GigaOM » Ralph de la Vega

AT&T’s Q4 will be a doozey thanks to the smartphone

Kevin Fitchard — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 22:42:07 +0000

AT&T has already sold 6.4 million smartphones in October and in November, which would make the fourth quarter its second best performing quarter ever even if failed to ~~set~~ sell a single smartphone in December, AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega said at a UBS conference Tuesday morning. De la Vega’s comments, which were reported by FierceWireless, indicate that AT&T is on pace to have the best smartphone quarter in its history this holiday season.

Last year’s fourth quarter is the current record holder at AT&T. Then Ma Bell activated 9.4 million devices. All of the same factors that drove such huge sales last year are again in place. Most notably Apple kept with its adjusted iPhone launch schedule, which with the iPhone 4S was moved from the early summer to fall. That means AT&T will reap the benefits of a new iPhone release and the traditional Christmas sales boom both in the same three-month period.

There may be incentives for consumers to invest even more heavily in the iPhone this year as opposed to last. The new iPhone 5 not only has a new design and new iOS 6 features, but it is the first Apple smartphone with LTE capabilities. AT&T could also an uptick across its LTE device portfolio due to the huge expansion of its network. At the end of 2011 AT&T had a meager 15-city footprint, but today it offers its new 4G service in 109 markets covering 150 million people.

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Here’s AT&T’s plan to grow now that everyone has a mobile phone

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 14:41:13 +0000

AT&T reported middling financial results for the third quarter with revenue of $31.5 billion leading to net income of $3.63 billion. Those sales are essentially flat from the same quarter a year before as is income. But behind those numbers is a shift occurring as AT&T’s big bet on wireless starts paying off.

AT&T’s saw wireless revenues rise by 6.6 percent year over year with data revenues up 18.3 percent. Wireline declined as a percentage of revenue by 3 percent. But given the saturation of the U.S. mobile market, AT&T is not taking its wireless success for granted. Instead it’s figuring out how to get existing customers to spend more. On the call it touted its growing base of smartphones (customers with smartphones spend almost twice as much as those with feature phones) and the take rate of its new shared family plans announced in August.

In the five weeks since the plans were announced and the quarter closed, 2 million of AT&T’s 44.5 million smart-phone customers signed up. Those plans, that charge customers a set fee each type of device on the plan and then add on a bucket of minutes have helped goose the operator’s average revenue per user (ARPU) by 2.4 percent. This means the average AT&T customers pays $65.20 per month for their wireless plans. The genius of these plans from AT&T’s perspective (and Verizon’s, which has them too) is that when customers pay AT&T for their device (AT&T uses a sliding scale so the more data you buy the less you pay per device) they are offsetting the loss of voice and texting data as many of those services go over the top.

Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO of AT&T Mobility, notes that customers are choosing those plans, and when they do they are choosing fat plans with more than a third taking the 10 GB plan. In a big benefit to AT&T more than 15 percent of the shared plans subscribers are changing over from unlimited plans. From de la Vega’s perspective, the plans may even end up being accretive to AT&T’s bottom line, especially going into the next quarter when people buy tablets, add those devices to the plan and perhaps boost their data buy.

“The ARPU we were expecting from these plans is higher than what we expected,” said de la Vega. “They could be accretive.” He later added that, “the more customers we have on usage based plans, the better we are.” And as the overall market for wireless phones in the U.S. becomes saturated with most adults owning a phone, the challenge for AT&T and Verizon will be how they can get those customers to pay more.

The new shared plans are one element of that, although those were designed to keep people from paying less, but AT&T is set to announce new services on top of its smartphones and wireline businesses with its Digital Life business. De la Vega promised that on Nov. 7 analysts would learn how AT&T plans to connect homes and cars and offer compelling services such as home automation and security on top of AT&T’s access business in a bid to get customers to sign up for new services.

So when analysts asked about AT&T’s lackluster ability to add new subscribers during the quarter (it added 151,000 post-paid customers) when compared to Verizon’s ability to snag 1.5 million post-paid net adds, de la Vega assured them that AT&T wasn’t playing a net adds game. Saying AT&T wasn’t “reliant on connecting more people,” in order to boost revenue he explains that the services would drive more data usage and thus help AT&T’s sales. That’s one way to deal with a saturated market.

