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Telecom & Wireless

AT&T’s Free Call Plan Won’t Save It From Cable

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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At this point, Big Telecom will do almost anything to keep cable companies from taking more of their phone customers. The latest idea from AT&T is to let its cellphone customers call AT&T (T) land line phones for free.

The plan is complicated, which means most customer will not be able to figure it out. For starters, the user has to have a 900 minute a month cellphone plan. And, they have to have AT&T’s unlimited long distance plan as well. It appears that the two programs cost about $100 a month when taken together.

Cable-based VoIP phones from companies like Time Warner Cable (TWX) and Comcast (CMCSA) have monthly plans for $20 to $30, so its is hard to see why the AT&T plan is attractive.

Maybe it is a sign that AT&T is having a hard time keeping customers.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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