I'd be willing to bet they subsidize their data pricing with that text messaging revenue. How many of AT&T's iPhone activations come with a fat text-messaging plan? Data plans are low-margin; text messaging is high-margin.
AT&T, along with most other carriers, made a tremendous amount of capital investment in the last few years to improve the service they provide to smartphone owners. iMessage is a threat to their margin-stealing model.
If they made text-messaging free—or just counted its data use against your data plan—but raised the price of your data plan by $15/mo, how would you feel?
> If they made text-messaging free—or just counted its data use against your data plan—but raised the price of your data plan by $15/mo, how would you feel?
If it meant I could use my own system instead of being firewalled to their weird broken service? And everything acted like a dumb pipe? I'd feel pretty great actually.
If text messaging overages are required to subsidize data plans, then how can European carriers be profitable offering data at significantly lower prices?
iMessage is a threat because iPhones are popular; the extent of the threat is directly proportional to iPhone market share.
Carriers made significant amounts of money because of the iPhone that arguably they would not have found any other way to make. Very few of their personal investments led to this success (except perhaps things like Cingular's agreement to invest in "visual voice mail" at Jobs' behest, before AT&T bought Cingular).
From my point of view the complaint from AT&T is a little like an investor trying to socialize his losses while keeping all his capital gains. AT&T enjoyed Apple's success when it benefited them, and now that it's working against them they're worried? Well, tough.
AT&T, along with most other carriers, made a tremendous amount of capital investment in the last few years to improve the service they provide to smartphone owners. iMessage is a threat to their margin-stealing model.
If they made text-messaging free—or just counted its data use against your data plan—but raised the price of your data plan by $15/mo, how would you feel?