Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think he wants to say AT&T should get the users hooked to using lot of data, so they as a subscription company can keep making money from users for a longer time.
Exactly. If you're AT&T, when households are looking at their bills for stuff to cut, you don't want them looking at their data plan and saying, "well, I guess I don't use it very much..." You want the gym membership to get the axe.
My startup was recently bought by Nokia, and unsurprisingly, one of the fringe benefits of working for Nokia is getting a free smartphone (GSM 3G) with an unlimited data plan (T-Mobile, thank God). My wife and I looked into cancelling our Verizon family plan and moving to just one line for her, but the early-termination fee is so high that it’s cheaper for me to just keep the Verizon phone. And since our Verizon plan has free in-network calls, it’s also cheaper for me to carry the Verizon phone, so that she can call me on it.
The flip side of this is that people who abandon their carrier because of network issues will be more like a slow leak than a stampede, so AT&T executives with an eye on quarterly profit results would rather do anything but invest heavily in building out their infrastructure.