AT&T just declared war on an open internet (and us)

Last year we won the open internet back, but the new regulations had one big weakness: they didn’t explicitly ban a scheme called “ #zerorating .” Zero rating is a poison pill wrapped in a piece of cheese; it looks like a good thing for consumers (free video!), but ultimately has the capability to rot competition and the open internet. The #FCC decided it would look at zero rating schemes on a case-by-case basis, which left the door open for wireless companies to play their usual games. #ATT just broke that door off its hinges. Last night AT&T made a dim prophecy official by announcing that its new #DirecTV Now streaming service would be zero rated: it won’t count against its customers’ data caps. Zero rating isn’t new — T-Mobile has been writing the manual on how to get away with it — but now it’s finally happening at a scale that matters. And AT&T’s version is much worse than #T-Mobile ’s.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/29/13774648/fcc-att-zero-rating-directv-net-neutrality-vs-tmobile

AT&T Eyes “Downward Trend” in Capex as SDN, NFV Efficiencies Kick In

#AT&T ’s CTO and president of AT&T Labs Andre Fuetsch this week said the carrier is planning on a decrease in capital spending in the next several years thanks to the benefits of its software-defined networking ( #SDN ) and network function virtualization ( #NFV ) efforts. “It’s certainly not going up,” Fuetsch said of AT&T’s capex figure at Nomura’s 2016 Media, Telecom and Internet Conference. “It’s certainly going down.” In the second quarter, AT&T said it spent a total of around $5.5 billion on capital expenditures across its businesses. Though the carrier didn’t break out capital expenditures on its mobility business, Wells Fargo Securities seems to have pegged the total around $2.7 billion. #WellsFargo Senior Analyst Jennifer Fritzsche said in a recent research note the top four carriers spent a combined $7.3 billion on capex in the second quarter, with known quantities of $2.8 billion from #Verizon, $1.4 billion from #T-Mobile and $376 million from #Sprint. According to Fuetsch, AT&T’s “downward trend” in network spending will come courtesy of “efficiencies we’re gaining from vitalization and software.” “As we deploy more and more virtual functions, and as the hardware that we’re running those virtual functions, as that becomes more commoditized, all those efficiencies we gain back,” Fuetsch explained. “We have the option of turning those investments back into the network or keeping those. So I would say, again, it’s hard to speculate here, but definitely a downward trajectory is what we’re looking at.”
https://www.wirelessweek.com/news/2016/08/t-eyes-downward-trend-capex-sdn-nfv-efficiencies-kick

Yahoo and the Online Universe According to Verizon

#Verizon Communications’ $4.83 billion acquisition of #Yahoo has the technology cognoscenti scratching their heads. What does Verizon, the country’s biggest wireless company, see in an internet also-ran? Fortune criticized “The Problem With Verizon-Yahoo.” #T-Mobile’s chief executive, John Legere, derided the deal as a “slippery slope.” The chief executive of #Sprint, Marcelo Claure, said that when telecommunications companies try to get into the content business, “history has proven that every single one of them has failed.” And there are reasons to think history might repeat itself. Yahoo will be merged with #AOL, another faded star of Web 1.0 that Verizon bought last year. These brands from yesterday are supposed to compete for the same advertising dollars that titans like #Google and #Facebook are devouring faster than ever.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/business/media/yahoo-and-the-online-universe-according-to-verizon.html?_r=0&referer=https://www.google.com/