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AT&T = Open - Let me have a good laugh about that…

Posted by Frederic On December - 6 - 2007

So At&T has managed to convince Leslie Cauley of the USA Today that it now has gone “open” - meaning you can use any device you want to. Apparently they were envious of all the free attention Verizon got after a similar announcement.

“You can use any handset on our network you want,” says Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T’s wireless business. “We don’t prohibit it, or even police it.”

Problem is, of course, that AT&T has done nothing and has changed absolutely no policies whatsoever. AT&T runs a GSM network. Put your AT&T SIM card into any device, and it just works. Like magic.

I expect T-Mobile to announce the same thing within the hour.

The USA Today article compares this to Google’s ‘openness,’ which is a complete joke. If anything AT&T has taken this one out of the political playbook. Co-opt a word like “open” and just make it mean whatever you want it to mean.

And that’s why tech journalists get a bad name and AT&T rightly deserves ridicule for this

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About Me

My name is Frederic. I am a PhD student and have been writing about technology on this blog for about the last three years. The focus of this blog is on Web 2.0, blogging, social media, and news aggregation.

These days, you can find most of my professional writing on ReadWriteWeb.

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