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CTIA: The good, the bad and the very, very ugly

Kevin Fitchard — Sun, 13 May 2012 12:00:38 +0000

I have a confession to make: I like CTIA Wireless. A lot of my colleagues in tech media are down on the show, saying that it’s dying. They’re right in one sense. CTIA is long past its prime as a premier showcase of new devices, services and other big industry news, having been superseded by CES and Mobile World Congress earlier in the year. But I like the show just the same.

I’ve always been more of a networks and technology guy than a gadget guy, so the new device launches don’t excite me the way they do my peers. What I like about CTIA is that it brings together a bunch of smart people from interesting companies who are excited by the future of wireless networking.

At CTIA I can sit down with Kyocera to discuss how ceramics can transform phone audio. Then 30 minutes later I’m chatting with the original Symbian creator Psion about its new efforts in open-source hardware, followed by a conversation with startup Mesaplexx about how a tired old cell site component–the radio frequency filter–can be transformed through advanced mathematics (more on those two in a later post).

CTIA is also a great show for measuring the progress of the industry. This year, U.S. operators started discussing small cells and the heterogeneous network in earnest, dragging it out of the labs and demo booths and into the cold light of their network roadmaps. AT&T revealed it will begin rollouts of small cells later this year, but Sprint was even more aggressive, detailing specific plans to install tens of thousands of picocells in buildings and high-traffic outdoor areas in the next two years.

Those small cells will eventually be woven into operators’ macro networks and Wi-Fi networks, creating complex HetNets that allow our devices to connect to multiple nodes – in some cases simultaneously. I don’t want to oversell the concept, but this marks a true transformation in network design, moving away from network topologies focused primarily on coverage to topologies that supply enormous sums of capacity. There are still plenty of obstacles to hurdle before mall cells and HetNet will work, but the important thing is that the operators are now actively trying to overcome them – and technologies like these make CTIA Wireless truly great.

The dark side of CTIA

But there was also plenty about the show that wasn’t so great, namely the politics and the backbiting. AT&T’s very public fight with the Federal Communications Commission carried over into the conference with FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski lashing back at Ma Bell’s accusations that the denial of AT&T-Mo forced AT&T to raise prices (check out Bloomberg Businessweek’s priceless sendup of the argument here.)

The operators took any opportunity they could to foretell the doom of the impending capacity crunch in order to justify their consolidation ambitions. And even some pettiness came out as their CEOs bickered onstage about whose network was fastest and what technologies truly constitute 4G.

While the issues behind those debates are important – the proper allocation of spectrum resources, the effectiveness and performance of different technologies –this was hardly the most elevated forum for discussing them. Trust me, not much was done to further the dialogue.

The problem is the carriers

The biggest problem with CTIA Wireless isn’t its placement on the calendar. Rather, it’s the carriers. CTIA is the trade and lobbying organization for the largest U.S. operators, so those carriers have always set the agenda of their show. That may have worked fine 10 years ago when the carriers were the be-all-end-all of mobile – when they controlled all services and revenue and were largely responsible for mobile innovation. But in recent years, the mobile industry has outgrown the operators.

Third-party developers, big Internet companies like Google and Facebook and device hardware makers like Apple are now just as important as the operators — many would argue more important. Yet CTIA hasn’t evolved to reflect that reality. That’s why the GSM Association – which has a much broader membership and mission – has managed to turn Mobile World Congress into an event of far more importance to the overall U.S. wireless industry. It’s much more inclusive.

CTIA has tweaked the show to give it the appearance of a broader tent. This year it extended keynote slots to companies like Spotify, Mozilla and Electronic Arts, but you get the impression they were being summoned to the feet of kings. Many of the biggest mobile players in Silicon Valley don’t feel they have a place at CTIA, and some long-time CTIA loyalists have decided they no longer need the event: Microsoft, Samsung and Nokia weren’t entirely absent, but none of them exhibited.

I’m not saying the operators have no place at their own show. The dialogue about small cells and the launch of new services like AT&T’s Digital Home initiative make the show far more significant than any mere gadget showcase. But the carriers need to lay off their agenda. They need to start talking with the larger mobile industry instead of talking at it. It would help if CTIA would eliminate the self-aggrandizing keynotes the carriers deliver every year.

