T-Mobile Merging With MetroPCS 86
Daetrin writes "Last year T-Mobile tried to merge with AT&T but the deal was blocked by the FCC. Now T-Mobile and MetroPCS have agreed to merge in a $1.5 billion deal. There doesn't seem to be much concern that the FCC will disagree with this deal, perhaps because the two companies combined will have a user base of 42.5 million, which will still be smaller than the #3 player Sprint's 56.4 million. Because the two companies have similar spectrum holdings T-Mobile claims the merger will allow them to offer better coverage. They also say they will continue to offer a range of both on and off-contract plans."
But the real question is. (Score:5, Insightful)
Will they keep Carly Foulkes?
Angegriffen! (Score:2, Interesting)
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Re:As a T-Mobile customer, I'm opposed to this mer (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, from a phone geek's PoV, this is a merger between a company that's always been hostile towards customers having control over their own devices, and one that used to be liberal on the subject but has become more and more controlling lately. And directors of the former will be taking up prominent roles in the new company.
Yet I've been with T-mobile for 10 years now (Powertel -> VoiseStream -> T-Mobile) and I have yet to experience this hostility you speak of. Neither have the friends I know on MetroPCS and T-Mobile.
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They did that for all the smart phones, basically the feature phones that were incapable of using much data had a different plan than the smartphones that could use a lot. Makes sense to me.
Now they have true unlimited data for $20/month.
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I'm pretty sure it made sense to charge me more for my G1 (which was a different plan in name only than the mytouch) than for my 6800. Any reasonable person can figure out which one is going to use more data, even though both were unlimited.
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I'm not doubting you, but I had no such experience from T-Mobile. They always unlocked my MyTouch phone 3 weeks after purchase. Waiting 3 weeks allowed me to simply return the phone if I didn't like
Re:As a T-Mobile customer, I'm opposed to this mer (Score:4, Informative)
Same experience here. I've had T-Mobile for over 12 years (from when they were Voicestream). I'm currently on a Galaxy Nexus unlocked and purchased straight from Google on a $50/month unlimited voice/data/text plan.
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I don't know what the plans are called, I don't care. I don't see anything being blocked or limited, and I've used the phone as a NAP to link both my Xoom and my laptop into the net.
T-Mobile has phases. They had a stupid phase a few years ago. As far as I can tell, they're in happy phas
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True, but the fact that T-Mo now lets you bring your own device at a much lower rate mitigates some of their lockdown issues. I hope that is not a feature that goes away, because it has really worked well for me.
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+1 Paranoid?
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What's this fetish on "first with the news"? (Score:2)
Slashdot wasn't exactly first with this news.
Isn't it better to be "best with the news"? ie, not just report the facts, but provide background material and insightful commentary that helps the reader frame the facts and relate them to other facts that need to be relevant?
Or is it just that the speculators and stock chasers need to hurry and sell/buy/call/put the relevant stocks as fast as possible?
I prefer the commentary on Slashdot (and many other forums) more than the news reportage itself - many individual biases combined usually evens out to a re
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I thought the same thing. At first, it smelled of astroturf, but then, there are a few customers that exactly know the score, but these are rare individuals. To have them readily poised to salt SlashDot takes preparation. The news broke yesterday, so that's perhaps sufficient time to sculpt something together into a comment. Oh, wait.....
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Re:As a T-Mobile customer, I'm opposed to this mer (Score:5, Insightful)
Then let me reply to these:
>- Less competition - less incentive to reduce prices or improve services
Mergers do that; not the best idea in a competitively shrinking market
>- Another round of layoffs, probably numbering in the thousands, possibly tens of thousands.
Sorry, that's one benefit of mergers for the companies. These days, nothing is forever.
>- More customers on less spectrum, with at least initially multiple network standards making spectrum sharing even harder.
That's until a "4g" network is rolled out. It also makes the merged body look less digestible by Sprint or Verizon.
>- More costly spectrum refarming
You must be a stockholder.
>- Either maintenance of four largely incompatible networks (2GSM, IS95/2000, UMTS, and LTE) or the migration of all IS95/2000 customers to 2GSM/UMTS/LTE, at considerable cost.
AT&T deals with this, and to a lesser extent, it will bite each carrier as well. 2GSM is on the way out; in seven years LTE will dominate, for better and worse.
>- Funds spent on the above that could be spent on rolling out 3G to uncovered areas, or rolling out LTE. Or improving their deteriorating customer service.
No, the funds were going to be spent anyway on LTE and expanding coverage. Customer service? You want service?
>Oh, and to add insult to injury, there'll be one less alternative existing T-Mobile customers can jump to in the event T-Mobile gets worse. Which it will.
We agree on this one, but Metro was having trouble with the same financing you cite as impediments to T-Mobile growth. You can't have it both ways.
