AT&T: We Won't Get Bashed By the 'Dumb Pipe'

LAS VEGAS–Big wireless carriers are terrified of the dumb pipe. The carriers' nightmare for years has been to be turned into simple ISPs, competing on cost and speed rather than on the extra services on which they pride themselves (and for which they can charge extra.)

But AT&T has a plan, and the company's vice president of ecosystems and solutions, Laura Merling, is in charge of a big part of it. As with so many of these plans, depending on how AT&T plays it, it could either be great for consumers or downright nightmarish.

The Good Scenario
Here's the good scenario, and one Merling wanted to talk about: AT&T is becoming an information services platform. That means it's charging businesses to not only provide Internet service, but to integrate those services with their own processes.

Not only can the company offer advice, it can expose AT&T's network and billing capabilities as APIs, letting business customers seamlessly integrate AT&T's capabilities into their own internal apps without extra logins. AT&T can provide a communications platform for a doctor's office to video chat with patients, or offer that office the ability to record, capture, store, and manage calls in AT&T's cloud.

AT&T can also bridge third-party providers, because AT&T touches almost anything on the Web - joining together multiple cloud providers into a single, jointly billed virtual cloud, for instance. All of these offerings leverage AT&T's huge network, and all of them would require the business to subscribe to some unique AT&T service; few of them would require the end user to be an AT&T subscriber.

"There is value in the services and in the network we have, but we know we won't always be owning the relationship with the end consumer," she said. "We can potentially make money off of customers whose endpoint is on another carrier."

That's a very smart pipe.

The Bad Scenario
But here's where things get a little shifty. About a week ago, AT&T's CEO Randall Stephenson told investors that content providers will buy their way out of data caps, completely destroying any idea of net neutrality. (Remember, net neutrality doesn't apply to wireless.) Big content companies like ESPN (according to the Wall Street Journal) which can pony up to carriers could get excerpted from caps, but the smaller guys who can't pay to play would still get metered. It would be a two-tier mobile Internet where new, small content sources get penalized and bigger companies feel they have to pay to get carried.

In theory, Marling's department would have something to do with the exciting new APIs involved in letting content companies subsidize service plans, but when I asked, I got shut down hard by her otherwise-friendly PR handler. He referred me to Stephenson's comments and practically glared any follow-ups into submission.

This comes after I spent time with ItsOn, a cloud-based wireless billing services company that, among other things, can let wireless carriers build data plans where people pay for specific applications. It promoted the feature as consumer-friendly (if you only use Facebook, why not get Facebook for $2.49 and nothing else?), but the ways carriers could punish consumers with per-app data plans should be pretty obvious.

ItsOn's CEO, Greg Raleigh, said no carrier would be foolish enough to re-erect the old walled-garden mobile Internet - that open will win. I wish I had as much faith in the inherent goodness of our major wireless carriers as he does.