An interesting and long interview with Ralph De Vega, the new CEO of AT&T (NYSE: T) Mobility, on Engadget. Among other things, he talks about the supposed openness of AT&T’s network and how they’re perceived wrongly in the market.
— On choice: “If you go to our stores you can get your choice of six operating environment systems…If you look at the number of phones that we carry, it’s like a 150 different devices that you can choose from…Do you want a smart phone? One that is more music-centric? If you want music do you want iTunes? Do you want eMusic? Napster? What kind of music do you want after you make that choice? What e-mail service do you want?”
— Then some pointed comments about Nokia: “My biggest pet peeves [about Nokia] is saying purposefully releasing the devices in Europe first and then we get them months or years after they have been released in Europe because that’s their biggest market. … why are you releasing that device in Europe first, and then letting us having it device 6 months or even later in the US?…Now as a result of our complaining they have built a development lab in San Diego to begin to develop devices for the US. They are still not on par with other companies. … So it’s not that we have been holding it up. They have not been giving it to us at the same time that they have been giving them to European operators.”
— On the spectrum auction: “I think it’s a good experiment to see if they can foster more of this “open access”, as it’s being called. I’ve never called it open access. I’d like to think of it as giving customers more choices about the devices and the applications that they want to run. If you look at our history, every time that there is a significant amount of customers that say they want this app or that service we’ve gone out and we’ve delivered it to them.”
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