I think he wants to say AT&T should get the users hooked to using lot of data, so they as a subscription company can keep making money from users for a longer time.
If you're AT&T, when households are looking at their bills for stuff to cut, you don't want them looking at their data plan and saying, "well, I guess I don't use it very much..."
But most AT&T customers are locked into long-term contracts, so they can’t just up and decide “I’ll cut the data plan”.
My startup was recently bought by Nokia, and unsurprisingly, one of the fringe benefits of working for Nokia is getting a free smartphone (GSM 3G) with an unlimited data plan (T-Mobile, thank God). My wife and I looked into cancelling our Verizon family plan and moving to just one line for her, but the early-termination fee is so high that it’s cheaper for me to just keep the Verizon phone. And since our Verizon plan has free in-network calls, it’s also cheaper for me to carry the Verizon phone, so that she can call me on it.
The flip side of this is that people who abandon their carrier because of network issues will be more like a slow leak than a stampede, so AT&T executives with an eye on quarterly profit results would rather do anything but invest heavily in building out their infrastructure.
Whether one can cut the bill immediately or in X months time, the point is that the last thing AT&T should want is people saying, "why am I paying $X when I hardly use it?"
They should want to have mobile data usage so ingrained in their customers' lives that people wouldn't dream of cutting it when their contracts run up.
AT&T has sold a lot of data plans by making them required for iPhone purchases, and plenty of people wanted the fancy new toy. What happens when smartphones aren't the fancy new toy? How many AT&T iPhone customers, if they had to drop their iPhone and get another phone, would still buy a data plan if it was simply an option rather than a requirement?
Actually I'd rather they eat less fast food. If they stop going to the gym they will get less healthy and die sooner. I'd like them to be using my product for as long as possible.
But if the heavy users of their services are costing them more than they're making, and generally degrading the quality of the service, that argument doesn't really hold up. I'm going to assume that, like most similar business models (including gym memberships and all-you-can eat buffets), AT&T relies on light data users paying for more than they use in order to subsidize heavier data users that use more than they pay for. Encouraging people to become heavy users that are an overall cost to the business so that they stick around longer would seem like the classic "we lose money on each one, but we make it up in volume" sort of mistake.
It would be like encouraging people to eat more when they go to an all-you-can-eat buffet by giving them doggy bags to take home as much as they want, on the theory that then they're more likely to come back. If you're losing money on those people you don't really want them to come back.
It's obviously an open question as to exactly what their costs per user are for light versus heavy users of data, but I'm going to infer from their recent actions that they've decided that at the moment supporting heavy users of data isn't such a great business to be in.
Your argument makes no sense to me. Why would the length of my subscription with AT&T have anything to do with how much data I use? If I only use 100MB a month and am happy with that, how would paying less for it make me leave AT&T faster?
