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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.
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)
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.