If I Ran AT&T... I'd Be Worried

In the latest installment of my imagining what I'd do if I ran AT&T, it's time for me to admit I'm worried about the future of my company given where things are trending.

As everyone knows my wireline phone business is swirling around the toilet bowl, bleeding customers on a quarterly basis.

My basic DSL business is struggling to compete with cable as they offer more bandwidth, TV service, and frequently voice through VoIP to further my losses of landline customers.

And now there's news that because of the ailing economy we're having to slow down our already slow deployments of U-Verse.

I can't help but feel like the entire access side of our wireline business is dying with no great hope on the horizon for it ever getting better given our current trajectory.

Yet my people are telling me that everything's fine as AT&T's wireless business is booming, but even there I'm pessimistic.

For starters, I have to be realistic in acknowledging that one of the biggest reasons for our wireless success has been because we have the iPhone. And while I know we have that exclusivity locked up for a little while longer, that doesn't mean we'll have it forever. So what happens when we lose it? How are we supposed to maintain that edge?

But even more troubling has been how while everyone loves their iPhones, I'm hearing a lot of chatter about how much they hate AT&T's network.

Customers are having trouble getting reliable connectivity in major cities.

Whenever too many iPhone users get in the same area our networks keep buckling under the load, like at this year's South-by-Southwest and at Apple's own Worldwide Developer Conference.

When Apple was announcing the new iPhone 3GS the crowd actually booed when they heard that our networks aren't ready to support the new phone's features like MMS and tethering.

And we're facing a massive pushback over our early upgrade pricing that's causing some commentators to suggest iPhone users not upgrade, wait out their contract, and then jump ship when the iPhone becomes available through another provider.

So with all this in mind I can't help but feel like our wireless success is fragile and hinges too much on something we can't totally control.

And yet despite these massive challenges I am also optimistic about the new innovation coming out of my company.

Our U-Verse TV service has received generally favorable reviews, making it the largest most successful deployment of IPTV in the country to date.

We're working with Cisco to deploy their Telepresence technology across the US and around the world.

Our AT&T Navigator advanced GPS service just won an award from Frost & Sullivan.

And we just released the cutting edge AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service, which moves us into the cloud computing space by offering a business-class storage service.

So there's lots to be excited about, and yet I'm still worried. I wonder who actually even knows we're doing all this cool stuff? How many people see us as an innovator? And how much can these new business lines be counted on to bolster our flagging wireline and fragile wireless businesses?

With demand for bandwidth and interest in utilizing networked services and applications at all-time highs I should be overwhelming optimistic about the future of my company, and yet I'm not.

I can see so much opportunity to leverage our many assets, and yet I can't ignore the tremendous amount of work and energy it takes to get a massive company like AT&T moving as quickly and as nimbly as is needed to take advantage of that opportunity.

I want to see my company competitive in the 21st century, but we have trouble getting out of a 20th century mindset, like with our stance on not taking advantage of U-Verse's IP nature to ride on open networks that aren't our own.

I want us to look beyond short-term costs and profits so we can realize the long-term benefits of things like investing in developing the next generation of PEG and local community media so that we can create an ongoing engine of locally produced and relevant content to feed through our networks.

I want to believe that as great a company as we grew to become in the 20th century, that our brightest days are ahead of us.

And yet on this day I'm having a hard time doing that. I'm feeling the weight of holding tight to the old paradigm weighing on my shoulders. I'm confused as to what to do next to work towards a future that looks much different than the past we've known. And I grow weary at the mere thought of even attempting to get my company and its millions of moving parts all coordinated and moving in a new direction.

I have not given up hope, mind you, but I am worried. Our future isn't certain, and I'm concerned that without a significant re-imagining of who we are AT&T's days as the dominant telecommunications provider in the US may be numbered.

But I am optimistic that with the resources of money and quality people at our disposal, that anything's possible. And I look forward to leading my company into a bright new future, though for now it's time to go back to being a lowly blogger until the next opportunity for me to take the reins and imagine what I would do if I ran AT&T.