Big corporate entities fighting it out in advertisements across the web and in the papers is nothing new, but something happened at CES this year that was perhaps a little different from the normal mud-slinging we’re used to. T-Mobile’s new CEO, John Legere, is obviously a smart man but, what he did on stage at CES to describe AT&T’s network in New York wasn’t the most professional way to depict one of the biggest networks in the country. Here are some choice quotes from that evening thanks to PCMag:
On AT&T: “Does anyone use AT&T in New York City? Is anyone satisfied with their service? Of course not. The network’s crap.”
Shared Data Plans: “A 5-gigabyte, 10-device shared data plan, when Joe Schmoe Jr. starts to watch porn on his phone, isn’t gonna work.”
Legere goes on to criticize not just AT&T but Verizon, Sprint and the way we’ve been buying our devices. So, Legere is clearly a very different CEO for T-Mobile than we’ve been used to in the past. That much is clear but, it’s been a while since CES now and you’d think that AT&T would have already responded to such a thing. Well, it’s taken them a while but their response is finally ready and it looks like AT&T is more than happy to fight Legere’s comments with facts. There’s a new ad from Ma Bell that’s doing the rounds in the papers and it’ll probably hit the web soon, that delivers some “truths” about T-Mobile’s network:
Now, I’m no expert on the coverage and data speeds of ATT and T-Mobile but it seems to me that T-Mobile can sometimes offer better speeds over HSPA+ than AT&T can over LTE. I’d also question the dropped calls statistic but, we suppose that they’ve done their research. Bloomberg spotted the ads in newspapers and it’s obvious that AT&T are looking to go after T-Mobile as the 4th place carrier tries to make a comeback.
This is nothing new really but, it is interesting to see AT&T go after T-Mobile like this, after all you’d think they’d have bigger fish to fry but, if T-Mo are going to sling mud at their reputation, AT&T have plenty of mud to sling back.