Tag: AT&T

NSA spy hub in NYC

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They called it Project X. It was an unusually audacious, highly sensitive assignment: to build a massive skyscraper, capable of withstanding an atomic blast, in the middle of New York City. It would have no windows, 29 floors with three basement levels, and enough food to last 1,500 people two weeks in the event of a catastrophe.

But the building’s primary purpose would not be to protect humans from toxic radiation amid nuclear war. Rather, the fortified skyscraper would safeguard powerful computers, cables, and switchboards. It would house one of the most important telecommunications hubs in the United States — the world’s largest center for processing long-distance phone calls, operated by the New York Telephone Company, a subsidiary of AT&T…

…33 Thomas Street is different: An investigation by The Intercept indicates that the skyscraper is more than a mere nerve center for long-distance phone calls. It also appears to be one of the most important National Security Agency surveillance sites on U.S. soil — a covert monitoring hub that is used to tap into phone calls, faxes, and internet data.

Your taxpayer dollar$ at work. Who wants better education or healthcare when you can erect an edifice like this – just to snoop?

AT&T’s first 5G speed tests suck

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While 5G has massive potential, the only major effect it has achieved so far in the US is confusing the general public. That’s due in large part to ill-advised marketing strategies and questionable 5G “launches” by the four major wireless carriers. In the latest addition to this frustrating saga, we’re finally seeing speed tests of AT&T’s fledgling 5G network, and the results are far from impressive.

The results were posted to Reddit and reported on by PCMag’s Sascha Segan…not a bad result, per se, but it’s also roughly the same as the gigabit LTE speeds we’ve been seeing these days…a 4G test from that same area…came back with a very similar result. How could this be?…

…The 5G hype machine has promised a whole lot more than marginally better performance, higher floors, and slightly lower latencies, so it’s fair to be somewhat perturbed by these early results which, it’s worth pointing out, are the only reports we’ve seen so far, due to AT&T’s refusal to hand out review units…

Most independent communications geeks agree that what American consumers will have available after another year or two of disinformation and crap outright lies — will be roughly 20% increase in overall capability compared to other nations who are actually installing the real deal.

My only hope is that we’re not forced to buy the “upgrade”.

AT&T’s offering a crap new product that’s a tiny bit better than their old crap product — WooHoo!

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Smell that? Those are blocks of dried horse dung…

❝ AT&T will soon offer 5G mobile service on its 850MHz spectrum, which will enable wider coverage than existing 5G networks but offer only 4G-like speeds at launch. Significant speed increases will arrive in 2020, AT&T says.

❝ The 5G networks already deployed by carriers use millimeter-wave signals that don’t travel far and are easily blocked by walls and other obstacles. This has resulted in coverage maps with small pockets of 5G, and 4G just about everywhere else.

But 5G can work on all frequencies, such as the lower-band frequencies used by 4G. There isn’t as much spectrum available on these bands, so you won’t see anything like the huge speed increases available on millimeter-wave spectrum. But 5G on low-band spectrum will cover wider areas and indoor spaces and hopefully bring some speed increases—Verizon says 5G on the lower bands will be like “good 4G.”

Golly gee, gang. So, what we have to look forward to is “new and improved” crap hardware that finally delivers what the old crap hardware promised.

Anyone wonder if we’ll be charged for the “improvement“.

No more AT&T throttling your data plan…Just buy their more/most expensive options and you’re OK

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❝ AT&T…announced three new “unlimited” data plans. Keeping track of all the different limits on AT&T’s unlimited mobile plans is just as difficult as ever, but…Buying AT&T’s cheapest unlimited plan still comes with the risk of getting your data throttled to speeds slower than those provided to other customers when the network is congested. The possible throttling can be imposed at any time, even if a customer hasn’t used much data that month. But while upgrading to pricier plans currently only gives AT&T customers 22GB a month before possible throttling, the plans coming out soon have options for at least 50GB or 100GB of un-throttled use…

❝ Starting November 3, AT&T will offer a new “Unlimited Starter” plan as the entry-level edition at prices of $65 per month for a single line or $35 for each line when you buy four lines…

The new top-level plan is Unlimited Elite, and AT&T said it will launch “in the coming weeks” but did not reveal a specific release date. This one is $85 a month for a single line or $50 per line with four lines…blah, blah, blah!

