AT&T To Acquire T-Mobile From Deutsche Telekom 748
teh31337one writes "AT&T and Deutsche Telekom have entered into a definitive agreement for the sale of T-Mobile USA for $39 billion in cash and stocks. Press release here." Gripes one anonymous reader: "Americans will have even less choice now when it comes to cell phone carriers. Say good-bye to the one that had the best customer service and was most friendly towards Android and rooting."
Not gonna lie (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not gonna lie (Score:5, Funny)
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Right, because we all know that's what happened when AT&T merged with Cingular. Oh, wait, you say that the service got a lot worse when that happened? How could that possibly be, I mean it's not like AT&T would use the gains in efficiency to line its pockets while providing substandard service.
Around here the problem is a lack of providers. I'd like to sign up with US Cellular, but they aren't available here. Around here we've got Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T. I think that Boost might be a
Re:Not gonna lie (Score:4, Informative)
ATT recently bought (well a few years ago) centennial wireless. Everything was great until the last few months (for me the last 3 weeks). I'm not sure what they are doing, but areas where I used to get 5 bars (that were not att areas but centennial wireless areas) I now get 2 or 3 bars. Calls are being dropped in areas where I used to have the best service. Everyone I know who used to use centennial wireless is having the same problems. No signal, droppped calls, etc.
I've been a long time ATT customer, but I'm thinking it's time for a change if this doesn't' improve in the next 5 months.
Re:Not gonna lie (Score:4, Insightful)
To me, this is the travesty of mobile phone/data service in the U.S.: Our mobile-phone market has been divvied up between the big players, and we're all locked into contracts that cost more than a new car to escape from.
And now we have one fewer choice.
And unlike US Cellular, T-Mobile was a legit nationwide carrier.
Guess I better learn to accept the Verizon shaft or prepare to deal with the overall crappyness of AT&T.
Re:Not gonna lie (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not gonna lie (Score:4, Funny)
Where I live, AT&T has the absolute worst reception of all the cell phone carriers.
Oh, you live in the US too?
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So, it's a (probably colluding) oligopoly, which is so much better...
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Except that it is. If you actually care about having a phone that works outside the U.S., your choices are... AT&T or...
Oops. There's no second choice!
Yup. Unless you pay out the nose for an expensive "world phone", your options are basically AT&T or T-Mobile, and with T-Mobile gone, AT&T will be the only remaining GSM carrier in the United States.
I've done my part by writing a letter of complaint. Now go do yours.
http://www.justice.gov/atr/contact/newcase.html [justice.gov]
Big diff tween cell service and grocery stores... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Big diff tween cell service and grocery stores. (Score:4, Interesting)
> No, but if I did, I would be able to sue the grocery store for violation of their contract, as you can with the cellular companies if the service they're providing is suddenly sub-par and vastly inferior to its conditions at the start of the contract.
You almost certainly can't--read your contract. You can go to arbitration. Which you will lose.
Re:Big diff tween cell service and grocery stores. (Score:4, Interesting)
> No, but if I did, I would be able to sue the grocery store for violation of their contract, as you can with the cellular companies if the service they're providing is suddenly sub-par and vastly inferior to its conditions at the start of the contract.
You almost certainly can't--read your contract. You can go to arbitration. Which you will lose.
You can always sue somebody. If the court finds them guilty of violating their contract, then the arbitration clause doesn't matter.
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that leaves you sans a cell phone unless you're in an area with overlapping coverage from multiple carriers....
Care to name an area with a population density greater than 10/sqmi which doesn't have that?
Re:Not gonna lie (Score:4, Insightful)
Fewer carriers means you can get a similar situation to Canada. We have "few carriers", and pay some of the highest prices on the planet for pathetically weak service.
If you want more of that, by all means.
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AT&T should be broken up, not made larger. This is a disaster for the future of cellular communications, wireless internet and telecommunications generally.
