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Not too long after Cingular made the claim that it had the most reliable network, even claiming to beat out Verizon Wireless, it appears that now Cingular customers are experiencing significant network problems, and reporting their experiences here. The issue appears to be random (some users not experiencing problems, others basically having no service at all), and according to some Cingular reps, this is a nationwide phenomenon.

The outage has also generated buzz in many mainstream news outlets, most of it sarcastic and unflattering.
It’s well known that one of Cingular’s ancestors, AT&T Wireless, was considered having the worst network and customer service in the industry according to many of its customers, particularly towards the end of its life. Evidently, now that the “new” AT&T wants to retire the Cingular brand and AT&T Wireless back, they might also be trying to live up to the old reputation as well.

Update: Cingular customers are now indicating that they are seeing service return to normal.  If you’re a Cingular customer and are still experiencing problems, try power cycling your phone.

So, the news is out there: AT&T – or rather, SBC assuming the moniker of the former long distance giant that it purchased – has struck a deal to acquire BellSouth Communications. The immediate impact: 10,000 people are going to lose their jobs, after the sale closes and the combined company moves to eliminate redundancies. But the long term impact is that, like its older and monopolistic ancestor, having a behemoth in control of so much of our communication infrastructure will ultimately mean higher prices for consumers.

Sure, AT&T will feed regulators the line that with the advent of Voice over IP and cell phones, competition will remain strong. But lets’ face it: AT&T already owns Cingular, the largest cell phone company in the US (and interestingly, the one that consistently rates worst for customer service… tell me nothing’s wrong with that picture). And most competitors still have to deal with AT&T in order to interconnect with its now-vast communications networks. If say, Verizon or Sprint needs to set a up a cell site in Texas, Louisiana or Mississippi, they need to connect (or “backhaul”) that cell site to the local telephone network in order to make it send and receive calls. And who must they pay for that service? AT&T, of course. And you can bet that AT&T will probably charge a much higher price to a competitor like Verizon and Sprint for that backhaul than it would to its own subsidiary, Cingular.

The result? Competitors will have to raise prices to cover the increased overhead, while Cingular will have less motivation to sell their service at lower rates if their competitors can’t do the same.

And then there’s AT&T’s newfound greed when it comes to data. The new behemoth, even before the BellSouth announcement, has proposed a scenario where content providers – Yahoo, Google and the like – would pay additional fees to AT&T in order to receive preferrential delivery on the network. Wihtout the payment, the priority of data coming from those sites would instead be put at the bottom of the list, ensuring poor quality of service. In effect, AT&T wants to be paid twice to transport the same content it has in the past. And who will ultimately be stuck with the bill? The end user of course, through higher prices for products and services offered by the content providers who must pay the “premium” internet bill.

Clearly, this merger doesn’t seem like it will be a win for anyone but AT&T. But then why should AT&T care? They’re the phone company.

Litigation OVER!

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) – BlackBerry maker Research in Motion said Friday it agreed to pay $612.5 million to patent holding company NTP to settle a long-running dispute that had threatened to shut down the popular wireless e-mail service for its 3 million users.

So, that ends that. And as a Blackberry user, I’m certainly relieved.

At the same time though, I am annoyed at the situation. First, let’s face it, NTP got away with stealing $612 million on an overbroad patent, which it never made its own products from. And the patents have been largely ruled invalid. Yet, thanks to our broken patent and court systems, the invlidation of those patents didn’t mean a thing in this case.

Second, this signals to me that RIM’s “workaround” wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. For the longest time we were fed a line that RIM had a workaround and that effectively, they didn’t need to settle. And when experts kept asking the same question we all were – why not just turn the workaround on now and end the case? – there was no answer from RIM. In effect, it feels a lot like Blackberry users were lied to, to give us a false sense of complacency and to prevent more people from researching alternatives. That doesn’t sit well with me.