It was a perfectly staged robocall.
AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson was in the middle of a live interview at Washington, DC’s, Economic Club Wednesday when he was dinged mid-sentence by his Apple Watch.
“I’m getting a robocall,” the head of the nation’s second largest wireless carrier said while holding his watch up as he declined the call. “It’s literally a robocall.”
The audience laughed, but the irony was lost on no one.
Earlier in the day, AT&T and Comcast announced that they had tested a system to combat annoying robocalls by allowing them to “authenticate” calls between their networks. If successful, the rollout may someday block robocalls.
Until then, consumers must resort to spam filters provided by Verizon, T-Mobile and, yes, AT&T, which — as Stephenson can attest — don’t always work.
In fact, as the Federal Trade Commission reported earlier this year, Americans received 26.3 billion spam calls over the course of 2018 — up 46 percent from 2017.