Time to start writing congress people and threatening to send money to their opponents if they don't put pressure on the Justice Department and the Commerce Committee to stop this. That has a surprising effect on them. Nothing else seems to do anything, but they get nervous when people say they're going to send money to their opponents.
Re:Not gonna lie (Score:4, Interesting)
Ideally, yes. In practice, not so much. The problem with that is, CEO's like new yachts more than they like happy customers.
The real problem is that idiots keep applying economic models that assume strong competition to markets that are natural monopolies.
The right way to do all of this is to create a nonprofit organization in each city whose job it is to install last mile fiber between every building in the city and a central office or two. It doesn't need to operate any switching equipment whatsoever. All it does is put fiber in the ground between all the buildings in an area and a single central location. Then competing ISPs can lease fiber that goes to specific customer premises and rackspace in that central office, all for cost, and hook into the internet through a series of competing inter-city backbone providers like Level 3 and AT&T. Then each individual ISP can decide questions like monthly fees, network neutrality, flat rate or per-bit pricing, etc., but in a highly competitive market since all it takes to start an ISP is to buy some switching equipment for a couple grand and rent some space in the central office.
You give the nonprofit some basic rules to follow (like percent coverage with fiber by such-and-such date, redundancy, up-time, etc.) and then you give the nonprofit's executives bonuses inversely proportional to the amount of money they spend in meeting the specified requirements. The idea is to take the specific thing which is a natural monopoly, namely the last mile connection, separate it into a single-purpose organization that operates with no profit and let competition operate as much as possible for all other parts of the operation. Now, can we please do this?
Re:Not gonna lie (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, and the wireless version. I think this one's beautiful:
You take your nonprofit organization and provide it some spectrum and enough capital to build a couple of towers and the fiber between the tower and the central office. The fiber goes to a switch in the central office where any wireless ISP can hook up for their share of the maintenance cost of the tower. Then you do constant live spectrum dutch auctions: You allocate a tiny piece of the spectrum for a control channel and then split the rest into slices of e.g. 5KB/sec each and auction them off at e.g. 2 second intervals. Then anybody who wants to use wireless transmits a message on the control channel that says "I want three slices for the next 2 seconds, I bid $0.0004/slice/second" and the tower either responds with a message saying which frequencies to transmit on or denying the request because the requesting device has been outbid. If there are more available slices than there are bidders then everybody gets what they want and nobody pays anything, if there are more bidders than slices then the highest bidders win and each one pays the amount per slice that the lowest winning bidder pays.
The result is that if there is sufficient capacity then everything is free, if there is contention (and to the extent there is contention), the nonprofit collects revenue. The revenue then goes to buying more spectrum or building more towers to alleviate the capacity shortfall. It's like magic -- a direct connection between supply and demand. How's that for free markets?
Re:Not gonna lie (Score:4, Insightful)
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Jesus? What has he ever done for me?
Re:Bad? (Score:4, Funny)
He committed suicide (then got better) to satisfy your end of a contract that you never agreed to.
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Attempts to explain the concept of "contract of adhesion" to a vengeful iron age deity have, as yet, been unsuccessful....
Re:No it isn't (Score:5, Informative)
I know you're being sarcastic, but the wireless spectrum in the US has never been competitive, and the telephone network even less so.
If anything, the US is structured more like a merchantilist [wikipedia.org] society.
AT&T should be broken up (again) (Score:5, Interesting)
The above commenter almost certainly works for one of the recent "reputation management" companies that work to subvert online communities from discussing stories that may reflect badly on very big companies. This particular UID was created a few days ago to perform a similar function in a story with the headline "Time Warner Cable Cuts iPad Live TV Access 50%". The tactic is to create a very large section of long, useless trolling comments at the very beginning of the comments section made up of a lot of anonymous idiocy broken up by idiocy from registered users, almost always very recently registered.