I especially love their plan to keep you viewing even when throttled by “giving you” Standard Definition quality streams. I hope you love down-rezzed screens because US brands stopped making or importing SD TVs about 16 years ago…and the last few SD broadcasters gave up a couple years ago. AT&T will actually have to reduce the quality of whatever they’re letting you receive — when they’re screwing you out of bandwidth.

AT&T promises new jobs, gets tax break — cuts thousands of jobs!

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AT&T Liar-in-Chief — Bloomberg/Getty

❝ AT&T in November 2017 pushed for the corporate tax cut by promising to invest an additional $1 billion in 2018, with CEO Randall Stephenson saying that “every billion dollars AT&T invests is 7,000 hard-hat jobs. These are not entry-level jobs. These are 7,000 jobs of people putting fiber in ground, hard-hat jobs that make $70,000 to $80,000 per year.”

❝ The corporate tax cut was subsequently passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump on December 22, 2017. The tax cut reportedly gave AT&T an extra $3 billion in cash in 2018.

But AT&T cut capital spending and kept laying people off after the tax cut. A union analysis of AT&T’s publicly available financial statements “shows the telecom company eliminated 23,328 jobs since the Tax Cut and Jobs Act passed in late 2017, including nearly 6,000 in the first quarter of 2019,” the Communications Workers of America (CWA) said…

AT&T’s only expansion in total workforce came from acquisition of Time-Warner and two smaller companies. The existing workforce was cut.

ATT & Verizon rip-off DSL customers

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Aurich Lawson/Thinkstock

❝ Tens of millions of people in the AT&T and Verizon service territories can only buy slow DSL Internet from the companies, yet they often have to pay the same price as fiber customers who get some of the fastest broadband speeds in the US.

That’s the conclusion of a new white paper written by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), a broadband advocacy group.

❝ “[I]n recent years, the nation’s two largest telco ISPs, AT&T and Verizon, have eliminated their cheaper rate tiers for low and mid-speed Internet access, except at the very slowest levels,” the NDIA wrote. “Each company now charges essentially identical monthly prices—$63-$65 a month after first-year discounts have ended—for home wireline broadband connections at almost any speed up to 100/100 Mbps fiber service.”

RTFA. Consider hollering at your elected representatives in Congress to support you and your peers fight for better treatment, affordable access to the Web. It’s overdue and criminally corrupt.

AT&T’s fiber-to-the-home rollout: 1Gbps for the rich, 768kbps for the poor — surprised?

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❝ AT&T’s deployment of fiber-to-the-home in California has been heavily concentrated in higher-income neighborhoods, giving affluent people access to gigabit speeds while others are stuck with Internet service that doesn’t even meet state and federal broadband standards, according to a new analysis…

❝ California households with access to AT&T’s fiber service have a median income of $94,208…By contrast, the median household income is $53,186 in California neighborhoods where AT&T provides only DSL, with download speeds typically ranging from 768kbps to 6Mbps. At the low end, that’s less than 1 percent of the gigabit speeds offered by AT&T’s fiber service.

❝ The income difference is even more stark in some parts of California. “For example, in Los Angeles County, the median income of households with fiber-to-the-home access is $110,474, compared with $60,534 for those with U-verse availability, and $47,894 for those with only DSL availability,” the report said.

❝ In 4.1 million California households, representing 42.8 percent of AT&T’s California service area, AT&T’s fastest speeds fell short of the federal broadband definition of 25Mbps downloads and 3Mbps uploads…

❝ As copper networks increasingly become outdated, the FCC is seeking to eliminate regulations to make it easier for ISPs to retire copper networks. However, the copper could be replaced by wireless networks instead of fiber in areas where fiber rollouts aren’t cost-effective. AT&T is deploying a 10Mbps fixed wireless service in order to meet its Connect America Fund obligations.

As if AT&T cared a rat’s ass about service to folks in rural America. They won’t even sort out democratic access in urban areas – and if the experience in other Western nations is a model, that’s simply short-term greed overcoming good sense.

