Posted by: AT&T Blog Team on May 3, 2012 at 10:56 am
By Jim Bugel, AT&T Assistant Vice President, Public Safety and Homeland Security
This week, we launched our new website to help better educate our customers on protecting their wireless devices and their personal information. You might recall that, just a few weeks ago, we joined our fellow wireless carriers, law enforcement, Senator Schumer and Chairman Genachowski at an FCC event that focused on industry efforts to address the problem of stolen devices.
The new website, which can be found at www.att.com/stolenphone, focuses on the critical importance of passwords – not only to protect the device but the account as well. We encourage our customers to also change their passwords. Often. We also provide guidance on downloading apps that help to protect devices and personal information. We further offer a tutorial on how to back up SIM card contacts. And last, but certainly not least, we provide the steps a customer should take in the event their device is lost or stolen.
Our many efforts to tackle the challenges that stem from the theft of wireless devices are well underway. And our work with the industry as well as governments and the law enforcement community continues. So, stay tuned for more updates as we roll out additional educational tools and materials (and the new database to identify and disable stolen devices) over the coming months.
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Posted by: AT&T Blog Team on April 27, 2012 at 1:14 pm
The following statement may be attributed to an AT&T spokesperson:
“AT&T takes the problem of unauthorized third-party charges, or cramming, very seriously. We provide our customers with tools to understand and manage legitimate third-party charges on their phone bills and we have also put in place an aggressive anti-cramming program that includes strict requirements for customer authorization of third-party charges, monthly tracking of cramming complaints and audits of third-party billers. In addition, last month, we announced that we would limit third-party charges on wireline bills to certain types of charges that are less likely to create opportunities for cramming. The industry as a whole has worked cooperatively with each other, as well as the FCC, to identify ways to help customers effectively manage their bills. And we are committed to continuing this work”
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Posted by: Joan Marsh on February 9, 2012 at 12:47 pm
Yesterday, Kevin Fitchard over at GigaOm wrote a blog post on my Super Bowl post, in which I highlight some spectrum lessons from the big game. While he acknowledges that we need more spectrum in a tweet, I want to focus on a couple of points in his blog post with which I disagree. Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading his take, and appreciate his time.
First, he concludes that it’s “strange” for AT&T to use a one-off event like the Super Bowl to make a point about the need for more spectrum, asserting that this is exactly the type of scenario where more spectrum wouldn’t help. That’s not correct. As I note in my blog, one of the core network enhancements AT&T made to prepare for the Super Bowl was to add more UMTS carriers to its existing cell tower infrastructure. You can only add additional carriers if you have spectrum free to support them (a minimum of 10 MHz for a UMTS carrier). In many areas, AT&T is close to exhausting spectrum available to add additional carriers and thus will no longer have that tool available to it to increase local capacity.
Setting that aside, there’s a broader point that I was trying to make. Customer usage at a big one-time event is simply a window into the average data usage profile of tomorrow. Five years ago, carriers did not worry about supporting massive video uploads at Super Bowl-like events because video (upload and download) simply wasn’t part of the customer wireless experience. That has now dramatically changed and the gigabytes being driven in Lucas Oil Stadium demonstrate that. In its most recent traffic study, Ericcson predicted that by 2016 the number of high-traffic smartphones will increase more than 5 times and generated traffic will grow around 12 times. Tablet subscriptions will grow 10 times and associated generated traffic will increase about 40 times. Those increases will be driven predominantly by video. The Super Bowl numbers simply give us a glimpse into that video-centric wireless broadband future.
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