I've seen this tactic used on a lot of stories that always seem to be about some very very large corporation, sometimes on the very same stories reported at other websites with large and active commenter communities. I'm not exactly sure how the technique would work, but it's too widespread and too uniform to be anything but an organized effort. You even see variations on the same user names in different social networking and discussion-based websites.
I know for a fact that companies like New Media Strategies and all the "Reputation Defender" and reputation.com companies that have recently sprung up are not shy about using some very disruptive and underhanded tactics to try to achieve their goals for their clients, and will sometimes even brag to their clients about their techniques. I know someone who worked for one of these outfits and the stories he would tell are pretty disgusting. And these companies are very richly capitalized. There's a lot of money in obfuscation it seems. Corporations do not want us to know what they are up to.
Information is already often untrustworthy. We either have to find a way to thwart these efforts or we have to speed development of ad hoc networks on a large scale. If there's not going to be meaningful net neutrality, then we're going to have to do it ourselves.
By the way, AT&T buying T-Mobile is a terrible development. We can hope that the Justice Department steps in and stops this, but they've been pretty soft on anti-trust. AT&T should not be getting bigger, they should be getting broken up. We will all lose on this deal.
Re:AT&T should be broken up (again) (Score:4, Informative)
Here is "MichaelKristopeit421's" recent reply to a comment of mine:
Coincidence or technique? Real or agent provocateur?
I think he's sloppy and his outing will cause him problems with the home office. Too bad because he clearly enjoys his work. What do you think, minimum wage or what?
This is great for the consumer! (Score:5, Funny)
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They must love you at the casino.
Doubling down, eh?
--
BMO
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As much as this is a truly bad thing, there is one area where this will lead to greater efficiency...network coverage. Both AT&T and T-Mobile customers who previously had poor service in certain areas will, once everything is integrated, get better service in those areas. It will take a while before AT&T can let the network stagnate to the point where the service sucks again.
Sooo... from my experience, Verizon Wireless is deplorable and despicable in their customer service and billing practices, respectively. I've heard from family members that AT&T has some ugly issues, but I haven't experienced them personally. My impression is that T-Mobile is the best of the three, and my experience with them has been better-than-average service and coverage, and consistent accuracy in billing.
I'd love to hear people's experiences with other providers, so I have somewhere to go when T-M
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Are you shitting me? What is more likely to happen is "Which tower is older? That one? Axe it. And fire half our field techs." People will probably see worse service within about 6 months.
Borgification (Score:2)
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You can, the issue is that they don't use the same spectrum for 3G. You can talk just fine and get data over edge, but you're not going to get 3G speed.
OTOH, it's AT&T you're not going to bet 3G speed anyways, even if your phone can handle it. Or at least that was the case when I had a phone capable of using AT&T 3G service.
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No, you will continued to be serviced by t-mobile folks locked away in some far corner of customerservicelandia.
I used to be an AT&T Wireless customer who was then gobbled up by Cingular who was then gobbled up by AT&T. I was still, however on my old AT&T Wireless account/plan. Every time I would call and talk to someone, they would eventually stop and "Oh, sorry, you're one of those old AT&T Wireless customers. I need to transfer you. And yeah, you're right, I can't offer you a better plan.
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Deal still subject to regulatory approval (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Deal still subject to regulatory approval (Score:5, Informative)
However, the deal is still a year away and subject to regulatory approval.
However, the deal is still a year away and subject to regulatory lobbying and bribery.
Re:Deal still subject to regulatory approval (Score:4, Funny)
However, the deal is still a year away and subject to regulatory lobbying and bribery.
True, but subject is the key word. It might not happen... right?
Re:Deal still subject to regulatory approval (Score:4, Insightful)
AT&T is blowing $39 BILLION for the company. They can afford a few ten's of millions of dollars for "permission" to go ahead.
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Surely AT&T could fix up their own network for less than the cost of T-Mobile.
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Of course they could. But they don't want to do that, they want T-Mobile's subscriber base.
