Speaking at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2010 conference this week in San Francisco, AT&T Chief Technology Officer John Donovan once again declared that the future holds lots and lots of data (we get it) and that AT&T will "move heaven and Earth" to get out ahead of mobile bandwidth demand.

Donovan wouldn't answer why AT&T hasn't been able to get out ahead of data demand despite always being able to predict perfectly where usage patterns are going. "I’ll tell you the things it’s not been,” Donovan told attendees. "It’s not been capital, it’s not been conviction and commitment." While that certainly sounds nice, AT&T often (see U-Verse versus fiber to the home) hedges their bets in order to please investors, so that's not entirely true.

Donavan also indicated AT&T has no plan to go gently into that dumb pipe night, insisting the company's working on their own apps and a content "enablement layer." What is that? Well it's apparently AT&T's justification term for why it's still crippling Android handsets and stuffing them with unremovable bloatware in an age where consumers want their products unlocked and open. Says Donovan:Of course this kind of AT&T "help" sounds exactly like just the thing many people don't want AT&T to do. Time and money spent on "me too" content (have you seen AT&T's nice Hulu clone?) could be better spent on the network. Meanwhile, a company like AT&T's version of innovation on this front is trying to get in the middle of this consumer/content relationship simply to impose new and creative fees.