I know the cool thing these days is to rag on AT&T for their huge amount of dropped calls, their removal of unlimited data plans for new wireless customers, their iPhone 4 pre-order debacle and their rip-off that is iPhone data tethering fees, but among all that is wrong with AT&T, we all owe them an enormous amount of gratitude for changing the face of the mobile industry in a very good way.
A few years ago, before Apple released the original iPhone, smart phones were pretty terrible. Blackberry was the most popular device for businesses but had almost no penetration in the consumer market. Phones such as the T-Mobile Sidekick were as close to consumer smart phones that had any sort of market penetration for non-business users, and anyone that ever used these phones was fully aware of the carrier’s “walled garden.” If you wanted to add a ringtone, wallpaper or game, you had to go through the T-Mobile store “T-Zones.” All carriers had their own market for device add-ons and were ripping off customers left and right. Companies such as Verizon were notorious in the tech community for disabling features on their devices such as Bluetooth data transfer that would allow customization by users such as wallpaper or ringtones without paying for them.
When Apple was shopping the iPhone around to carriers, Verizon did not want to give up the control to Apple that they were looking for. It’s even been rumored that a large contention in the negotiations was the inclusion of the Verizon Wireless logo on the iPhone itself. AT&T, formerly known as Cingular, was the company that ultimately laid down for Apple and let them put out the phone they wanted to and the rest is history.
Some mobile experts believe that AT&T is a victim of their own success and even have speculated that the data overload problems that have plagued them would have happened to Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile should they have been the sole company offering the iPhone.
It’s not secret that the iPhone is a game changer. The one point Steve Jobs made in the beginning of the device’s introductory keynote was that customers hated their phones and the iPhone was going to change that. By completely blowing up the stranglehold that carriers had over device hardware and software, customers finally had a device they could fully customize and enjoy without feeling as though they were being ripped off by their provider. Ultimately it was the Apple App Store which really blew the door open for this phenomenon, but the App Store would never have occurred if AT&T didn’t allow Apple the power to run the device the way they wanted from the beginning.
Whether you’re an iPhone user or not, you should all be thanking AT&T for giving up the control that all providers once had over their phones and creating an experience that’s much better for the consumer. If they hadn’t, we would not have the wonderful competition between iPhone and Android forcing each other to up the ante on innovation, streaming free music from Pandora would be a pipe dream and social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook would not have nearly as much success as they enjoy today.
Try to keep this in mind the next time your iPhone drops a call, which will probably be in a few minutes! 
Follow Me
