Operation Chokehold

Fake Steve Jobs. [Link]

As for Chokehold, people keep asking me if I think it will succeed. My answer is that it already has. Have you seen the coverage of this thing? It’s all over Twitter. Tonight it hit the Wall Street Journal. Who knew there was so much anger out there? As far as I’m concerned, it’s mission accomplished.

I think the reason people are so angry goes beyond AT&T and the iPhone. I think the anger stems from the fact that we’re living in the United States, which used to be considered a First World country, and yet we’re dealing with a wireless system that feels like something you’d find in Port-au-Prince during hurricane season. In fact the developing world is racing past us, building out new wireless networks while we’re stuck with this POS legacy infrastructure run by POS legacy behemoths that either can’t or won’t bring it up to snuff.

I mean, consider this fact:

AT&T, a huge wireless provider in the United States, cannot reliably connect calls in New York City.

How can this be?

And (emphasis added)

The fact that AT&T is already bonking, here in the first five minutes of a 60-minute game, is terrifying. It’s their own fault, of course. Go look at their financial statementsand open up the Financial Operations and Statistics Summary and look at capital expenditures over the past eight quarters. I’m no math whiz, but it looks like capex has gone down by about 30% over the time period. Scroll down a bit to the Wireless section and check out data revenues — they’re up 80% over the same period.

Irresponsible? Pointless? Yes, that sounds familiar.