Last year’s keynote panel of the big carrier CEOs was a big hit because AT&T had just announced its plans to acquire T-Mobile – antics ensued as CNBC’s Mad Money host Jim Cramer pressed them on the merger’s implications. But this year the session returned to its usual lackluster format: Canned questions from Cramer and contrived answers from four guys talking down to the rest of the industry. I didn’t write up the keynotes because there wasn’t any content to cover, but in case you’re wondering, here’s my (rather loose) interpretation of the affair (for a more detailed play-by-play check out Ina Fried’s live blog on AllThingsD):

T-Mo’s Philipp Humm: I’m the fastest!
AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega: No, I’m the fastest!
Verizon’s Dan Mead: Guess how much I can bench press?
Sprint’s Dan Hesse: LTE Rocks! [winks for the ladies]
Jim Cramer: Everyone in the Arab Spring used cellphones to text and tweet, ergo cellphones caused the Arab Spring, ergo cellphones create democracy (ignore China). Dan Hesse, how many cellphones are necessary to create democracy in North Korea?
Hesse: LTE Rocks! [winks for the ladies]

It’s the carriers’ party; they can cry, complain or strut if they want to. But the best parties are those where the hosts don’t make themselves the center of attention.

Blame image courtesy of Flickr user Simone Lovati

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Who’s eating up AT&T’s data capacity? It’s not new customers

Kevin Fitchard — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:16:51 +0000

What does a mobile network hosting 41.2 million smartphones look like? A network where growth in data traffic far exceeds data revenue growth. AT&T is selling a lot of smartphones and data plans, but even millions of new iPhone customers don’t fully account for the huge spikes in mobile data traffic AT&T is experiencing.

AT&T’s first-quarter earnings numbers show that new smartphone customers aren’t the ones straining its data networks. Rather AT&T’s chickens have come home to roost. Customers are finally starting to consume the big buckets of data AT&T is selling them, taking their fair share of network capacity while not paying more for the privilege. Consequently AT&T is seeing a massive increase in data traffic without a corresponding jump in data revenues.

Revenge of the tiered pricing plan

During AT&T’s Tuesday earnings call, Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega revealed that AT&T had added a net total of 10 million new smartphones over the past year. The devices now account for nearly 60 percent of its postpaid subscriber base. De la Vega also revealed that AT&T’s wireless data revenues are tracking about $24 billion per year, growing at steady rate of more than 20 percent per year.

But AT&T has pointed out before that data traffic on its mobile networks is actually doubling each year. So that means a 100 percent annual increase in mobile gigabytes shipped is being driven by a mere 32 percent increase in smartphones. What’s more, AT&T is only collecting a few billion dollars more in revenue to handle that deluge of new data.

The lion’s share of AT&T’s data traffic growth isn’t being driven by new smartphone customers; it’s coming from its existing subscribers, and for the most part they’re not paying more for that extra consumption. AT&T’s numbers would indicate that many customers are getting a lot a closer to their data caps without exceeding them. Basically they’re consuming more data while still paying the same amount on their monthly bills.

Some of those customers are AT&T’s grandfathered unlimited customers, but they’re a shrinking minority, accounting for 39 percent of smartphone customers in the first quarter. Plus, AT&T has begun throttling back speeds on those customers once they exceed 3 GB on HSPA+ and 5 GB on LTE. That means most of AT&T’s data traffic explosion is coming from tiered plans, which makes sense if you look at AT&T’s pricing structure.

Of the 25 million smartphone customers on tiered plans, 70 percent subscribe to an upper-tier plan, which means a 2 GB plan under the old pricing scheme and a 3 GB plan under the new one. But in a recent study, wireless analyst Chetan Sharma found that 70 percent of smartphone users in the U.S. consume less than 1 GB per month, which is one-half to two-thirds less than the amount of data most of AT&T’s customers are actually paying for. There’s been a huge disconnect between the amount of data customers buy and the amount they actually use, but that gap is finally starting to close.

Capacity crunch or poetic justice?

As you have probably figured out by now, AT&T’s capacity crunch seems to be a problem largely of its own making. Customers are finally growing into the data plans, and they’re eating up all of AT&T’s mobile data network capacity in the process. I should also point out that AT&T’s networks have also become far more efficient than they used to be, allowing it to deliver more bandwidth over the same infrastructure and spectrum. When the iPhone 3G first launched in 2008, the typical AT&T HSPA cell could support a theoretical limit of 3.6 Mbps. That number is now 14.4 Mbps. An LTE cell using the same amount of spectrum can theoretically support 37.5 Mbps.