>Also, from a phone geek's PoV, this is a merger between a company that's always been hostile towards customers having control over their own devices, and one that used to be liberal on the subject but has become more and more controlling lately. And directors of the former will be taking up prominent roles in the new company.
T-Mobile is no more awful than AT&T. I can get my T-Mobile phones unlocked in a few days. I can brute-force them if need-be. That a combined board might have strange people in it was out of your and my control anyway.
>This is a terrible, terrible, idea, and the people behind it are terrible, terrible, people.
I think the idea is neutral, and the people behind it are trying to survive. Can't blame them for that. How they are terrible otherwise is unknown to me, save they've squandered tonnage of goodwill. In the US, I otherwise have Verizon and you couldn't give me a free AT&T or Sprint phone and "service".
Tempest in a teapot. Not to dismiss your obvious hopes and dreams for T-Mobile, but these are carriers and they have no soul-- none of them.
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As somebody with an even smaller user ID (see what I did there?), I still think you are jumping to conclusions.
Re:As a T-Mobile customer, I'm opposed to this mer (Score:5, Interesting)
Mergers are always good for CEOs and shareholders and always bad for everyone else. It's a rule. This is not sarcasm.
Consider the whole reason Verizon and AT&T dominate the market: Verizon happened when Bell Atlantic absorbed MCI and GTE; AT&T absorbed Cingular and a few others. Smaller players still exist, but competition is hard; without mergers very small players would drop off until a healthy culture formed, but with mergers one or two parasites become huge and dominating and make it harder for smaller players to gain traction.
The smaller players can merge, gaining a stronger hand to compete but increasing the distance between them and the other small players, which then makes it hard for those small players to compete--and then they either die off or get absorbed in mergers. Eventually small players can't exist, and as they die off the larger players come to scavenge the carcasses.
Each round of mergers brings a lot of similar services under one hand, where they become redundant or excessive. Having 14 non-redundant niche services is a money sink, and so 10 of them go away and the consumer has 4 to pick from which aren't always as well-matched to the individual consumer's needs as the services discontinued. Lay-offs occur, although we can typically bring that into a cost-savings and increase in efficiency, which is less economic waste and should be good--because it SHOULD cause a decrease in operational costs, leading to a decrease in pricing of services to consumers, leaving more free money in the economy to fund new ventures that can tap the newly freed labor pool. Unfortunately, what often happens is the price stays high and margins increase, so the economy gets additional labor that it doesn't have anything to do with and we have a bunch more people unemployed.
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Not to mention that the "saved" costs due to the reduced redundancy and increased efficiency will most likely go into some executives' pockets as a year-end bonus, instead of back into the company's R&D.
Big companies are by and large, social parasites. They consolidate wealth into the few by reducing the wealth distributed into the many. There's really no other way to think about them. The only industry that is slightly better is the one that revolves around virtual goods and services, i.e. software com
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Ditto to most of the dissent.
TMO is not always the driver when they don't offer boot unlockers. The manufacturers see that custom Android ROMs are a challenge to support (actually, unsupportable by them), so they resist letting us brick our phones with the latest zOMGTHIS ROM IS GREAT from who knows where. Your scorn is more accurately directed at the manufacturers. A lot of regional carriers also don't have the clout to get any perks from the manufacturers. This will help Metro subscribers in the end.
I'
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If Metro's PCS voice spectrum is congested, and T-Mobile can show the FCC that they're actively using their own spectrum as well, I seriously doubt there's going to be any great push to force its divestiture unless some small regional carrier is looking *really* needy. I mean, who's the FCC going to make them sell it to? AT&T or Verizon? Please. Sprint doesn't really need more 1900MHz spectrum, doesn't want AWS spectrum, and couldn't afford to buy it anyway.
Remember, most of the merger-forced spectrum s
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> My only question is, will Metro go GSM?
No and yes. They'll "Go Canadian" and do what carriers in Canada did -- keep using circuit-switched CDMA for voice (since it's built out, a sunk cost, and already "there"), and new phones will default to HSPA+ & LTE for data (falling back to EVDO, 1xRTT, EDGE, and GPRS when HSPA+/LTE doesn't exist).
In ~2 years, they can start scaling back EVDO and reallocate spectrum to LTE and HSPA+. Another year or two past that, and they can eliminate EVDO entirely (keepin
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I do agree with some of your comments, though the one thing I really like is the value plans with bring-your-own-device. I can still buy them from T-Mo, or from wherever I care to (and hopefully with stuff moving to LTE that will involve fewer compromises).
Not sure I'm excited by the merger though - I don't really see much gain for T-Mo customers.
Re:As a T-Mobile customer, I'm opposed to this mer (Score:5, Insightful)
What is your deal? I've seen you post this comment almost word for word on various other sites.
