Consumers in control

AT&T recently began its marketing campaign to re-brand Cingular Wireless, which used to own the AT&T Wireless brand until Cingular phased it out, as AT&T. Follow? Don't worry, you don't have to unless you're the guy getting paid for all this re-branding, in which case you may now retire and enjoy your wealth.

In the TV commercials addressing the most recent re-branding, AT&T, in the guise of Stanley Tucci's voice, alludes to how customers, using devices and services in the way they see fit, are driving communications convergence. This seems like a roundabout way of saying that consumers wanted AT&T to buy BellSouth and the rest of Cingular that it didn't previously own because it's the only way consumers can get those offerings. There probably aren't many people outside AT&T that believe consumers were present, either physically or spiritually, at the merger discussions that brought those companies under one roof.

Actually, if you believe in the potential of IP multimedia subsystem architectures, mergers aren't necessarily a prerequisite for service and device convergence. It's also debatable how much current consumer behavior is really driving convergence — a whole generation seems to be getting along fine with their mobile phones and little else. If further convergence happens, service providers will be driving it based on the bet that they can sell a new way of using communications and entertainment applications, rather than on how consumers really use their devices today. Unless, that is, we've decided to draw pretty broad conclusions from the pretty few number of customers actually using fixed/mobile converged services, IPTV, mobile TV and other relatively new applications.

But, that isn't all to say that consumers won't be in control of the communications and entertainment future. They'll buy and use some things and not others, and they probably won't think about whether AT&T is one company or five different ones connected by corporate handshakes. The way things are going, they might be more interested in getting all this stuff from Apple. It's a good thing Apple has made a partner of AT&T — or is it Cingular?

In this issue of Telephony, we look at what consumers will be thinking, or at least seeing, in the future. Follow-up reports from the Consumer Electronics Show include Kevin Fitchard's story on Cingular's iPhone distribution deal on page 8, Carol Wilson's take on the convergence of TV and Internet on page 14, Kevin's mobile TV update on page 15 and Carol's feature story on the effect social networking is having on telecom, on page 30. Also, visit our Web site to hear a podcast from Kevin about his recent trip to Las Vegas to cover CES.

Elsewhere in this issue, Contributing Editor Joan Engebretson writes about short-code trends on page 26, Ed Gubbins chips in with an analysis of pair bonding on page 13, and Tim McElligott reports from the OPASTCO winter conference on page 10

Consumers are indeed in control, but let's not blame them for everything.