Re:Deal still subject to regulatory approval (Score:5, Insightful)
Surely AT&T could fix up their own network for less than the cost of T-Mobile.
This acquisition isn't about subscribers or network equipment. AT&T is spending $39B to purchase T-Mobile's frequency spectrum in the US so that they can ensure that they have enough spectrum to roll out LTE and continue to upgrade their 3G HSPA+ network. Any subscribers that opt to stay with AT&T post merger is just an added benefit to them.
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Re:Deal still subject to regulatory approval (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Deal still subject to regulatory approval (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, some will claim that this will help AT&T's network. That a dollop of shit in a glass of wine is wine, not shit. Bottoms up!
Re:Deal still subject to regulatory approval (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus millions of customers who fled AT&T's fucking horrible network are now going to be forced to give them even more unearned money (at least in early termination fees)
I thought that by law, a utility service contract had to give the subscriber an option to cancel without ETF should the provider make material changes to the terms.
Re:Deal still subject to regulatory approval (Score:4, Informative)
People who follow cell phone plans closely (crazy as they are) usually get excited about changes in privacy policies, etc, as it gives a window to change carriers without suffering Early Termination Fees. However, merging itself might not be enough, as the hybrid carrier is likely to continue to maintain both sets of contracts for existing customers.
Re:Deal still subject to regulatory approval (Score:5, Informative)
The only reason I chose T-Mobile was because it wasn't AT&T.
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Perhaps we can hope that the government makes a move to protect consumers for a change?
I wish I shared your optimism but, It ain't looking good for us. [opensecrets.org]
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark (Score:3)
Me too. I loathe AT&T and avoided getting an iPhone for years because I didn't want to have an account with them. I wasn't crazy about T-mobile's signal strength at my house, but stuck with them because my phone bill was so low. I just bought a Nexus S last week and then this happens. I'm so unhappy. This is most definitely NOT going to improve either prices or service for communications in the United States.
The situation for Internet service to my home office is even worse. There is literally only
Re:Deal still subject to regulatory approval (Score:4, Informative)
I am in the same boat as you are. I was an AT&T customer for 6.5 years and then switched to Tmobile after a huge F'up by AT&T (should've taken them to the courts). If this deal goes through, I am going to Verizon. No way in hell will I ever be an AT&T customer.
TLDR version: Fuck AT&T
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Just wait for the AT&T/Verizon merger in another 5-6 years! You know it's going to happen.
Monopoly (Score:4, Funny)
Are we ever going to break up AT&T?
Re:Monopoly (Score:4, Informative)
AT&T isn't really that AT&T (Score:3)
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NOOOO! (Score:3)
I switched to T-Mobile strictly to get away from AT&T's bullshit yet stay with a GSM carrier! And I love T-Mobile's support as well, though AT&T's wasn't that bad to be honest.
This still stinks to no end though. And the worst part is, I can't take my N900 to any other US carrier, as only ATT/TMO is GSM here.
Fuck.
AT&T-Mobile (Score:2)
Well, clearly, there can be only one.
This sucks, IMNSHO.
Don't worry Citizens! (Score:5, Insightful)
The free market will save us!
Any minute now...
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If only we had one it might.
Re:Don't worry Citizens! (Score:4)
The free market will save us!
Any minute now...
I don't know who is worse; the people that bitch about how much better it was when there was one Ma Bell, or the people that bitch when a company merges or buys out another company.
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Re:Don't worry Citizens! (Score:4, Insightful)
The people who bitch about how much better it was when there was one Ma Bell mostly weren't alive when there was a Ma Bell.
Having to pay a rental fee for every phone in your home every month because you were not allowed to own your own phone wasn't exactly a great thing.
