Industry Perspective: Glenn Lurie, president of AT&T emerging devices

On the business model: I think we are going to learn as we go forward what customers expect and what they are willing to do, because a lot of this is going to be very new ground for us…One of the things the wireless industry has tried over the last few years is to simplify. This could, if not done right, make life more difficult and less simple, and that is not what we are going to do. We are going to focus on the customer, make sure we make it easy for them. If someone is a customer with us, we’d like to have a single rate plan. I just can’t tell you for sure yet how it will all pan out.

On why AT&T couldn’t wait for LTE: The key thing is, do we today have the speeds and bandwidths to deliver the types of experiences that customers would expect on these devices? The answer is: We can deliver that today. When you look at our network, we are delivering well over a megabit per second. That allows us to do laptop cards, surf the Web at a nice speed, and it works extremely well. These devices are not futuristic. There are a lot of things we are working on now, and you’ll see these devices coming today. We are sitting at HSPA today, a megabit to a megabit-and-a-half per second. We’re going to start rolling out HSPA+ in ’09. That will take us to 20 to 25 megabits per second. That is incredibly fast and allows you to do some amazing applications that go another level above. Just like everything else, we believe these devices will evolve, but we have plenty of speed and bandwidth to deliver the kind of experience we want to deliver today.

On network interoperability: One of the reasons our iPhone relationship worked so well is the fact it was exclusive and the fact that, once we knew we would be strong partners for a long time, we were really able to sit down and plan together. That is one of the biggest successes you have seen – you’ve seen Apple and our results the last few days, and we are doing quite well. I see that model working quite well in other segments of this emerging devices world. Bottom line is what [consumer electronics] manufacturers are looking for is a great partner who will help them and work with them hand in hand, and we are going to do that.

On the connectivity timeline: Today we are doing things already in the PC space. We’ll see more come there. You’ll see some announcements from us in Q1 of next year.

On AT&T’s ultimate goal: Our goal here is to bring value to customers and, obviously, our goal is to grow revenue. At the same time, when you look at the number of CE devices out there, all the different types, all the things being built today, plus the things we don’t even know about yet, we want all those devices on the AT&T network. Our goal is to get every device on our network. We want to do it in good partnership with our partners. We want to do it and bring that value to subscribers, and we want to make sure we innovate with our partners to move along the technology.