So I wouldn’t feel too sorry for AT&T, despite all of its claims of being broadsided by traffic demand. When it set up its current tiered pricing structures, it knew its customers would eventually scale their usage to match their monthly allowances, and they’re still a long way from even getting close to those caps. If AT&T didn’t know this, then it never should have offered 2 GB and 3 GB tiers in the first place.

This is what infuriates me about the way the operators price data. The per-megabyte cost we pay for mobile data has actually fallen considerably in the past few years, but we wouldn’t know that by looking at our bills. If carriers from the beginning had set reasonable plan tiers that actually reflected how customers consumed data, operators could have gradually lowered prices as their networks became more efficient. It’s probably a stretch to say they would have come off as heroes, but their mobile data policies probably wouldn’t be vilified the way they are today.

Instead, they chose to gouge customers by selling them far more gigabytes than they could possibly use. Now that customers are starting to actually use up those gigs, carriers are claiming they’re running out of capacity. Didn’t you guys see this coming?

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Exec shuffle focuses AT&T on the real prize: mobile

Kevin Fitchard — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:36:14 +0000

AT&T's Ralph de la Vega is now solely responsible for wireless

With its executive reshuffling this week AT&T returned to a structure that more accurately reflects where its businesses are heading: mobile. The wireless division juggernaut that drives most of AT&T’s revenues is now firmly in the hands of former consumer CEO Ralph de la Vega, who is giving up his U-Verse responsibilities to the new head of AT&T Business and Home Solutions Andy Geisse. It’s a smart move considering how ridiculous it was for AT&T to lump consumer wireless and wireline together in the first place.

I say that because AT&T is a nationwide wireless operator with a Baby Bell operating territory, covering Southwestern Bell, BellSouth, PacBell and Ameritechs’ old turf. Those wireless and wireline footprints overlap but it’s hard to run a nationwide strategy when a significant part of your business is not only a regional operation, but a shrinking regional operation at that. De la Vega was in the odd position of trying to get residential customers to hold onto their phone lines while simultaneously selling them huge buckets of mobile minutes.

AT&T tried to combine those consumer businesses in the first place because of a now-dead vision of a world of “three screens”. It wanted to interlink the services it offered to the PC (through DSL), the TV (through U-Verse) and the mobile phone. It sounds like a neat idea, but the vision never took off. Except for the cursory U-Verse smartphone app and the glue of a unified monthly bill, AT&T’s mobile services have remained distinct from its wireline ones. AT&T ditched its ‘three screens’ advertising long ago and now it appears to have ditched the strategy as well.

The move leaves de la Vega to focus solely on AT&T’s huge-growth wireless business, and he will have plenty to keep him busy. AT&T has the industry’s largest base of iPhone and overall smartphone subscribers, all of which are placing pressure enormous pressure on its 3G and 4G networks. De la Vega, along with newly promoted SVP of technology and network operations John Donovan, will also oversee AT&T nationwide launch of LTE, in hopes of catching up to arch-competitor Verizon Wireless.

John Stankey takes over as AT&T's strategy guru

De la Vega apparently won’t have to deal with the task of finding new spectrum though. That job now falls to John Stankey, who will give up his title as CEO of business operations to assume the mantle of Group President and Chief Strategy Officer. AT&T is looking to grow its airwave holdings, and to do so it’s had no qualms with attacking the people that stand between it and the frequencies it so desires. Stankey is well respected throughout the telecom industry, and he has elaborated, quite reasonably and eloquently, in the past on the evolution of wireless networking and the need for spectrum to meet growing mobile data demands.

I’m a bit worried that eloquence and reason will now fall to the wayside. To overcome objections to AT&T’s consolidation ambitions, the carrier needs to unleash a bulldog on its regulators and critics – a role that until now has been filled by CEO Randall Stephenson. It looks like that bulldog will now have to be John Stankey.

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New iPhone Will Jumpstart Demand for Wireless Broadband

Om Malik — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 19:27:36 +0000

It was over a decade ago when I got my first broadband connection — by today’s comparison a very slow DSL connection from my then-local provider, Verizon Communications, which went by the name of Bell Atlantic. At $60 a month (not including the cost of the modem), the service, which got around 256 Kbps on a good day (vs. top speed of up to 640 kbps), was really a novelty.

With the exception of many who worked in New York’s Silicon Alley, not many cared about the expensive, always-on connection. Being a broadband nerd of sorts, I couldn’t care less about the price tag; I couldn’t wait to pay more to get more bandwidth.

