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

Frederic    blogging    

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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