One of several items on City Council’s agenda tomorrow:

2. Ordinance on final hearing (emergency) recommended for denial (five affirmative votes required for approval) (SPUD-626) 3212 NW 48th Street from PUD-307 District to SPUD-626 Simplified Planned Unit Development District. Ward 2. Deferred from October 4, November 8, December 20, 2011 and January 10, February 21 and March 6, 2012.

And what’s in this “simplified” development? Exactly one new item: an 80-foot cell tower, proposed by AT&T ostensibly to fill coverage gaps. As a user of a competing service, I don’t see any gaps in the area, but then I’m not on one of those bandwidth-sucking “smart” phones either.

A neighborhood rep in that district explained it this way:

“We got our notice of rezoning back in August, the planning commission was unanimous against the cell phone tower, 9-0, but it was still recommended for approval until we did our petition. We worked for three months and got our petition at 63.62% (Anything over 50% is considered a super majority which means we only need three votes instead of five to win). However, AT&T saw that and turned around and rezoned the area a second time, shrinking the SPUD, knocking out the petition and our neighbors’ voices(we only have 19% now). Now we have to have five votes again to win, not three.”

The neighbors have hired attorney Eric Groves to fight the tower.

It occurs to me that the Grand Mosque of Oklahoma City is directly across the street. How well would a minaret work as a cell tower — or, for that matter, a cell tower as a minaret?

Update: The Death Star prevailed, 7-2, after five hours (!) of discussion.

Doc Searls finds no sunshine trying to connect to the cloud:

The hotel charges about $20/day per device to use its wi-fi. We have seven devices that are Net-enabled, but so far have only one (my laptop) is paying the fare, and the quality of the connection gets a D+ from Speedtest.net. Our two phones (my wife’s and mine) with cellular data plans are left to the mercies of AT&T, which barely provides phone service.

What’s more, all the nearby hot spots have been chilled out. This won’t last forever, of course:

I’m sure in the long run The Market will fix this, but meanwhile “The Cloud’s” promise and reality are way out of sync.

And for now, I feel better about being Somewhat Less Wired than some of you.

For an alleged communications company, this is not exactly what anyone would call communication:

Clicking on “LOG IN” on your start page really ought to take me to, you know, a login window or summat, instead of doing nothing at all, leaving me to flounder cluelessly until I find a page with specific logins for each and every kind of service and package you offer (Wireless. Home Phone. DSL. TV. Home phone and Internet. Wireless and cable but not Wireless Cable. Wireless and home phone, no Internet, Cable on Sundays only. Wireless Teletext with simultaneous translation to and from Lithuanian.

Been there, wandered through that. It’s as though they commanded the designer: “We want you to make this exactly like our voicemail, only in pictures.”

The AT&T/T-Mobile merger isn’t exactly dead, but it’s definitely coughing up something. Oh, wait, that’s dollars:

AT&T will continue to seek antitrust clearance for its merger with rival T-Mobile USA, it said Thursday. However, to reflect the break-up fee it will have to pay T-Mobile’s owner Deutsche Telekom if the deal does not get regulatory approval, AT&T expects to recognize a $4 billion accounting charge in the fourth quarter.

Deutsche Telekom and AT&T have withdrawn the license transfer applications they filed with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, and will instead concentrate on defending against a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice in August to block the deal, AT&T said.

For T-Mo, which would get $3 billion in cash plus a billion worth of spectrum, this might be enough to keep going, though Deutsche Telekom would really, truly, like to unload its American cousin, mired in fourth place in the market and showing few signs of growth — though I have to figure that much of the turmoil at T-Mo of late has been pure merger-based FUD.

Suppose — just suppose — that the AT&T takeover of T-Mobile USA doesn’t happen. It’s no particular secret that Deutsche Telekom has been anxious to get its American stepchild off its hands and its books, but if AT&T can’t take it, who will? Sascha Segan of PCMag.com has some ideas on the subject, and I’m thinking the one I’d like the best is this:

Why should the New York Times be the only American icon rescued by Carlos Slim? Owned by the richest man in the world, América Móvil is the world’s fourth-largest mobile operator and already has a foothold in the U.S. through its ownership of Tracfone/Net10/Straight Talk. If T-Mobile is indeed America’s value player, it could have some synergies with América Móvil’s existing offerings. Also, Slim loves telecom.

And he’s already got 15 million Stateside customers: add Tmo’s 30 million, and they won’t quite catch up to Sprint for third place, but they’d be a much-stronger fourth. Besides, if anyone is capable of staring down the Death Star, it’s got to be Carlos Slim.

You may remember that I was basically betting that I’d finish up this new T-Mobile contract extension before the AT&T engulf/devour process takes place.

