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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.
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)
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.
Nextel has to switch technologies anyways as they are being removed from their current freq
Which is an important point here missed by many. Nextel, in effort to offer to step out of the way of emergency services was granted back in February the right to exchange the crappy frequencies they built their business on for awesome new ones for half off. Saved billions in the process.
1. Buy up radio licenses from trucking companies operating in 800MHz all over the country.
2. Build a cellular network with those frequencies geared towards business (i.e. markup city)
3. Pound the emegency service radios until they beg the FCC to do something.
4. Exchange the crappy, life-threatening frequencies for shiny new ones at fire sale prices.
Maybe we'll get some interesting new services on those frequencies. Crap, I forgot "profit" somewhere in there.
"Nextel, the #1 preferred carrier for delivery boys, tow truck drivers and construction workers in all 50 states. 51 if you count Canada."
Intelligent Life on Earth
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 :).