AT&T Gets A Wrist Slap For Advertising A Satellite Calling Service That Doesn’t Exist

AT&T's never been much for worrying about the finer points of reality. This is, after all, a company that spent years lying to its users telling them that capped and throttled wireless service was unlimited." It's also the same company, you'll recall, that tried tricking customers into thinking 4G connectivity was actually 5G by simply... changing the icon on your phone.

Most recently, AT&T found itself in lukewarm water for lying about a satellite calling service that doesn't exist. At least not yet. AT&T's been running ads claiming that it now offers Supplemental Coverage from Space (SCS), which as the name implies, lets you make calls when out of range of cellular towers by using low Earth orbit satellites.

The problem: while AT&T has struck a deal with AST SpaceMobile to hopefully offer such a service someday, the service doesn't actually exist yet. This has apparently rankled AT&T competitors like T-Mobile, which filed complaints with the The BBB National Advertising Division (NAD). NAD, after several appeals, encouraged AT&T to stop running ads for a service that doesn't exist:

AT&T, which is also famous forrenamingits 4G service 5GE," reluctantly agreed to comply with the recommendation and released a new version of the satellite-calling commercial with more specific disclaimers."

It will likely be many years before AT&T's SCS service is actually available (commercial satellites for the service haven't even launched yet and there's no clear ETA when they will be), and NAD found AT&T didn't bother to make that clear to anybody.

The problem: NAD is an industry self-regulatory regime intended to forestall any sort of actual regulatory action against companies that engage in false advertising. NAD rulings aren't really binding, there's no financial penalty, and usually by the time a complaint has wound its way through appeals process the ads have already been running for months and had their intended effect.

So every so often you'll see NAD pop up to give a light wrist slap to a telecom for misleading people (like when Comcast tried to pretend its cable network was 10G," or when Verizon overstated 5G availability), but it doesn't mean a whole lot. Because the end goal isn't actually trying to get telecoms to stop lying, the goal is to ensure they don't see real government or legal accountability for said lies.