Gave up hope long ago (Score:5, Interesting)
I gave up hope on the mobile industry in the US long ago. When T-Mobile and AT&T couldn't even use compatible frequencies for 3G, the hope of cross carrier compatibility died a long time ago. GSM is only great when you can buy an unlocked phone, choose a provider and pop in a SIM, then change on a whim while paying lower monthly prices due to the lack of a subsidy. This is one of the many benefits Europeans enjoy, along with good roaming agreements to ensure they can make a call even if their own provider doesn't cover the area well. I still look back to 2004 when I had an unlocked Sony Ericsson phone from T-Mobile that I used in Europe for a bit. Bought a SIM in London, traveled into the Netherlands, around Germany and a bit into Switzerland. At one point, my phone saw 9 different providers it was willing to use for emergency calls, and 4 or so of those it was willing to roam on for everything else.
Since none of those benefits ever came to the US, I hold some hope in that this merger will bring some good. AT&T is pledging a bigger LTE rollout, including to rural parts of the US. This is desperately needed, as many rural areas have dial up and satellite based options only. Dialup is near unusable these days, and satellite adds too much latency, negating benefits from Web 2.0 based sites, and conferencing/communication software. Low caps also prevent rural users from taking advantage of services like Netflix.
Remember: ATT Illegally Tapped Our Phones (Score:4, Informative)
GSM is only great when you can buy an unlocked phone, choose a provider and pop in a SIM, then change on a whim while paying lower monthly prices due to the lack of a subsidy.
T-Mobile will give you the code to unlock your phone on request for customers of 3 months or more (I believe).
ATT will not.
I don't want anyone to forget their illegal warrantless wiretapping [wired.com] and the massive lobbying effort get themselves retroactive immunity [gizmodo.com] for their cooperation over the illegal spying [eff.org] on you.
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AT&T is pledging a bigger LTE rollout, including to rural parts of the US.
They have a nice corporate logo, I think we can trust them.
You GSM losers laughed before... (Score:2)
CDMA is your daddy now! :)
This is SO not what I was hoping would happen. I was hoping T-Mo USA would buy Clearwire for the spectrum and then upgrade all their stuff to LTE. *sigh*
I guess all we need at this point is for Verizon to buy Sprint and convert all the towers to LTE with that claimed 'software update'.
The pollyanna part of me wonders if AT&T adding T-Mo's towers to their network could solve their problems, but I'm not sure it was ever a coverage issue, was it?
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CDMA is already dead. Any movement you see in it is just gas escaping from the corpse.
Not Again... (Score:2)
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Why would your quality of service drop? (Score:2)
We went with T-mobile, as AT and T are notoriously unreliable around these parts.
It's not like the T-Mobile towers will be taken down by a cackling AT&T. If you get good reception now, you should continue to get good reception as AT&T also starts using the local T-Mobile towers... in fact I see that as being the one bright spot here, that the GSM network towers across the country are combining and this should really help customers of both carriers get better reception (and AT&T customers get be
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And yet that's more or less what happened when AT&T acquired Cingular. Pretty quickly the quality of reception diminished and even places which had decent reception got worse.
Additionally, T-Mobile and AT&T don't use the same spectrum for 3G which means that anybody who had a phone for the T-Mobile network suddenly won't be getting 3G.
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LTE requires SIMs too. Currently, Verizon's LTE network is data only, with voice still going over their CDMA network. This will change in time to have voice also going over LTE.
Well, POOP! (Score:5, Insightful)
I have been a loyal T-Mobile customer for 8 years, and I've NEVER regretted the move for a single second.
I pay $50 a month for nation-wide no roaming coverage, 500 texts, IM, international calling, 600 free anytime minutes and free nights and weekends. NOBODY has a deal as good as that for what you get. Not Verizon, not AT&T, not Sprint...nobody.
I loved that T-Mobile would sign contracts with "small fry" to extend their coverage to areas previously untouched. When I moved, my cellphone said "Sun-Com" for nearly 2 years, but I never paid a penny more. They finally put a T-M tower in my area, and service has been outstanding!
