We were pretty excited when we found out that FaceTime-over-cellularwas coming in iOS 6. Finally, users would be able to natively video chat away from Wi-Fi networks (withoutjailbreaking).
Needless to say, our excitement dropped off yesterday when we found out thatthere’s a chancethat AT&T is going to charge users separately for the feature, the way it does for mobile hotspot…
AT&T initially responded to the allegations with the following generic statement:
“We’re working closely with Apple on the new developer build of iOS6 and we’ll share more information with our customers as it becomes available.”
Then this afternoon, the carrier’s CEO Randall Stephenson took the stage at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference. And the topic unsurprisingly came up again.
ViaTechCrunch:
“I’ve heard the same rumor,” he said, insisting that for now, AT&T is focused on working with Apple to get the technology stabilized, so “it’s too early to talk about pricing.”
While Stephenson’s comment doesn’t confirm or deny the rumor, he does have a point: it’s too early to talk about this. iOS 6 is still very, very much in beta. In fact the public release isn’t expected until mid-October. Mix in the fact that AT&T is supposedlymoving to all new data plansin the near future, and a lot can happen in the next three months.
It’ll certainly be interesting to see how this all plays out, though, as this could play a major factor in AT&T’s churn rate during this year’s holiday quarter, followingthe next iPhone launch. I, for instance, am already considering switching to Verizon due to itslarger LTE network. So something like this could certainly push me over the edge.