I am reminded of that moment — of that thrill — of experiencing the web without delays, thanks to the new iPhone and its ability to connect to the 3G network. I already can’t wait for AT&T to upgrade their network from HSDPA to HSPA to HSPA+ to LTE so we can get faster and faster broadband.

For now, the best we can get on the iPhone 3G is HSDPA, which has a theoretical download speed of between 400 and 700 Kbps, though Apple on it site says it’s going to be 2.4x the speed of EDGE – about 100 Kbps. Still, I am going to go out on the limb and mark July 11 down as a red-letter day for 3G wireless.

Don’t get me wrong — it isn’t the day 3G wireless was first introduced in the U.S. Neither is iPhone the first 3G phone. I have had 3G phones, USB and PC Card modems for a while now. It isn’t the first time I have used 3G broadband; I am on old hand at using EVDO to connect my laptop to the web, or at connecting my Nokia e61 to a 3G network whenever I am in Europe, or using the Nokia N95 to snap-and-share photos and videos via one of the life-streaming services.

Yet this is the first time that a 3G connection on a non-computer device actually feels like a broadband connection. “This device is a true game-changer. Why? The immediacy of the data at your fingertips is huge. Imagine, looking up anything, anywhere,” is how AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega told me in a chat earlier this year. In the U.S. especially, the iPhone is going to have a major impact, mostly because are a PC-centric society constantly search for web-like experiences. (So far, most of the carriers have made their money off 3G computer connections. I am wondering how the iPhone impacts (or not) 3G usage in Europe.)

I received the new iPhone 3G on Friday, and since then I have been tinkering around it — a lot. My first (and perhaps lasting) impression: The 3G speed is quite addictive and it doesn’t take long to slowly start switching your daily compute tasks to this device instead of reaching for your computer.

A lot of that is because the iPhone has a generous screen and is very easy to use, but more importantly it has a more than adequate browser, making it an ideal candidate for being a “cloud client.” All that was missing was a fast-enough connection that helped “off-source” some (or, in the case of others, many) tasks from their computers.

The briskness with which I can surf web pages means it has become easy to keep and eye on this and our other network blogs. The email shows up in the inbox as quickly as on my desktop. NetNewsWire’s iPhone App has already become my preferred way to read RSS. Its ability to sync with the desktop client over the web only adds to its utility. Facebook on the iPhone is almost infinitely more usable than its web counterpart. (John Markoff is marveling at the pocket-sized experience as well.)

Truphone’s new iPhone app makes it easy to place VoIP calls on the iPhone, thereby making it less necessary for me to fire up the old computer to call mom. It sure would be nice to see a Skype client for iPhone. I am sure that over a period of time other habits will form — including watching YouTube videos – which just got bearable, thanks to a faster connection.

More importantly, 3G has freed me up from thinking about the availability of a Wi-Fi connection. Of course, if everyone else gets into the same habit, as I suspect they will, this is going to put some stress on AT&T’s 3G Network.

Going back to the early days of broadband, the thrill of doing mundane web tasks faster and without tying up a phone line didn’t seem as great in the beginning, but acted as a spark for the broadband revolution. It wasn’t till Shawn Fanning unleashed Napster that broadband demand took off, eventually leading to innovations like Skype, YouTube & Facebook.

I think that from that perspective, the iPhone 3G is going to provide a similar spark for wireless broadband. Just like touch and big screens are becoming increasingly commonplace in high-end phones, over the next 12 months I wouldn’t be surprised to find mobile device makers focusing heavily on the Internet, all while waiting for the elusive killer app, which none has seen just yet. Despite the tight control of carriers on wireless spectrum, this could be the start of a new wireless wave.

http://www.youtube.com/v/FejunYTfDYg

Photo of iPhone & Safari courtesy of Apple.

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AT&T Mobility Chief: New 3G iPhone Is a Game-changer

Om Malik — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 06:01:38 +0000

After months of rumor-driven frenzy, the much talked about 3G iPhone from Apple finally became a reality, promising yet another revolution in the mobile Internet experience. Offering a combination of great user interface with (slow) DSL-level speeds and location-based technologies, the new 3G iPhone is a game-changer.

