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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."
As we usher in a new era of reduced costs and consumer savings!!!!1!1
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
So does this mean that people who work for Nextel are no longer allowed to fraternize with those who work for Sprint after the merger if that new labor law proposal passes? Or do they get some sort of grandfathered in "friendship/buddy" clause that allows them to still retain friendships and acquaintances in such an occurrence?
Maybe the shittiness of Nextel and Sprint will cancel eachother out?
Ugh. Just what we need. This is like when your huge, fat, impotent, blubbering idiot of a third cousin marries your bitchy, chain-smoking, slut of a first cousin. Nothing can result from the union except terrible, retarded things.
So now we'll have lousy customer service (sprint) combined with that fabulous redneck mating call:
{bee-deep} "Billy!"
{bee-deep} "Yeah!"
{bee-deep} "Where ya at?"
{bee-deep} "At lunch!"
{bee-deep} "What?"
{bee-deep} "At luunncchh!"
{bee-deep} "Where?" (...)
I can't believe that a great company like Nextel wants to merge with a crappy company like Sprint. It kind of reminds me when Sears merged with K-mart. The sad thing is that it's usually the weaker partner that wins out.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
Spritel? Nexint? Vista?
Does anyone out there know what will happen from a network technology perspective? It seems to me that Nextel's iDen "standard" is entirely incompatible with Sprint. Will Spring just send Nextel customers new Sprint units? Then what happens to Push to Talk?
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)
Sextel
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.
What will the NASCAR championship be called now?
I'm a Sprint customer right now, and I can honestly say Sprint sucks. Granted, everyone has horror stories about any one particular wireless provider (none are perfect), but the issues I've had with Sprint have been insane.
It's not so much the service itself (which is not great, I still get dropped calls from time to time, but it's acceptable). It's their crummy customer service and problem resolution system. They disconnected my service 'accidentally', claiming I hadn't paid my bill when I had, despite the fact their customer service reps told me their computers showed a credit on my account followed by a "I don't understand why this happened. Don't worry, we'll fix it. Your service will be on within four hours." Four hours would pass, no service, I'd call again, same response with a "oh, this time it will be different". This lasted 3 ½ days. To make matters worse, every time I'd call their "customer care" number and punch in my phone number, they'd bump me to their collections department, where I'd wait on hold before getting to speak with somebody who would insist I hadn't paid my bill until I convinced them to look at their computer, then transfer me back into the queue for their regular customer service. To make matters worse, about one out of every three calls I made connected me with such a thick accent I couldn't understand them, and they had real trouble understanding me.
There's a lot more; this is just the problem I've had in the last week. I'm stuck in this contract with them for another 11 months and to date fully expect to ditch them as soon as my contract is up.
So my question is this: with Nextel, can I expect things to get any better?
The Internet is generally stupid
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.
After reading all of these comments about Nextel and Sprint I have to wonder if ANYBODY with a cell phone in the US is happy with their service. And let's not even talk about Cingular's new slogan. A guy I know on IRC recently got a job with Cingular. The catch-line lately has been "Hey Ted? Whatcha been up to? Busy raising the bar, I'll bet." He still doesn't get it. That's what makes it so beautiful.
Nextel uses SIMs, CDMA providers do not. From a corporate standpoint, SIMs give a phone a lower TCO because you can easily reuse handsets. Bob want's Joe's phone and Joe wants Bob's phone. A simple SIM swap is all it takes. For Sprint or Verizon, it's practically a week long process. Where I work, if someone gets fired or quits or turns in their phone. We just call Nextel or Tmobile and cancel the account then the phone (usually a Blackberry) gets put in a box. Then Joe Newguy, gets hired, we just put a working SIM from whoever most recently turned in a phone, in the phone and give it to him. Changing numbers is a snap with SIMs, just call up the provider and they can issue you a new number in 2 minutes. Verizon wanted me to key in a bunch of stuff in the phone to make it work.
From what I read while helping to build a case to defend a former customer from their bullying collection tactics (You shouldn't cash peoples checks, and not provide service.. then try to charge termination fees, when you were the one that turned off the customers phones even when the bills were paid.)
