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FCC Approves Sprint-Nextel Merger
Luke writes "Sprint and Nextel received approval from the Federal Communications Commission to merge to form the number three wireless company on Wednesday. FCC commissioners gave the companies unanimous support for the merger. The companies, which announced the merger on Dec. 14, 2004, expect to finalize the merger soon."
... if this is what passes for "News for nerds."
Would they have to privide dual chipset phones to take advantage of all the Nextel infrastructure? I suspect Motorola will lose out, because CDMA seems to be better suited for the future and is used more widely. Nextel will probably be converted to CDMA and Sprint will get the huge Nextel corporate contracts as soon as it can implement the local "walkie-talkie" feature that Nextel customers love so much.
The FCC should have mandated the removal of the "Push To Talk Feature" as part of the agreement. When you live in a society that has lost all concept of manners (and don't say the South is still some shining example, because I just lived there for 3 years and it is becoming just as vapid and rude as any place else) something that basically enables people to be even bigger assholes in public is the last thing we need.
Inevitably, you have soccer moms and ghetto thugs (or wannabes) blasting their conversations across the entire room, and for some reason they feel the need to shout even louder than they normally would on a cell phone. (another thing that drives me nuts)
Given that GSM is the defacto standard in Europe and many other parts of the world, and has covered a lot of ground in the US in the past couple of years, I think it's safe to say that GSM (and TDMA by extension) isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
Why would I want to look at people I am talking to over the phone?
Corporate power is anathema to small business formation as the overaccumulation of capital in the hands of a small group of people who are more likely to hoard assets than invest them, makes it really hard for anyone who is not born with a silver spoon in their mouth to create a new business.
Right now only five software companies create 75% of the revenues in the software industry here in the United States, and people wonder why the tech-job market is exploding in India and China, while laws like Sarbanes-Oxley which are ironically intended to curb corporate corruption, only enhance its power at the expense of small and medium sized businesses.
I mean, at this rate the entire telecommunications industry will just be a monopoly in the very near future, or at the very least, a colluding duopoly like Visa and Mastercard which is arguably just as bad since it gives the false impression to the public that there is competition in the marketplace.
And why does our government allow these kind of mergers to take place without even thinking twice about the long-term consequences? Oh yah, it is the mistaken premise by the leaders of both political parties that corporations need to get fatter in order to compete in the "World Economy" with largely state owned businesses in China and India as well as the oligarchy oriented super-massive corporations of old Europe and Japan.
Until the United States (and the rest of the world for that matter) has a graduated corporate tax on revenues (not profits but revenues), things are going to get worse and worse for the worker as they will be stuck in a state of inertia slaving away in some cubicle at a super-massive corporation with no option of finding another job because no new jobs will be created due to small businesses getting the shaft by their own theoretically democratic government which constantly creates unnecessary laws which add relatively major costs of compliance to small businesses, while leaving large corporations relatively unscathed.
How are small businesses so supposed to compete against large corporations if all their capital is being drained by their government while large corporations can use their political influence to get tax breaks and sweet heart deals to add to their bottom line.
I mean seriously, when will the American public get the drift that corporate mergers are not some special unification to be joyous about as if corporate mergers should be treated as some kind of state wedding.
You obviously have never done contract work in the field. The ability to ping people you are working with real quick without making an official phone call is great.
Text messaging is usually good for such things. The receiver does not have to respond right away, and they can read the message more than once. I would imagine a vibrating phone/2-way is less of a disturbance than a phone going '*BLEEP BLEEP* Are you there?'
You may even be able to send out a quick text reply without interrupting anyone else.
You don't ping your buddy at the restaurant to see if he wants to go to the bar tonight.
Actually, text messaging is quite good for this. I do not need to know that he is going right this minute. He can likely tell me any time in the next few hours. Of course, I have no idea if he is in a meeting, napping, out to lunch with someone important. I do not need to know, he can respond any time.
Please correct me if I am mistaken, but it seems to me that text messaging and push to talk are both best used for asyncronous communications. Don't push to talk messages disappear immediately after you hear them, or are they saved? I am under the impression that they disappear. For me, that would severely limit its uses...
I have to admit though, text messaging was much easier on my old Motorola 2 way pager than it is on the average cell phone. I can probably thumb about 4-6 characters per second on those things... I imagine I am more like 1-2 on a phone :).
Spring is a *terrible* cellular provider. I had the great misfortune of using them for one year. That year I had continual dropped calls, poor reception and loathesome customer service. I dropped them the minute my plan was up and went running to Nextel. Nextel was a tad more expensive, but I've had excellent service from them. The iDen network is clear and I have never dropped a call. I love my Nextel phone. The news of this merger is very disheartening to me. I think this will be the downfall of Nextel. Sprint sucks ass - their phones suck, their service sucks, their infrastructure sucks. Why why why did Nextel and Sprint merge?! Sigh, It doesn't matter, in the end the consumer looses out everytime.