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Cingular Uncertainty Principle

So the Mothership is fully selling its own branded wireless......again. Ma Bell is determined to cement brand recognition behind its own name ahead of the release of the hotly anticipated iPhone. [link]

Billions of dollars have arguably been wasted as AT&T has spun off its wireless assets again and again, only to buy them back up and do it all over again.

The article states that AT&T will be carefully measuring customer identification of its brand identity, vowing to "make sure that every drop of equity from the iPhone accrues to the AT&T brand", according to an AT&T spokesman.

Of course, AT&T would do well to consider applying an interpretation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to this equation, perhaps realizing that what they really need to be doing is keeping a better measure of actual customer satisfaction with the AT&T brand, which has taken a beating over the last decade. The AT&T brand may have become the single most costly, and perhaps yet still most valued, brand in American history.

Is wireless growth still poised to outstrip the loss of customers to competitors ranging from cable operators to fully-VOIP solutions such as Skype and Asterisk? Or would the mothership be better off taking a quiet tack on the merciless rebranding, and concentrating on ensuring that the AT&T brand is not suffering against that of Comcast, TimeWarner, and others? The more closely they concentrate on how to erase the name Cingular, the less closely they're concentrating on making sure their existing customers are being adequately served.

AT&T seems to be ceding fiber-to-the-home to Verizon, and traditional telecom services to the upstarts, hedging its bets behind wireless. The overall landscape is not at all dissimilar to the very rise of telephony itself, where numerous independent networks were vying for supremacy. It'll be very interesting indeed to see who's still standing at the end of the next decade.