January 2015

AT&T added 854,000 of the wireless industry’s core customers in the last three months of 2014, as profits and customer retention showed signs of strain from the heightened competition among the nation’s biggest carriers. But the Financial Times reports that AT&T lost more than 100,000 of its most lucrative mobile phone customers in the final three months of 2014, as the second-largest US wireless carrier fell victim to a bruising industry price war being waged by its smaller rivals.

The rate at which customers left its network, known in the industry as “churn”, hit 1.22 per cent, or its highest level in two years. The fourth quarter, usually the busiest and least profitable for wireless companies because of the costs related to phone upgrades, included strong demand for Apple’s latest iPhone at a time when the carrier used promotional deals to battle with rivals for customers. With little room for growth in the US, where the market is saturated, AT&T is spreading into new businesses through the acquisition of satellite television provider DirecTV and deals to acquire two wireless companies in Mexico. AT&T expects all the deals to close by mid-2015. The company is also coming to the end of two years of intense investment to upgrade its wireless and wired networks. AT&T reiterated that it would spend around $18 billion in 2015, down from about $21 billion in 2014. Amid all the strategic moves, the company’s net income was hit by an already disclosed $7.9 billion charge for pension-related costs. For the three months ended Dec. 31, AT&T reported a loss of $3.98 billion, compared with a profit of $6.91 billion a year earlier. Revenue rose 3.8% to $34.4 billion.

After announcing a major expansion of its high-speed Internet service, Google said it will continue to pour money into new broadband networks even if federal regulators adopt strong network neutrality rules designed to thwart Internet providers that may want to speed up or slow down certain Web sites over others. That's a long way of saying Google is taking the opposite stance of many in the broadband industry, such as Comcast, Verizon and others, who argue that aggressive rules would slow the industry's investments in better Internet infrastructure -- and by extension, their ability to offer better service to you and me.

Sens Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Roy Blunt (R-MO) are hoping to shine a spotlight on the Commerce Department's moves to hand off oversight of the system governing Internet addresses by introducing a resolution that would designate the week of Feb 8 as Internet Governance Awareness Week.

The resolution would coincide with a meeting in Singapore on the topic, and outlines a series of principles for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to follow as it organizes the multi-stakeholder process to hand over the reins permanently of oversight and management of the Internet domain name system.

Rep Jared Polis (D-CO) is calling for the US intelligence community to begin 24-hour monitoring of Sen Marco Rubio (R-FL) in response to a recent op-ed Sen Rubio wrote endorsing the permanent extension of post 9/11 intelligence gathering tools, presumably including controversial domestic data collection programs revealed by former government contractor Edward Snowden.

"If Sen Rubio believes that millions of innocent Americans should be subject to intrusive and unconstitutional government surveillance, surely he would have no objections to the government monitoring his own actions and conversations,” Rep Polis said. "Sen Rubio is asking for American technology companies to ‘cooperate with authorities,’ so I believe he will have no objection to authorities being given access to his electronic correspondence and metadata. Maybe after his 2016 strategy documents are accidentally caught up in a government data grab, he’ll rethink the use of mass surveillance,” he continued.