The FCC has now informed AT&T that there will be just a slight delay:

Within the past week, AT&T has indicated that, since filing its public interest statement supporting its proposed acquisition of T-Mobile and its opposition comments to various petitions to deny the merger, it has developed new models upon which it now relies. Indeed, AT&T is now expressly relying on these models to bolster its arguments concerning the size of the efficiencies made possible by the merger as weighed against the potential anti-competitive effects. We first learned of the scope of these models on July 13, 2011, during an ex parte meeting on economic issues held at the Commission, and now understand that our first opportunity to access the finalized versions of the new models will be on July 25, 2011… As such, the clock has stopped effective today, July 20, 2011. The Commission will restart the clock once the new evidence has been provided to us in a format and with sufficient explanation and back-up information to enable us, and third parties entitled to have access to the information, to adequately evaluate it. We will also allow time before restarting the clock for those third parties to have a meaningful opportunity to comment on the submission.

I have to figure that anything that slows this process down has to be a boon to T-Mo customers.

I’ve never owned a Windows-based phone, but I imagine that when they die, they die in a manner similarly to the way my Nokia did: white power-up screen, then fade to black, then back to white, then back to black, repeat once more, and then assumption of paperweight status.

So I was in the T-Mo store yesterday afternoon, exploring options, of which I had basically one and a half: get a new phone, and do I want a new contract or not?

“It’ll be at least eighteen months,” I said to the clerk, “before the Death Star takes over.”

He nodded sadly. “I am not looking forward to that.”

So I have a shiny new LG flipper, which if anything is a step down from the old one: there’s no place for a MicroSD card, so people will be spared my “Friday” ringtone. (For now.) To the Big T’s credit, they didn’t segregate the Phones For Cheap Bastards: this one was right in the middle of the display. And I apparently had had the foresight to copy most of my contacts to the SIM card, because I lost only a handful. And my contract goes into its eleventh and twelfth years, because these people have yet to shaft me for anything substantial, which is practically unheard of in the wireless business.

A company that actually values your business will not call you six times a week for three goddamn months trying to sell you more stuff.

Yes, Always Trying & Trying, I’m looking at you. I don’t want to go through the hassle of rewiring my security system, but everything has its price, and I’m coming very close to reaching “I no longer have any of your services, please perish in a vat of acid, and don’t even think about calling here again.”

For the benefit of Googlers and such: the offending number each time of late has been 936-671-7869. If they ring you for anything, feel free to tell them to go fart up a flagpole — or simply put them on Permanent Farging Ignore.

Barack Obama, always fond of pie-in-the-sky proposals, said in his State of the Union message that he wanted 98 percent of the country covered by high-speed wireless within five years.

I think it’s safe to assume the President didn’t anticipate the plopping of this meadow muffin:

AT&T will acquire T-Mobile USA from telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom for an estimated $39 billion in cash and stock, the companies said in a joint release Sunday.

The acquisition will expand AT&T’s 4G network 1.2 million square miles, making it accessible to an additional 46.5 million Americans, the statement said. AT&T also expects to gain enough cell towers to increase its network density by 30%.

I suppose going from “wholly inadequate” to merely “inadequate” counts as a win in some circles, but just about everybody loses in this deal:

T-Mobile has been pretty experimental and innovative — it has experiment with newer technologies such as UMA, built its own handsets and has generally been a more consumer centric company. AT&T on the other hand has [the] innovation of a lead pencil and has the mentality more suited to a monopoly — a position it wants to regain.

The chances that the Obama administration will raise even the slightest antitrust questions are somewhere between slim and none. We know this much: AT&T is forking over $25 billion in cash (the rest is in stock) for this deal. That’s $25 billion they weren’t about to spend on actually upgrading their network.

If I were U. S. Cellular, I’d be making some spectacular consumer offers right about now.

Disclosure: I’ve been a T-Mobile customer since the VoiceStream days. I do not expect to remain one.

Addendum: This should be Fark Blurb of the Year: “AT&T is getting married to T-Mobile. There will be no reception afterwards”.

Yes, he’s always talking & talking. (And profanely, so this is probably not safe for work.)

AT&T to raise landline prices. In other news, Maxell to raise cassette tape prices.

(Linked to this.)

A few days back, I ran a story about AT&T wanting to ditch delivery of the residential listings in metro Atlanta, and made the following semi-pertinent observation:

[A]round here they’ve been trying to reduce the demand by making the print too small to read for anyone old enough to remember how to use the damn book in the first place.

It’s now shrunk to invisibility, but with no actual paper saving: dumped on my porch this afternoon were the usual full-sized AT&T Yellow Pages, and a Mini-Me version of same called the “Yellow Pages Companion.” No residential listings at all. Plenty of duplication between the two books, though, although they were careful to give the obligatory front-cover stick-on cards to two different law firms.

I’m trying to decide whether I really care or not. I suspect that ultimately no one will miss the White Pages, except maybe Navin Johnson, and he was kind of a jerk.