Those are not my views; they come to use from Ralph de la Vega, president and chief executive officer of AT&T Mobility, the wireless division of San Antonio, Texas-based AT&T. A few hours after the release of the new phone, de la Vega chatted with me about the iPhone, its impact on location-based services, enterprise mobility and of course, the wireless web revolution it will unleash. Here are excerpts from our interview:

Om Malik: What are your thoughts on this new iPhone?
Ralph de la Vega (RDLV): This device is a true game-changer. Why? The immediacy of the data at your fingertips is huge. Imagine, looking up anything, anywhere. It (3G iPhone) allows you to leave your computer at home. It totally and completely mobilizes your data. Before this device you weren’t really untethered, but with this you are. I think people have tried to build a $100 laptop, and here is a $200 phone that can do all that over 3G. It will have a big impact, and will be ubiquitous.

OM: What are the big changes you think it will bring?
RDLV: When I was at the last CIO Forum, I thought people would ask me about lowering wireless prices. Instead I had CIOs asking me about push mail and security on the iPhone. I imagine they were getting questions from people within their company. I think what’s going to happen is that small groups of developers will start writing applications for their enterprise, and this is going to lead to the mobilization of the enterprise like never before.

OM: Do you think today is a red-letter day for location-based services?
RDLV: Absolutely! I think you will see a whole lot of applications using LBS and there are entrepreneurs who are going to be building them. This is such a huge opportunity. I think it will be interesting to see the combination of social networking apps with LBS.

OM: Ralph, as I wrote earlier today, I think the biggest concern is the ability of AT&T to handle the 3G network traffic that would emanate as people start using this new 3G iPhone. What are your thoughts?
RDLV: We have tried to model the usage of the new phone and prepared the network accordingly. We have taken our 2G iPhone usage data and we feel extremely comfortable to be able to deal with the demand. We have a maximum throughput of 3.6 Mbps and soon it will be 20 Mbps. The core of the network is going to run faster as well.

As Steve Jobs said in his speech, our 3G networks already have Wi-Fi like speeds. There are built in checks. As Steve pointed out in his speech, files above 10 MB will be downloaded over Wi-Fi that is fed by broadband connections. I think most average users are just that average and use data accordingly. There are, of course, bandwidth hogs.

OM: It seems like this is a device that is ready for mobile video and there are a lot of applications being developed for it that encourage mobile video streaming. Isn’t that going to overwhelm your 3G network?
RDLV: Clearly streaming video is the largest bandwidth-consuming application, but it is still not clear how many people will view video on it. We will know when we see the data. We have built the network with a lot of capacity, and we have it in control in the short term. So if we have a problem in the future, we will have the data which we can use to fix the problem.

OM: What are you doing about the bandwidth hogs?
RDLV: We are letting the customers decide the usage.

OM: Has there been a change in the cost of data plans?
RDLV: The data plans are different on the 3G iPhone vs. the 2G iPhone. Consumers will pay $30 a month every month, while enterprises will pay $45 a month. This is what you pay us on other PDA devices such as BlackBerry Curve. The SMS messages are not bundled anymore, and you pay for what you want. Again, the prices are based on what you buy.

Related Link: Robert Scoble interviewed John Donovan, the new CTO of AT&T, about the 3G iPhone and a while slew of topics. Have a look on Scoble/FastCompany.tv web site.

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AT&T: Not Too Worried About Google Wireless

Om Malik — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:00:49 +0000

AT&T Mobility CEO & President Ralph de la Vega is not too worried about Google and its wireless ambitions. “Running a wireless network is a capital-intensive business,” he said in a chat earlier this week. “It’s not a business for the faint of heart.”

He said that AT&T has “looked at the scenarios many different ways,” and that while Google entering the wireless market was “not out of the realm of possibility,” he felt the wireless model was different from Google’s current business model. The Mountain View, Calif.-based search and Internet advertising giant is currently the fifth-largest company in the U.S. (ranked by market capitalization).

AT&T’s mobility chief pointed out that they have the spectrum, assets and customers to compete. “We have made an investment in Aloha and will play in the 700 MHz market,” he said. “We want to have a network with global standards,” he added. AT&T plans to stick to its current plan and eventually migrate to a technology called Long Term Evolution (LTE), which promises download rates of 100 megabits per second and upload rates of 50 megabits per second for every 20 MHz of spectrum.

When asked about Google’s Android OS-based devices, de la Vega said that if his customers want those devices, AT&T will be happy to offer them that choice, much like any other OS-based phones.

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