Now I have to move to the Death Star?
And be lied to, over-charged and spied upon?
Fuck you, AT&T.
Maybe I should go pre-paid.
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Maybe I should go pre-paid.
That's what I am considering as well. My contract runs out around the time this deal is scheduled to close, so I wouldn't have any ETFs to worry about. The question now is, are there any decent prepaid GSM carriers in Georgia, that also offer good 3G data rates?
not that great of a deal. (Score:2)
Virgin mobile is half that price, with unlimited internet for your smartphone and no contracts. I used to be a T-mobile customer until I realized it wasn't really that great of a deal. I've found sprint's network (which is what virgin uses) to have better coverage than T-mobile as well.
Obligatory predictions. (Score:5, Interesting)
Positives:
One could argue that smartphone handsets might be more "locked down" over time, but I never saw AT&T handsets being more locked down in any way than their T-Mo counterparts. They might throw more crapware in (can't believe I'm using that term for my phone), but as long as rooting exists, there will be ways of removing them.
While I'm making armchair predictions, Verizon will buy Sprint within the next two years. Sprint has been losing customers for a while now and their WiMAX technology isn't taking off fast enough. I hope the FCC does something to control the monopolies that will ensue when that happens. This should get interesting really quickly.
Re:Obligatory predictions. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, good luck with that. Chance of that happening: 0%
Again, good luck with that. AT&T offers iPhones, what else do you want? You don't want that commie Android system do you?
The main reason I like T-Mobile. I can travel internationally and pay for calls as if I were still in the USA.
Re:Obligatory predictions. (Score:4, Insightful)
A switch to GSM is irrelevant.
All carriers will switch to LTE, which, right there in the name, is the long term evolution for GSM/UMTS.
What does this mean to you?
Simple. Sprint (after they switch to LTE),Virizon and ATT will all be on the same tech.
Of course, you will say that they are on separate bands. So what. Nearly all phones which you buy will support ALL implemented LTE bands. It wont matter a bit where you are with LTE>
Basically, US is getting on board with the rest of the planet. Well..all but Japan who will stay with Nttdocomo version of LTE.
Still ATT does suck for customer service and stealing your money.
But hey...You guys in the US dont appear to give a fuck about what your elected officials do, so dont start crying when shit happens.
Speaking as a customer (Score:2)
Americans will have even less choice now when it comes to cell phone carriers. Say good-bye to the one that had the best customer service and was most friendly towards Android and rooting.
All I can say is - at least it wasn't Verizon. I left them for T-Mobile a number of years ago, specifically because of bad customer support and absurd restrictions (such as not letting you use a phone's Bluetooth capabilities to upload your address book and calendar).
This definitely sucks, though.
so.... (Score:5, Funny)
We used to break up monopolies. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Now we celebrate them! All hail the invisible hand!
Jesus. The amount of anti-capitalism smugness in these comments is amazing.
Look, the US telecom market is about as far from the free market as you can get. The carriers get massive privileges in the form of land usage. They get massive amounts of tax breaks and subsidies, not to mention innumerable perks from local governments. To top it all off, the carriers don't even have to compete in an open market; the wireless spectrum is a heavily-licensed, extremely expensive, very limited resource doled out by
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Real capitalism would be great. A real free market would be great. In the meantime, the people running large and influential piles of concentrated "capital" are bitching constantly about "freedom" while limiting everyone else's freedom as fast as they can.
AT&T buying up the only other provider of GSM service in the country is a perfect example. For another example, note the generally available ROI on retail "capital investments".
Capitalism my ass. This is plutocracy.
Until the word "capitalism" is used
Ze Germans (Score:5, Interesting)
Funny how T-Mobile is an underdog in the US and people seem to actually like them there (or hate them less than the competition). At home they're the ex-monopoly. They have the highest prices and the most civil-servant like customer service.
They must be a different company in the US or the telecommunications sector is abysmal in the US.
