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."
Angegriffen! (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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+.