back to article AT&T profits slip on iPhone investments

AT&T announced its second quarter financial results today, revealing numbers that make it increasingly clear that Big Phone is betting the farm on the Apple iPhone. And considering how quickly its landline business is deteriorating, moving fast and hard into the expanding smartphone market looks like a good business decision …

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  1. John Ridley 1
    Unhappy

    Landlines still rule in our neighborhood

    I live in Michigan, and there's practically zero coverage at my house; if I go outside I can MAYBE get a call through. Texts take up to 2 hours to get through inside the house (15 seconds if I'm in town, 4 miles away). There are large areas of Michigan with little to no coverage, and the same goes for many other areas of the US. It's easy to forget that if you live in a city and travel to other cities. There are also a lot of areas where you can't get broadband, either (except via satellite which is not a great option IMO).

    We still have a landline, and the way things are looking, we will for a good long while yet.

  2. Hud Dunlap
    Paris Hilton

    That's because U-vers aint working

    If congress wants to look into anti-trust I would like them to tell me why AT and T is the only one who can give me DSL. They tried to get me to buy U-Verse. It has a whole bunch of Spanish channels that I have no use for. They tell me it's free. Yeah right. Besides it just clogs up my menu. If they want to subsidize foreign lanquage channels they need to crank up the Gaelic channels. I will go for that.

    If they want landlines to be valuble they need to put something of value on the u-verse. Oh yeah, and straighten out the customer service group which is a joke.

    Paris, because she is just as clueless as AT and T.

  3. MacRat

    for John Ridley

    You still don't need a landline..

    Check out T-Mobile@home which is handy outside the home as well.

  4. John Molloy

    Ah, Reg San Fran rep still a cynic

    iPhone = bad

    San Francisco reporter for el reg.

    Grats you have definitely hit the Andrew Orlowski cynic of the week job.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I don't have a landline

    You know... Apple's going to pretty much end up defacto owning AT&T.

  6. John Ridley 1
    Thumb Down

    for MacRat

    VOIP solutions need not apply. We are without power for probably on the order of 3 or 4 days a year, and the instant the power goes out, so does the internet, even when I use a generator to power up our in-house equipment.

    Even my neighbors who buy their VOIP services from the cable company, who have supposedly battery backed routers and VOIP boxes, report that they lose dial tone the instant the power drops.

    If the cable companies ever come to understand what the phrase "life critical service" means, I'll think about it.

  7. Flybert
    WTF?

    huh ?

    something seems screwy with the figures

    AT&T is the 8th largest American company June 2008-June 2009 with 124 billion in revenue, up from 10th largest for 2008 year

    They own satelites .. a ton of network capacity .. love my AT&T/Yahoo DSL service ( and landline too !)

    Apple is like .. hmm .. about 100th largest American company

    just for perspecive mind you .. sure the iPhone is helping AT&T's bottom line .. but the AT&T is huge and iPhone business is a relatively small part of it's overall revenue picture

  8. Sean Bergeron
    Jobs Halo

    Good enough

    The congressional investigation is grandstanding; none of these morons would care if the iPhone was on Verizon, and it worked in the DC Metro. And if Verizon hadn't been in the disable-every-little-feature mindset when Apple approached them first, it wouldn't be a story at all. When I tried to switch to Verizon two years ago (just before the first iPhone release), I was amazed at how much on my Winmob phone that worked on T-Mobile didn't work on Verizon. (I cancelled before the 30 day trial ran out, because their vaunted "network" had a colossal deadzone right over my neighborhood -- dropping calls even standing outside)

    FWIW, I'm one of the new iPhone subscribers (two of 'em -- one for me, one for the better half), and so far very happy with my service. As is my brother, and my nearing-retirement parents who got iPhones before either of their nerd kids...?

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