You've got some good points. But a lot of your argument doesn't seem to be about those points. Your argument seems to mostly have a emotional basis to it. As if you don't like the company/ies involved for whatever reason that you don't seem to be saying.
T-Mobile just has to maintain the cdma network for a little while. Years perhaps. Customer and hardware turnover will get customers onto hspa/lte compatible hardware. A lot of MetroPCS customers already have lte compatible devices. From the google search I see that it's hardware that's able to handle VoLTE. T-Mobile can make a push to improve the lte coverage and current MetroPCS hardware will be able to work without the cdma network. In the meantime they can continue to roam onto sprints network.
The maintenance of four different networks isn't really even a big deal. With the tower equipment that T-Mobile is using and deploying is capable of running all four with either a software update or very little hardware changes. I feel that you are also being a bit disingenuous with this argument since 2GSM UMTS/HSPA and LTE are in the 3gsm family and were designed to do handoffs with each other, cdma and lte were not so much.
As for the FCC requirements you don't actually know that the fcc is going to do that. The last few years it's been the two big dogs that have been making acquisitions. Those are different stories and I wouldn't use them as examples for a company the size of the new T-Mobile. If the new T-Mobile does indeed have to give up some spectrum we won't and don't know how much.
The technical issues you listed just don't seem to be that big of an issue. This is a business move. This is about combining two companies for the synergies. The real winner here is Deutsche Telekom. Which can sell off stock slowly from the newly formed company.
You're real reasons really show through when you decided to use that last sentence "This is a terrible, terrible, idea, and the people behind it are terrible, terrible, people." So again I ask. What's your deal?
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Please cite sources on network technology (Score:2)
The maintenance of four different networks isn't really even a big deal. With the tower equipment that T-Mobile is using and deploying is capable of running all four with either a software update or very little hardware changes. I feel that you are also being a bit disingenuous with this argument since 2GSM UMTS/HSPA and LTE are in the 3gsm family and were designed to do handoffs with each other, cdma and lte were not so much.
How do you know this? Please cite sources on how the "tower equipment T-Mobile is using and deploying is capable of running all four with either a software update or very little hardware changes." I am not doubting your assertion; in fact, I logged on here looking to see someone make exactly this assertion because I assumed that most cellular technology was very similar from the hardware dimension. Can you expand a little and point us to a link on this?
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Most telecom equipment, including base stations, is modular.
I don't have much personal experience with wireless base stations but if it's anything like all the transport equipment and routers/switches between the tower and the Mobile Switching Center, adding different protocols may be as simple as slotting a new card and connecting it to a new antenna.
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And therein is the lie. Because the FCC hasn't, to the best of my knowledge, allowed a merger in recent history between a major carrier and a smaller one without imposing the requirement that substantial amounts of overlapping spectrum be disposed of.
How does spectrum overlap? AWS is sold in blocks geographically, the companies own specific frequencies in specific locations, there is no overlap.
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Why would that be bad? Or good?
Mergers are a perfectly normal part of the business cycle: during a downturn ma ny smaller players die. Coming out of the downturn, mergers and aquisitions happen, until your down to 3 or so companies and companies have some pricing power again. As the economy improves you get new players, and the previously survivors tend to get sloppy and lazy and less competitive. Come the next downturn and wave of merges, it's often a very diferent set of 3 or so companies surviving.
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Re:Beware the shills (Score:4, Interesting)
> Unless you're a DT or PCS shareholder, there's no reason to support this merger. None whatsoever.
Unless, of course, you're a MetroPCS customer with late-model Android phone (like the Galaxy S3) whose underlying chipset is perfectly capable of HSPA+ (assuming its soldered-in RUIM can be induced to act enough like a real SIM card to make a GSM network happy... I'm pretty sure they CAN, if push comes to shove...).
THOSE customers will absolutely be dancing in the streets, because it might mean they might get to start using T-Mobile's 6-14mbps HSPA+ network for data a few months from now, instead of limping along at ~2mbps or less on MetroPCS's EVDO, or roaming at a painful crawl on Sprint's third-world single-digit-kbps EVDO (slower than data anywhere on earth besides maybe rural Haiti). From what I've heard, even Metro's LTE is slower than T-Mobile's HSPA+.
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I think you have convinced me. I was divided about this, I am generally in favor of more companies, not fewer, but if it made TMO healthier and more able to survive... But it is sounding like it won't.
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what exactly is the point? (Score:2)
metroPCS is a prepaid carrier as far as i know. the customer base is there for the cheapest phones and the cheapest plans that are barely profitable. i was looking at them for my wife's 80 year old grandmother to get rid of her landline.
no family plans means these people will leave you for another carrier to save a penny
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Second, it looks like both T-Mobile and MetroPCS have family plans, so the "no family plans" part seems to be just plain wrong.
