Randall Stephenson is well known for his inflammatory remarks regarding AT&T and its wireless network. Today, he is telling about a lot of things that are wrong with AT&T’s relationship with Apple. There are two main things that Big Blue’s CEO admitted about the iPhone and Apple in general.

The first was that AT&T should have never offered iPhone users unlimited data from the start. Since AT&T was the only iPhone carrier until 2010, AT&T had to invest heavily in network infrastructure in order to keep up with data-hungry iPhone users.

Stephenson told this to the New York Times:

“My only regret was how we introduced pricing in the beginning, because how did we introduce pricing? Thirty dollars and you get all you can eat,” he said in the on-stage interview at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference on Wednesday. “And it’s a variable cost model. Every additional megabyte you use in this network, I have to invest capital.”

Last year, both AT&T and Verizon moved to tiered data, in order to trim infrastructure costs.

Stephenson also voiced his opinion about Apple’s iMessage service, basically saying it undermines the carrier-customer relationship. Not to mention the constant worrying Stephenson has live through involving text-messaging fees.

“You lie awake at night worrying about what is that which will disrupt your business model,” he said. “Apple iMessage is a classic example. If you’re using iMessage, you’re not using one of our messaging services, right? That’s disruptive to our messaging revenue stream.”

AT&T’s data is expensive. Its service is notoriously sucky, and Stephenson is complaining about users? Instead of worrying about business models, maybe their money would be spent better elsewhere, like in customer service or in more updated infrastructure.

Via: The New York Times