John Stankey
Latest
HBO Max hits 12.6 million activations ahead of 'Wonder Woman' release
As HBO Max prepares for the Christmas debut of Wonder Woman 1984 and its controversial plans for 2021, AT&T CEO John Stankey revealed that the service is seeing “improved traction,” going from 8.6 million activations at the end of September to 12.6 million.
AT&T could offer ad-subsidized phone plans starting next year
AT&T is looking into the possibility of offering cellphone plans subsidized in part by advertisements, company CEO John Stankey told Reuters in an interview. Subscribers will still have to pay the bigger chunk of their bill, but Stankey said he believes there’s a segment of AT&T’s customer base “where given a choice, they would take some load of advertising for a $5 or $10 reduction in their mobile bill.” Stankey didn’t go into the nitty-gritty of how the offer would work, but based on what he revealed during the interview, it sounds like AT&T plans to serve individual customers with targeted advertisements.
'Tenet' won't skip theaters for a VOD or streaming premiere
AT&T CEO John Stankey said the movie won't debut on HBO Max.
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is retiring
COO John Stankey, who has also been CEO of WarnerMedia since 2018, is taking over the top job.
AT&T expanding HSPA+ rollout this year, launching LTE in mid-2011
It's a good day for next-gen network news, apparently -- first Verizon promised to bring its 4G network to 30 NFL cities by the end of the year, and now AT&T's John Stankey says its LTE network will arrive by mid-2011. Trials are already underway in Baltimore and Dallas, and Ma Bell's pulled some $700 million out of the kitty to fund the buildout, with investment scheduled to go "far beyond that" next year. On top of that, AT&T is also working to upgrade its backhaul connections for its current HSPA 7.2 3G sites to Gigabit Ethernet, and it's planning to upgrade the vast majority of its 3G sites to HSPA+ for real-world 7Mbps 3G download speeds sometime this year -- a seemingly big expansion from the "certain locations" we'd been promised earlier. Why the change? We don't know exactly, but AT&T is quick to point out that LTE customers will fall back to 3G quite often in the early days, and that Verizon isn't investing in 3G speeds at all anymore -- an interesting claim and potentially a major differentiator if the HSPA+ rollout is completed quickly, but one that won't matter if Verizon's network offers sufficient coverage. We'll see -- looks like the next year is going to be mighty interesting.