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Probably spectrum for LTE, plus prepaid is a growing market so not having a prepaid arm is probably a long-term losing proposition even if it reduces ARPU.
what AT&T needed (Score:1)
Re:what AT&T needed (Score:4, Informative)
You're seriously suggesting that AT&T [opensecrets.org], with their $4.5 million in contributions (20th largest) this election cycle and $31 million in lobbying (5th largest) in the last 2 years alone, doesn't know how to lobby effectively?
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You're seriously suggesting that AT&T [opensecrets.org], with their $4.5 million in contributions (20th largest) this election cycle and $31 million in lobbying (5th largest) in the last 2 years alone, doesn't know how to lobby effectively?
Yes. I mean, they lost, right? Clearly, they did not spend enough.
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Maybe it's possible that politics isn't enitirely corrupt? I know it's fashionable to play the cynic on slashdot, and politicians and beaurocrats don't seem to make a habit of acting in the best interests of those they server, but still: that doesn't mean they never do so.
Combined spectrum is a good thing... (Score:2, Informative)
I'm sorry to those folk on MetroPCS that have a "cool deal" that's just right for them, that may be swallowed up into "like but not quite matching" T-Mobile billing plans. I know this can be annoying.
That said, AT&T's problem (and reason for wanting to buy T-Mobile) was bandwidth starvation. The GSM carrirers are obligated to keep some spectrum on 2G, have a large base of phones on 3G, and desperately need LTE to meet their future bandwidth needs. So any spectrum they can buy/merge with while meeting
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Are you sure this will make any difference? They now have to support both CDMA and GSM, they can't just magically combine the two.
Maybe 10 years from now they can switch one of those off, but for the immediate future this won't mean additional bandwidth for anyone.
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but how would this merger work? Tmobile is GSM whereas MetroPCS is CDMA
The same way Cingular's and AT&T's merger worked. Nope, don't understand it; pretty sure they didn't either. :p
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Both T-Mo and MetroPCS have plans to switch to LTO, so long term there is no conflict.
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They claim CDMA gone by 2015... (Score:3)
I was wondering the same thing all yesterday when this popped up on the wire. In fact, I had a similar concern back a few years ago on the ATT-T-Mobile linkup. After all, although ATT and T-Mobile both use GSM, they use different frequencies to do so. T-Mobile phones will work on an ATT network and vice-versa for regular calls, texts, and slow data -- but not at 3G speeds. (For the record, that is now changing: T-Mobile is now doing some 3G on the 1900MHz band that is compatible with most phones, namely th
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AFAIK, AT&T acquired Alltel spectrum, but Verizon acquired Alltel's customers, who were able to use Verizon's network without problems. There might have been a few oddball areas, but AFAIK, for Alltel customers, the change involved little more than new billing statements and a PRL update.
MOD UP Parent (Score:2)
MOD UP -- lots of people defend T-Mobile/MetroPCS merger by citing ATT/Alltel, but this key qualifying detail isn't easily found. Thanks!
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> how would this merger work? Tmobile is GSM whereas MetroPCS is CDMA.
The difference isn't as big as you think.
The difference between legacy TDMA-based 2G GSM/GPRS/EDGE and WCDMA-based 3G UMTS/HSPA+ is HUGE. Night and day. Literally, nothing in common besides a subset of the SIM card and the battery.
The difference between CDMA2000 voice/1xRTT data and EVDO is almost as big as the difference between 2G GSM and 3G UMTS/HSPA+.
The difference between CDMA2000 voice/1xRTT data and UMTS/HSPA+ is basically the
I don't think they could offer WORSE coverage... (Score:3)
We need to do SOMETHING (Score:2)
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I think that's why we need to root for T-Mobile to succeed - not in reference to this merger, but in general. They're the only significantly-sized company to offer cell plans that undercut the offerings of the Big Two. I know doing so is a business decision on their part, and not being done out of the goodness of their heart, but - there needs to be downward pressure kept on this market because, overall, current prices are absurd.
Why I left T-Mobile (today) (Score:2)
1. Better deal. $40/month unlimited everything with SimpleMobile, compared to ~$75. I bought a new, mid-range Samsung smartphone for dirt cheap, and can use my old-ass T-Mobile G1 as an emergency backup. Ol' Saint Nick will probably help me upgrade again.
2. Spotty coverage. T-Mobile works fine for me at home, but has presented coverage problems when travelling. (SimpleMobile doesn't
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And given that Simple Mobile is just a T-Mobile MVNO reseller, if you actually think T-Mobile is struggling and merging with MetroPCS isn't going to save them, then switching over to Simple Mobile may not help you much.
As for #8, you're doing