Sprint PCS is a DBA name for Ubiqicom (sp?), apperently they licensed the Sprint name from the 'real' Sprint.
Kinda like that "Lawnmower Man" movie, based on "The Story by Stephen King", which sucked so bad.
Careful who you let use your business name.
As a general rule, GSM is usable places outside North America, while CDMA and iDEN aren't. A year ago, wandering around asking if phones worked anywhere else would result in three affirmative answers (from ATT Wireless, Cingular and T-Mobile), and three blank stares (from Verizon, Nextel and Sprint).
After the ATT-Cingular merger and the Nextel-Sprint merger, we'll only have two of each kind of answer. This will make shopping so much faster!
Ultimately we'll just have two monopolies: PhonesThatWork, Inc. and PhonesThatSuck, Inc. And they'll both charge an arm and a leg. Joy.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
In the mid-eighties, America had, essentially, a couple of mobile phone networks (in most areas) based upon a single standard, AMPS. This was largely the result of the AT&T monopoly and its legacy (clearly, the Baby Bells weren't going to suddenly switch standards for their wireless networks, and there was little point for the "A" carriers to use an incompatable standard.)
The EU (or EC, or EEC, depending on what part of the story you're talking about, but as it's the same organization, I'll refer to it as the EC from here on) didn't have anything like that. Every country had one or two mobile phone networks, generally based upon custom standards. The UK, for example, used Motorola's ETACS. Functionally, the standards were similar, they just used different signaling methods, or had different operating parameters, that made them incompatable with one another.
This didn't bode well for the emerging European Union, as it meant people travelling from one state to another wouldn't be able to roam, and the cost effectiveness of running this many incompatable technologies was clearly a problem. So the EU passed a decree saying that the mobile phone carriers had to adopt a single standard that they would run on their 900MHz bands. The EU didn't say what the standard should be, or that they should turn off their custom networks (though it made sense for them to do so if the new standard was better), simply that the industry had to decide on a standard and get it working across all 900MHz networks. And if a country didn't actually have a 900MHz network, it was to get one started right away.
GSM started as a project by France Telecom's mobile phone subdivision and was created independently of the EU's directive. It was one of the standards considered by the various standards groups, and in the end was their choice.
Now, where it gets interesting is when you fast forward to the early nineties. Britain felt that just having two networks didn't create enough competition, so sold off the 1800MHz band for "DCS" services. This had nothing to do with the EU, and Britain said it didn't care what standards were used in that band. The two mobile phone operators at the time, Orange, and one2one (now T-Mobile), ended up both chosing GSM. This was after Qualcomm created CDMA (IS95) and started lobbying for its adoption, so you can bet both operators saw it and evaluated it. Several other countries followed suit, and also opened up the 1800MHz band, and the companies that bought licenses also decided on GSM. It wasn't until a significant number of countries had done so that the EU decided that, because the 1800MHz players currently had a disadvantage over their 900MHz competitors, 1800MHz was to be opened up across the EU, and that GSM was mandated for the remaining operators.
This wasn't a big conspiracy against CDMA. It was done because the existing operators had chosen that standard, and there'd have been no point in the EU opening 1800MHz if non-GSM operators could gain control of the bands in other countries. Had Orange and one2one choosen CDMA, or one choosen CDMA and the other GSM, and this pattern been followed by succeeding operators, then you can bet the EU would have mandated CDMA everywhere, or at least one CDMA network and at least one GSM network everywhere.
The person you're responding to claims that some operators are now running CDMA on 450MHz. I haven't heard of that. But I'd expect the same behaviour from the EU as thus far, eg if it picks up steam, to prevent 900/1800/3G GSM/UMTS operators from having an advantage over an emerging network of 450MHz CDMA operators, the EU to open that band across the Union for CDMA operation (unless, of course, there are large numbers of operators using a competing standard on the same frequency)
My belief is that much of the propoganda against GSM from CDMA proponents is based primarily on making use of a lack of
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.