Monday, August 31, 2026
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Telecom Tweets of the Week: AT&T re-brands GoPhone

by Kelly Hill
written by Kelly Hill Share
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AT&T is jettisoning its long-time GoPhone brand, re-naming its prepaid service “AT&T Prepaid” (snappy!) and offering two free months of service on its $45 and $65 plans.

Meanwhile, Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure has been talking up the importance of 5G network infrastructure investment — and friendly regulation to support it.

He also makes a point about 5G and scale: when you’re dealing with the propagation characteristics of millimeter wave, 5G networks are going to have to be far, far more dense than any previous networks — and the industry has struggled to get small cells to scale for LTE. Not because of the equipment itself, but because in most cases the timelines and costs for the fundamental issues of siting/permitting, along with backhaul and power, haven’t changed enough from the macro tower model to make small cells the easy, low-cost densification solution that the industry has been looking for.

 

Amid rumors that the next iPhone could cost more than $1,000, some analysts say that carriers will likely go back to offering device discounts. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out, considering that upgrade rates have slowed dramatically as carriers have pushed more device costs onto customers with payment plans rather than subsidies.

Have your Prime Dayboxes arrived yet? Amazon’s let’s-create-a-shopping-holiday-from-scratch event was wildly successful again this year, beating out sales for both Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

With one of the most popular deals being an Amazon Echo Dot for $35, this is sure to put Amazon’s Alexa artificial intelligence into more homes — and possibly cars? I have personally caught myself wishing I had Alexa access while driving, and if my vehicle had Wi-Fi, I would absolutely try this set-up:

On the darker side of AI, though, researchers were able to create false video versions of President Barack Obama — although they didn’t use any words other than Obama’s own (creating new footage from old videos and speeches), one of the researchers said that wholly fake videos are “likely possible soon.” Which bodes really well for that whole “fake news” thing. 😐

https://twitter.com/DirkBernhardt/status/885504152725577730

More proof that nobody reads the fine print on … well, just about anything. Particularly not Wi-Fi terms of service. Purple, a public Wi-Fi provider in the U.K, put a paragraph into its terms of service that obligated users to activities including “cleansing local parks of animal waste. Providing hugs to stray cats and dogs. Manually relieving sewer blockages. Cleaning portable lavatories at local festivals and events.  Painting snail shells to brighten up their existence” and more — which only one user noticed during a two-week-long period.

And now for something completely (well, mostly) different: KFC and Huawei are offering a mobile phone in China. It’s red and has an image of Colonel Sanders on the back, and an app which lets you choose which songs will play over the restaurant’s music system when you visit a location. Apparently 30% of KFC’s purchases in China are paid for with mobile devices.

Also Alexa-related, I plan to spend the next couple of days exploring Game of Thrones Easter eggs ahead of the season premiere this weekend. Winter is coming!

https://twitter.com/News_Cult/status/885869302284464129

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Kelly Hill reports on network test and measurement, AI infrastructure and regulatory issues, including spectrum, for RCR Wireless News. She began covering the wireless industry in 2005, focusing on carriers and MVNOs, then took a few years’ hiatus and returned to RCR Wireless News to write about heterogeneous networks (remember those?) and network infrastructure. Kelly is an Ohio native with a masters degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where she focused on science writing and multimedia. She has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Oregonian and The Canton Repository. She lives in northern Virginia, not far from Data Center Alley.

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