AT&amp;T Wireless hurricane pricing probed
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Florida is investigating Redmond-based AT&amp;T Wireless Services over complaints of price-gouging during Hurricane Frances, Attorney General Charlie Crist told CNN.
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BellSouth Corp. BLS.N on Monday  said third-quarter earnings fell due to storm damage in its  region and costs stemming from Cingular Wireless' planned $41  billion purchase of AT&T Wireless Services Inc. AWE.N.
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AT&T has added a new set of parental control options to their mobile phone service.  For a monthly fee of $4.99, the "Smart Limits" service brings together infomation about parental control features across AT&T's wireless, wired, broadband and video servi
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Questions filled the air Monday as the mobile industry geared up for one of its biggest U.S. trade shows on Monday by focusing on entertainment.AT&amp;T got a head start on the CTIA Wireless IT &amp; Entertainment show in San Francisco by unveiling an upcoming music service with Napster. But even AT&amp;T said the best business model for mobile entertainment is still being worked out.The market for mobile entertainment still pales in comparison to messaging, which more than half of AT&amp;T&#39;s customers use, said Mark Collins, vice president of consumer data at the nation&#39;s biggest carrier, which has about 63 million subscribers. Collins thinks mobile entertainment will catch on to that degree, but the jury is out on the best business model for getting there, he told a large crowd at a pre-show entertainment conference.On Monday, AT&amp;T announced it will let consumers download songs over the air from a Napster catalog of more than 5 million songs. The Napster Mobile service, due to become available in mid-November, will offer single songs for $1.99 each and a monthly subscription for $7.49. The subscription will let customers download five songs each month. Features for discovering new music and keeping up with favorite artists will also be included.The service is meant to complement song downloads to PCs for later &quot;sideloading&quot; to a phone, said Gregg Brown, who handles strategic marketing and business development for music at AT&amp;T. The carrier already offers that type of service but believes some consumers want to be able to buy songs immediately, he said. A copy of each song bought over the air can also be automatically delivered to the customer&#39;s PC.It&#39;s an example of the try-anything approach carriers and content makers are taking to mobile entertainment. Also at the pre-show conference, ESPN Senior Vice President for Digital Media John Zehr said the sports media company closed down its MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) business last year because it had a harder time than expected selling handsets in retail stores. It also was unfair to sports fans to make them switch service providers and phones just to get ESPN&#39;s mobile content, Zehr said.Now ESPN&#39;s content is offered through Verizon&#39;s portal. Soon the company will add social networking to help fans of certain teams keep in touch, Zehr added.ESPN&#39;s goal is to make it as easy as possible for consumers to find its content -- preferably on the &quot;idle&quot; screen of the phone whenever they look at it, Zehr said. Carriers should find a way to determine what each subscriber would want to see on that screen, or ask them, rather than making them take the initiative, he said.But ESPN has another thing coming if they hope to dictate placement, according to IDC analyst Shiv Bakhshi.&quot;The content provider never controls the environment of consumption,&quot; Bakhshi said.Clashes happen partly because the market is so young and demand is still little known, AT&amp;T&#39;s Collins said. It&#39;s hard to work out business models that satisfy carriers, content providers and advertisers, he said. Everyone wants to get into the mobile world because cell phones are ubiquitous, but carriers can&#39;t pay top dollar for content when the customer base isn&#39;t that big yet. Device makers add another layer of complexity.&quot;We can&#39;t just take the cable television or the broadcast model and superimpose it on this business,&quot; Collins said. The right model will be some mix of advertising, subscribers paying for content, and makers of programming selling it to carriers, he said.
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AT&amp;T Corp (TN: Quote, Profile, Research) on Thursday said it was lowering the price on its CallVantage Internet calling service by $5 per month, matching the price from several other suppliers.