AT&T is BFF with NSA

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The telecoms giant AT&T has had an “extraordinary, decades-long” relationship with the National Security Agency…Citing newly disclosed NSA documents dating from 2003 to 2013, the New York Times said in a story published with ProPublica that AT&T was described as “highly collaborative” with an “extreme willingness to help” with government internet surveillance.

In June 2013, the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked thousands of documents to media outlets including the Guardian. The following April, the Guardian and the Washington Post were awarded a Pulitzer prize for reporting on the story.

The new documents show that AT&T gave the NSA access to “billions of emails as they have flowed across its domestic networks”, the Times and ProPublica said. The reports also said AT&T provided “technical assistance” in “wiretapping all internet communications at the United Nations headquarters” in New York City.

The documents also show that the NSA’s budget for its relationship with AT&T was twice as large as that of the next-largest such programme, and that the company placed surveillance equipment in 17 of its US internet hubs.

The Times said the new documents did not name AT&T, but said analysis by its reporters and ProPublica revealed “a constellation of evidence” that pointed to the company…

The Times quoted an AT&T spokesman, Brad Burns, as saying: blah, blah, blah, blah.

You can fill in the gaps with any of the several varieties of bullshit offered on occasions like this by some corporate mouthpiece for the alphabet snoops in question, the government in question and the even more questionable cowards and collaborators in Congress who keep this crap flowing into the waters of our lives.

Verizon’s Supercookies are a profitable corporate threat to your privacy

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For the last several months, cybersecurity experts have been warning Verizon Wireless that it was putting the privacy of its customers at risk. The computer codes the company uses to tag and follow its mobile subscribers around the web, they said, could make those consumers vulnerable to covert tracking and profiling.

It looks as if there was reason to worry.

This month Jonathan Mayer, a lawyer and computer science graduate student at Stanford University, reported on his blog that Turn, an advertising software company, was using Verizon’s unique customer codes to regenerate its own tracking tags after consumers had chosen to delete what is called a cookie — a little bit of code that can stick with your web browser after you have visited a site. In effect, Turn found a way to keep tracking visitors even after they tried to delete their digital footprints…

While Internet users can choose to delete their regular cookies, Verizon Wireless users cannot delete the company’s so-called supercookies…

Indeed, after a report on the practice by ProPublica, Turn announced it would suspend its use of Verizon’s ID codes to regenerate tracking cookies and reconsider its use of the technique…

Verizon is now at the forefront of telecommunications companies selling intelligence about their customers to advertisers…

The ad-targeting experiments by Verizon and AT&T are striking examples of the data-mining opportunities open to phone carriers now that they have become the nexus of the information universe, providing a connection to the Internet for people anywhere they go, at any time…

Some leading data-privacy and security experts contend that Verizon’s use of unique and persistent customer ID tags makes its subscribers vulnerable to covert online tracking by third parties.

Harold Feld, a senior vice president at Public Knowledge, a nonprofit group that focuses on information policy, said..“Stuff like this is worse than what Google or Facebook or anyone else does,” Mr. Feld said.

“I can avoid Google and Facebook, in theory at least. But if the network operator is going to spy on me, there is nothing I can do about it.”

Cripes. One more category of snoop we get to feed with information for free – so they can profit.

FTC expects record claims over AT&T cramming scam

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AT&Y scum

Over 359,000 AT&T customers have already filled out an online application to obtain refunds from the company, which padded phone bills with suspect SMS charges.

Since the Federal Trade Commission announced a $105 million settlement with AT&T last week over fake billing charges, 359,000 individuals have already come forward to claim their share of the refund money, and that number is expected to climb.

The claims relate to so-called “cramming” charges in which AT&T customers paid extra fees, usually in the amount of $9.99, for “premium SMS” services that promised to deliver content like horoscopes and celebrity news to cell phones. Such services are a relic of the pre-smartphone days, but people still paid for them, often without authorization, with AT&T receiving a commission on the charges…

The process for making a claim is very straightforward: anyone who was an AT&T customer after January 1, 2009 can simply fill out this online form, which only requires a phone number and address.

Crooked corporation of the day, eh?