Re:Ze Germans (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the abysmal telecommunications sector. Around here I've got 5 choices, 3 of them would require me to buy a new phone, and only T-Mobile and AT&T allow the use of random phones with a SIM. Sprint won't activate a phone that doesn't have it's logo silk screened on it, and none of the major providers competes for anything other than being somewhat less sucky than the others and depending upon inertia to carry them through.
It's been getting progressively worse over the years. Even with GSM, AT&T uses a different portion of the spectrum for 3G than T-Mobile does, meaning that there's going to be a lot of people without 3G or having to buy new phones prematurely if this goes through.
New round of AT&T / T-Mobile commercials (Score:5, Funny)
So, do we get a new round of AT&T vs. T-Mobile commercials? Does the hot T-Mobile Girl start making out with the AT&T Guy?
Or do we see him trying to woo her?
Who get's to be on top? *giggles*
Re:New round of AT&T / T-Mobile commercials (Score:5, Informative)
Having been customers of both services, I can tell you that both AT&T and T-Mobile will be on the top, and their customers will be on the bottom.
Actually, this isn't all bad (Score:5, Informative)
Besides, T-Mobile has generally been a niche player in the US market in comparison to the number of customers on any other network.
not the problem (Score:3)
The problem with the US cell phone market is that there is not enough competition, and competition is stymied by technical incompatibilities and bad contracts. This merger won't make things any worse.
What really needs to be done is more regulation to allow a competitive market to function: all handsets must work on all carriers, customers need to be able to switch any time without penalties, and nebulous phone subsidies should be prohibited (carriers can still offer zero percent interest financing on phones, but the prices need to be transparent).
Re:you say good-bye, i say hello (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that the two carriers use two different bands for 3g data and T-Mobile customers could already roam on AT&Ts network, but at edge only speeds.
This is bad. As a t-mobile customer I'm going to be awfully sad the day I have to give up my unlimited tethered internet. Sprint is looking like the only real option left and I really detest the $10 smartphone tax just on fucking principle.
The promise of unlimited wireless internet is looking bleaker and bleaker by the day.
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Except that the two carriers use two different bands for 3g data and T-Mobile customers could already roam on AT&Ts network, but at edge only speeds.
Actually, you can only roam when you are in an area without native coverage. So if T-mobile serves your area (but with spotty coverage), and an AT&T tower gives you a better signal, you can't roam to the AT&T tower.
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Look at his comment history.....don't feed the troll......
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I've heard good things about Boost mobile, but the CDMA carriers have their own issues, like Sprint refusing to activate phones which don't have their insignia on them, even if the phone is the same model that they normally allow.
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Boost = Sprint. There are only 4 (now 3) real carriers in the US. ATT, T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint. The rest are subsidiaries, virtual providers etc. There are only 2 technologies CDMA and GSM which only GSM is an Internationally used standard and thus preferred by business. So businesses and people with any intention of traveling frequently are now forced to get AT&T while before you could go with certain handsets on T-Mobile (T-Mobile's frequencies for eg. 3G and EDGE are NOT according to standards).
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As a Canadian, I think we are in no position to pity or criticize our neighbours. Our media and telecom industries are in some ways even more integrated and oligopolistic than our neighbours' equvialents. Most of the private terrestrial broadcasters happen to be owned, in whole or in part, by the same companies that own what are known as "broadcast distribution undertakings" - basically, the cable, satellite, and IPTV providers. Several also own digital pay TV channels, cellular and landline telecom provide
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Too bad you posted as anon or I'd have modded you insightful. I've got a tracphone and I love it. I pay for what I use when I use it. No bill. No aggravation. Coverage is through at&t towers which gives me a great coverage area but no data and if someone texts me I just ignore it, I only pay if I read it. For 40 bucks I get 400 minutes which lasts between one and three months depending on what is going on at the time. It's not for those pitiful people that live with a bluetooth headset grafted on