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What will Cingular Wireless get after it pays $41 billion in cash to acquire AT&amp;T Wireless later this year? The answer became clearer yesterday after AT&amp;T Wireless reported third-quarter financial results
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Targets 'price insensitive' kiddies AT&amp;T hopes to fool the youth of America into paying way too much for digital music.â¦
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AT&amp;T hasn&#39;t decided whether it will bid for the highly desirable 700MHz band because it doesn&#39;t know if it can build a profitable business, given the open-access rules set for the wireless spectrum by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in July.Calling the rules &quot;interesting,&quot; AT&amp;T&#39;s CEO Randall Stephenson said the company is hard at work crunching numbers and analyzing business scenarios, but hasn&#39;t reached a conclusion yet.&quot;Is there a business model there? I&#39;m not sure if there is or not,&quot; he said Friday at the&#160;Web 2.0 Summit, where he answered questions from conference chair John Battelle and from audience members.The FCC conditions, which include&#160;open-access rules on a third of the spectrum, have been a major source of controversy.The winner of 22MHz of spectrum must allow any wireless devices to connect to the network, permitting wireless telephone customers to use handset devices from other carriers. The winning bidder also can&#39;t block or slow down wireless and Web content from competitors.Some telecom carriers wanted no conditions, while some consumer advocacy groups and Google wanted the FCC to require that winning bidders also resell the spectrum at wholesale rates to competitors, something the FCC didn&#39;t adopt.The FCC is scheduled to auction 62MHz of spectrum in the 700MHz band beginning in January. The spectrum is ideal for long-range wireless telephone and broadband services, with signals that travel up to four times farther than in higher spectrum bands.&quot;It&#39;s a huge opportunity. It&#39;s beachfront property. When it comes to buying spectrum, it&#39;s the best you&#39;re going to find for a long time,&quot; Stephenson said.Data consumption on wireless networks is growing fourfold year over year, so a company&#160;such as&#160;AT&amp;T needs to bulk up on spectrum to keep up with the demand, he said.&quot;It&#39;s very obvious we&#39;re going to have to add to our spectrum holdings,&quot; he said.That&#39;s why AT&amp;T earlier this month reached an agreement to&#160;buy 12MHz of high-speed wireless spectrum&#160;in the 700MHz band from Aloha Partners for $2.5 billion.&quot;It&#39;s the first time, I think, that we&#39;ve ever paid $2.5 billion for a company that had no revenue,&quot; Stephenson said.The Aloha spectrum covers 196 million U.S. residents, including 72 of the 100 largest markets in the United States.In other matters, Stephenson said he was very satisfied with the&#160;iPhone deal between his company and Apple.&quot;I&#39;m not sure I could have asked for much more out of it than what we got,&quot; he said.Asked to comment on the decision to use the slower EDGE network for the iPhone, Stephenson said it was a request from Apple CEO Steve Jobs.&quot;He wanted a broad ubiquitous data network. The EDGE network is the only data network that covers the entire United States,&quot; he said. The situation will improve as AT&amp;T upgrades markets to 3G, he said.Stephenson acknowledged that AT&amp;T&#39;s directory assistance business is being challenged by ad-supported options from Internet companies&#160;such as&#160;Google.&quot;We better get our advertising-supported [directory assistance] model up fast,&quot; he said, adding that AT&amp;T is building such a service internally.On a lighter note, he said he&#39;s &quot;envious&quot; of Google and the success it has had with its business model. &quot;It&#39;s a great gig if you can get it,&quot; he said.(Grant Gross in Washington, D.C. contributed with this story.)
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Cingular is making over AT&amp;T Wireless Stores with new signage, but the changes are more than just window dressing. Thanks to spectrum gained in the $41 billion acquisition, Cingular said it will build a third
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Estimates range from $3B to $10B following second major storm to hit Florida within a month. NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Losses from Hurricane Frances are now forecast to make it the fifth-costliest storm in US
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The maverick network service provider run by former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale, and that was largely responsible for convincing the US Federal Communications Commission to impose new and innovative rules for bidders on certain blocks of the 700 MHz UHF spectrum, is now saying it may not be able to bid after all. In a formal complaint to the FCC filed Monday, lawyers for Frontline Wireless accused the FCC of "getting it wrong" by having set the asking price of the choicest blocks in the auction too high.
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Bidding stalled on Tuesday in the  closely watched auction of a piece of wireless airwaves that  the U.S. government is selling, according to data released by  the Federal Communications Commission.
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By Bloomberg News. Cingular Wireless, which is buying AT&amp;T Wireless, said yesterday that third-quarter sales rose 4.9 percent, to $4.
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ATLANTA Cingular Wireless reports a rise in subscribers and revenue, but a drop in operating profit ahead of the expected closing of its 41 (b) billion dollar purchase of AT-and-T Wireless Services.
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AT&T has agreed to purchase wireless carrier Dobson Communications Corp.  in a deal valued between $2.5 billion and $3 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site on Friday.
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Some cell phone companies charge  their users $100 to $200 to end a contract no matter what the  reason and disguise their own charges as taxes on bills,  witnesses told a congressional panel on Wednesday.
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An announcement that AT&amp;T would drop its prices for its VoIP CallVantage Service, its popular residential broadband phone service, from $34.