IP Democracy: AT&T's de la Vega: No Walled Garden Here

AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega says that despite common perception, AT&T's wireless service is not a closed system and that the nation's top mobile carrier stands ready to work with Google to incorporate the search giant's open Android platform into its mix of options. Speaking this morning at Morgan Stanley's Communication Conference (webcast replay here) de la Vega said "We haven’t put in a walled garden at AT&T. The way we view Android is giving customers another choice." He also hinted that talks are underway between AT&T and Google to do precisely that.

"If Google will work with us to customize that system to give customers choice, then we’ll work with it," he said, adding that Google has sent encouraging signals that it will customize Android to make AT&T happy.

de la Vega also addressed last week's announcement by Sprint, Clearwire, Intel, Google and a group of cable companies that they will mount a WiMax venture. He specifically rebutted the notion that the new WiMax initiative has a "speed to market" advantage over AT&T's own, longer term plan to launch a competing mobile broadband service using LTE (long term evolution) technology. The new venture claims it will start rolling out WiMax this year, while AT&T doesn't plan to deploy LTE until 2010 or so.

"I think we have the time to market advantage," de la Vega said. Although the new Clearwire effort may get the network up and running, mobile broadband needs an ecosystem of technology developers and handset makers. "We have the ecosystem in handset and data cards," he said. "When people talk about future technologies about WiMax, I think people need to take into account that you just can’t have it in the network."

His view is backed up by this excellent article in today's Computerworld which examines the competing technologies and concludes that LTE has the upper hand, not because of any speed to market factors but because it is based on the GSM standard, which predominates globally.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on May 14, 2008 9:18 AM to IP Democracy