One Year After Announcement, Tethering Yet To Come To AT&T Customers

If the CEO of a company is not reliable enough a source for future service announcements, then who really is? 

Harry from Technologizer stirs up some nostalgia when he notes that it is now over a year since AT&T Mobility CEO promised tethering. 

Back then, we had enthusiastically written

"However, after all the drama we finally have official news from AT&T. AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph De La Vega in an interview with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has just confirmed that AT&T would be offering an official tethering option for the iPhone "soon"".

Were we too optimistic that 'soon' in this context might not be more than a few weeks or so? Apparently yes. A few weeks back, an AT&T spokesman had played down reports that suggested that AT&T might finally manage to offer tethering at least by the end of this year. "Where did anyone promise tethering by EOY?  Where did you see that?", he had asked. 

So why is AT&T so fussy about offering tethering services? While statements from AT&T have always been evasive about this, and when they are not, they seem to be vague as the CEO's statement shows, one reason that the company has proferred is that of maintaining excellent customer service levels. An AT&T spokesman earlier speaking to the Wall Street Journal had said:

"Whenever we offer new features, we want to offer the best possible customer experience. For tethering, we need to do some additional fine tuning to our systems and networks so that we do deliver a great experience". 

That sounds like a perfectly logical argument, until we ask ourselves how better has the service become in the past one year since the CEO announced tethering. Had AT&T really been serious about improving customer service levels, we wouldn't be seeing high dropped calls to this date at some of the high iPhone density areas. 

Our rant here is not exactly about AT&T's service levels. A lot many of our readers have been extremely satisfied users of AT&T and we think there is a lot of truth to this. The rant is more directed towards empty promises that are yet to be fulfilled and something that AT&T has not been very forthcoming about when it comes to explaining the delay. 

So, is this a hopeless situation? Absolutely not; from the customer perspective. Firstly, with the exclusive iPhone deal most likely to end in 2010, AT&T shall be looking to retain customers by offering them services that they have denied for long, including tethering. Also, with increasing speculation about Verizon entering the iPhone market, customers have an option in case the latter offers the feature. 

All said and done, more the delay in offering services such as tethering, higher is the likelihood for iPhone users to move away from AT&T as we have already seen with a lot of users who have jailbroken their iPhones to avail themselves of tethering. So, if there is anyone that is losing out in this entire episode, it is just AT&T and it is high time De La Vega realized this. 

[via Technologizer]

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