued the case may be moot after AT&T withdrew its merger application at the Federal Communications Commission.
A decision to dismiss or delay the Justice Department’s case would put the deal all but out of reach for AT&T. The company’s strategy for regulatory approval rests on winning a favorable court decision it could use at the FCC to argue that the transaction isn’t anticompetitive. Without such a ruling, AT&T has no chance of getting the deal done, T-Mobile’s lawyer, George Cary, told Huvelle at a hearing yesterday.
Excellent.
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