Operation Chokehold- “Irresponsible and Pointless”

For once it is AT&T’s feathers being ruffled and not the other way around. To catch you up if you have missed today’s geek fun, “Fake Steve Jobs” has called on US iPhone users to join in his “Operation Chokehold” this Friday by using massive amounts of data on their iPhones. It comes on the heels of rumors that AT&T is planning to roll out new ways to curtail the huge amounts of data iPhones are consuming on their (lame, weak, already lousy) network.

In essence he is asking us to say to AT&T, “You think you’ve seen iPhones using data?!?! You ain’t seen nothing yet!!”

Well “Chokehold” is getting some attention. It has been all over Twitter, made it to the Wall Street Journal and now had drawn direct criticism from AT&T. Cult of Mac posted

Contacted by CultofMac.com, an AT&T spokesman described the planned protest as “totally irresponsible.” The spokesman continued:

We understand that fakesteve.net is primarily a satirical forum, but there is nothing amusing about advocating that customers attempt to deliberately degrade service on a network that provides critical communications services for more than 80 million customers. We know that the vast majority of customers will see this action for what it is: an irresponsible and pointless scheme to draw attention to a blog.

OUCH!!

For his part Fake Steve Jobs shot back…

…we feel chastened. Frankly, we should be ashamed of ourselves.

Then again, at least we didn’t rake in $40 billion in revenues and $10 billion in profit over the past nine months by selling a wireless network that doesn’t work right.

DOUBLE OUCH!! He goes on to point out that while 3% of iPhone users are currently using 40% of the bandwidth that number will continue to go higher and higher. In the process AT&T will try to play catchup but will fail- miserably. Problem is, they won’t stop selling iPhone and other high-bandwidth eating devices. They won’t stop adding new devices like the Nook to their network. No, they’ll just keep blaming consumers… and raking in the profits.

Please note that while we at Gear Diary do not advocate this type of behavior it will be interesting to see what effect, if any, this has on AT&T and their response to it.

Tags: Apple iPhone, AT&T