AT&T has proposed doing away with delivering the residential White Pages in parts of metro Atlanta:

Calling it a “substantial hardship” for the company that is no longer necessary, AT&T wants to abandon delivery of the white pages. If the [Georgia Public Service Commission] approves the request, the change would take effect with the next scheduled phone book delivery in December 2009 and January 2010.

AT&T customers who wish to still receive a hard copy phone book would receive one if they request it.

I dunno how things are done in Georgia, but around here they’ve been trying to reduce the demand by making the print too small to read for anyone old enough to remember how to use the damn book in the first place.

Last year AT&T served up some 876,000 copies of the Atlanta residential pages, which doesn’t exactly rival Quotations from Chairman Mao, but which nonetheless uses up a whole lot of trees.

Now this is kind of nifty: a scan of a 1962 (or thereabouts) flyer from Cincinnati Bell that introduces / coerces / foists off [choose one] the wonder of “All-Number Calling.” No more pesky letters!

As a resident of Oklahoma City’s WIndsor exchange, I liked those pesky letters, but for the last forty-odd years the phone company has been making the prefixes, and the locations to which they were assigned, essentially meaningless.

I’ve written on this subject before, but somehow it keeps popping up. And this time, it brought with it a recollection of Allan Sherman’s mockery of the concept, which was called “The Let’s All Call Up AT&T And Protest To The President March.” It went something like this:

Let us wake him up in his slumber.
Get a pencil, I’ll give you his number.
It’s 3 1 8 5 2 7 3
0 8 7 4 2 9 dash!
5 1 1 4 9 0 6 7
4 0 8 5 2 hyphen!
1 1 4 6 2 0 5
7 9 hyphen dash 0 3.
And now that you’re on the right road,
Don’t forget his Area Code.
Which is 5 1 8 2 4 7 9
0 5 hyphen dash 9 4.

Do not try to sing this to the tune of either BEechwood 4-5789 or that song about Jenny.

Not that I collect “AT&T sucks” stories or anything, but this one seems a bit more heinous than usual:

[F]inally I decided that the new iPhone is just such a desirable object that I had to get one. Unfortunately I then found myself practically begging for somebody to take my money!

First I went to ATT’s web site to order the service. Now, here’s another bit of PSP trivia: I don’t have a credit card; haven’t since college! I do have a debit card, of course, but I simply don’t use credit. So at the ATT site, they did a “credit check” and found me wanting, and decided that the iPhone wasn’t for me. So I “spoke” to an online rep, and the conversation went something like this:

  Me: Hi, I want to get an iPhone, but failed your credit check.
  Rep: Sorry, then you are ineligible for the service.
  Me: Really? Just like that? But I was going to pay with a debit card.
  Rep: Sorry, if you fail the credit check, you’re ineligible.
  Me: Seriously? What if I pre-pay for the whole two-year plan?
  Rep: We don’t offer that.

Is this really true? Well, not necessarily:

I decided to actually call ATT on the phone and find out if this was really true. And, of course, it isn’t. The person on the phone said I could, indeed, get iPhone service, but I’d have to go to an ATT store and would probably have to tender a $750 deposit (!!) as a punishment for being sensible with my money and not buying things I can’t afford.

So, off to the store, and — yeah, you saw this coming, didn’t you?

Imagine my chagrin when I arrived to discover that they’re all out of them and have no clue when they’ll be getting more.

Emphasis added, and the words emphasized could probably have been left out of the sentence without changing the truth of it one whit.

Now imagine what it would be like if people like that ran a car company.

I hadn’t thought about this, but it’s true. On the first of January 1984, AT&T was forced to give up its local service, the result of United States v. AT&T. Before that, the company had a de facto monopoly in most parts of the country. Which means that if you were going to use your Commodore 64 as a communications device, you were locked into AT&T’s service — just like you are today as a user of Apple’s iPhone.

And there are other similarities between the two products.

(Via Vodkapundit.)

Kay gets scammed by scum:

Yesterday I got online to pay my utility bills (I’ve become a paperless kind of gal) and got pretty cranky when my AT&T bill had an extra $36.99 on it. This month is tight as hell as I’ve mentioned here. I paid the damned bill in bad humor and after I paid the others, I got on the phone to AT&T and hollered about the extra charges. It turns out that they were bogus charges was from a “crammer” and AT&T knows all about them.

And when I called the numbers for the offender that the CSR gave me, I was told that someone gave my phone number and name to get email and fax service. I asked what address they gave and was told that she couldn’t give me that. She got an earful as y’all can well believe. She finally gave me the confirmation numbers I needed for AT&T to take them off my bill. I called AT&T back and gave them the info and asked more questions. She credited the $36.99 and told me to report it as identity theft.

She’s not alone, it appears; this crap goes on all the time despite an alleged government crackdown.

Kay says “their corporate officers should be jailed.” I think “castrated with a dull spoon” is more like it.