AT&T’s CFO dismisses the company’s price war with T-Mobile as “noise”

Is AT&T feeling the heat from the “Uncarrier?” Not if AT&T CFO John Stephens is to be believed. CNET reports that Stephens told an investor conference on Thursday that all of the talk about AT&T being in a “price war” with T-Mobile is just media hype and that the company isn’t under pressure to react to moves being made by the scrappy carrier that has shook up the wireless industry over the last year.

AT&T Chief Financial Officer John Stephens says he’s isn’t fazed by carrier rhetoric in the so-called price war. “The competition is more noisy than disruptive,” Stephens said Thursday at an investors conference in Miami. T-Mobile’s offer to pay off the early termination fees of customers willing to switch to its service was designed to wreak havoc on AT&T’s customer growth. That didn’t happen. While T-Mobile did post impressive customer growth in the first quarter, AT&T withstood the impact and topped expectations for customer growth, adding 625,000 contract customers and more than 1 million net new customers. “It doesn’t appear that based on our results, there was much of an impact,” he said during his appearance, which was streamed live.