AT&T Offers Free Cell Service to Doctors, Nurses

AT&T will provide three free months of cell service to first-line doctors and nurses. 

That will take the form of three free months of its FirstNet broadband network services, its network exclusively for first responders that grew out of the communications failures after 9-11. 

The offer was announced Sunday on John Krasinski's Some Good News (SGN) YouTube series, a feel-good collection of pandemic-related stories. 

Krasinski (The Office and a host of subsequent movie roles) said that when AT&T found out his latest episode included a salute to "healthcare heroes," the company asked how it could help. Krasinski said that, not knowing what he was talking about, he said, how about covering the cell phone bills of every nurse and doctor in the country for a month. "Their response: 'How about three." 

Krasinski called it unprecedented, and thanked it "the only way we know how," which was with the shaky rendering of the logo on a big sheet of poster paper.  

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.