AT&T to customers: “We are idiots.”
Telecommunications executives make me crazy. Take this quotation (from here)as an example:
“Somebody running a server in their basement on our network and uploading illegal copies movies raises the costs for everybody else and jams the network in ways we’re not compensated for,” said Mr. Cicconi, whose company [AT&T] is also one of the world’s largest providers of Internet-based corporate communications services.
Mr. Cicconi’s argument is fallacious. (And it’s a poorly-worded argument, too; an executive for a communications company ought to have better grammar at his command.) AT&T is 100-percent compensated for some guy running a server in his basement uploading illegal movies. He has hired AT&T’s network to transmit data to, and receive data from, Internet hosts of his choosing. The content of any particular datum is irrelevant. Mr. Cicconi has chosen digital movie piracy as a straw man to hide his real concern: overselling profits.
ISPs sell more bandwidth than they have. People don’t usually notice, because it’s statistically unlikely that everyone will try to fully utilize their connections at the same time—at least as long as they stick to reading their email and looking up stuff on Wikipedia. When enough people start sending around big video files (even legal ones), they use up the ISP’s oversold bandwidth, and the rest of the ISP’s customers start making irate phone calls to complain that they can’t look at that one camel on Google Maps.
In short, if AT&T loses money on customers who actually use the capacity they lease, then AT&T should charge more or find ways to cut costs. Blaming customers just makes the company look like idiots.
