Well now! AT&T certainly turned over the Sprint/T-Mobile apple cart speculators didn’t they? AT&T just announced they have struck a deal with Deutsche Telekom to acquire T-Mobile, America’s fourth largest wireless provider. The $39 billion deal gives Deutsche Telekom an 8% stake in AT&T, and a spot on AT&T’s Board of Directors. AT&T expects the transaction to close within 12 months.
Soon and very soon, the accounting nerds at SBC, the real entity known as AT&T, are ending the bandwidth gravy train. In the industry, we all knew they’d get around the trying again after the glorious fail of their metered billing trials in Texas. We just didn’t knew when. Well, that when is now May 2nd. Broadband Reports broke the scoop over the weekend.
As of May 2nd, all DSL customers will have a 150GB cap. All U-Verse customers will have a 250GB cap. Go over that 3 times anytime in the *life* of the customer account and you get whacked an extra $10 for every 50GB over, every time you go over. So if you are 51GB over, that is an extra $20 tacked onto the bottom of your bill.
Business users of DSL are strongly encouraged to take note and plan accordingly. If you need alternate bandwidth providers, call us - 888.407.5030, get a quote for Ethernet service online or investigate T1s, bonded T1s, etc.
For users of online backup services and WAN based file replication, this is particularly important to consider as a single PC easily can burn through the entire bandwidth allocation.
Unsurprisingly, carriers are reporting that in the recent snow-in events across the midwest and eastern seaboard, residential internet use jumped 15-20% over comparable days as stuck-at-home users became work-at-home users.
Does your business have enough bandwidth to support all your users working from home during a snow storm, natural disaster or other tragic event?
We can help you figure out how much bandwidth you need and find the most cost effective way to deliver it. Request a bandwidth quote and one of our solutions engineers will be in touch in a couple minutes.
Now that Verizon’s iPhone is ready to arrive on February 10, AT&T is making a few changes. Today it’s SMS pricing. A leaked document obtained by GearLive, indicates AT&T will be eliminating the $5 for 200 messages and $15 for 1500 messages plans. Replacing those plans will be a new single $10 plan for 1000 messages, with overage messages costing $.10 each. Their $20 for unlimited messaging option will remain as-is for now.
(Source: dslreports.com)
Deep packet inspection vendors and the profit lust of incumbent monopoly/duopoly carriers highlight the potential for a very fractured internet in the future.
In 2010 Frontier began a bizarre trial in Minnesota that involved making users pay between $100 and $200 for 3 Mbps DSL if they consumed more than 100GB a month. Now Frontier is pushing that pricing into suburban Sacramento, CA. Guess they don’t see enough competition there to treat that market with respect.
Anyion is known for its professional irreverence. One of the ways we show it is in our business cards. Each year, about this time, customers receive a new business card along with our corporate Christmas card. Many of our customers tell us they have collected and kept our business cards because they’re so funny. So by request, here are a few of our most memorable business card backs from the past few years.
Apple appears to finally be listening to other manufacturers and their carrier partners and is learning how REAL signals engineering is done. In their original iPhone implementations, Apple’s engineers appear to have made that assumption that the network will conform to the needs of the phone in order for them to get a decent level of battery life out of the phone. What they’ve learned over the past few years is that the phone has to be nice to the network and can’t be totally dependent on the network in order to make its battery last.
At the beginning of November, Daniel Pentecost of Anyion Group participated in the first of what will be many vendor “shoot-outs” to compare and evaluate Hosted PBX vendors available in today’s market.
The judging results and presentations are now available on the Telecom Association website - http://byob.businessphonebuyersguide.com/
As we move into the holidays ahead, remember that’s it’s ok to make new traditions. Acknowledge the old and at the same time, forge new traditions for yourself, family and friends. May the joy of life and the season be with you and your family. ~Anyion
