Wave: That’s what Sprint is touting.
Mr. Whitacre: And I don’t know what that does for you. Does that shoot you into space or what? My personal opinion is consumers will be a little slow on the content side, but it’s still going to be a big factor in the years ahead.
Wave: What are the technical challenges into bringing all of this together?
Mr. Whitacre: There are a lot of them. How do you make all these networks work together? It’s sophisticated stuff. It takes a lot of software work as well as work with your networks. But I think it’s been proven it can work and will work and I think it’s an exciting future for convergence.
Wave: I wish I could find another word to throw out there for you, but it’s the only one that —
Mr. Whitacre: It’s the only one.
Wave: I’ll work on that. When a company is able to offer a customer so many different services, what kind of impact do you think that has on reducing
customer churn?
Mr. Whitacre: Well, I’m not expert at that, but Stan Sigman (president and CEO, AT&T Mobility) tells me that the quality of the network is the key to reducing churn. So I think that says you have to spend the capital dollars to have a first class network.
We’ve had a little challenge in that area because AT&T Wireless and Cingular had two different networks. There’s TDMA, and then we moved to GSM, and then along comes 3G.
So it’s technically a challenge, but I think we’ve met it so far and I think you can see the network quality has improved a great deal and so has the churn. I guess Sigman’s right, the better the network the lower the churn.
Wave: I think he knows what he’s talking about.
Mr. Whitacre: (smiling) I think he does, too.
AT&T Chairman & CEO Ed Whitacre
Now that AT&T has completed its deal to buy Bellsouth, wireless is at the heart of the new company's plans for the future. Chairman and CEO Ed Whitacre talks about the new AT&T and shares his thoughts about net neutrality, convergence, rebranding, and much more!
Click here to listen.
