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AT&T To Acquire T-Mobile From Deutsche Telekom
teh31337one writes "AT&T and Deutsche Telekom have entered into a definitive agreement for the sale of T-Mobile USA for $39 billion in cash and stocks. Press release here." Gripes one anonymous reader: "Americans will have even less choice now when it comes to cell phone carriers. Say good-bye to the one that had the best customer service and was most friendly towards Android and rooting."
As a former AT&T customer and a current T-Mobile customer, I am very disappointed by this. However, the deal is still a year away and subject to regulatory approval.Perhaps we can hope that the government makes a move to protect consumers for a change?
Douglas Whitaker
I gave up hope on the mobile industry in the US long ago. When T-Mobile and AT&T couldn't even use compatible frequencies for 3G, the hope of cross carrier compatibility died a long time ago. GSM is only great when you can buy an unlocked phone, choose a provider and pop in a SIM, then change on a whim while paying lower monthly prices due to the lack of a subsidy. This is one of the many benefits Europeans enjoy, along with good roaming agreements to ensure they can make a call even if their own provider doesn't cover the area well. I still look back to 2004 when I had an unlocked Sony Ericsson phone from T-Mobile that I used in Europe for a bit. Bought a SIM in London, traveled into the Netherlands, around Germany and a bit into Switzerland. At one point, my phone saw 9 different providers it was willing to use for emergency calls, and 4 or so of those it was willing to roam on for everything else.
Since none of those benefits ever came to the US, I hold some hope in that this merger will bring some good. AT&T is pledging a bigger LTE rollout, including to rural parts of the US. This is desperately needed, as many rural areas have dial up and satellite based options only. Dialup is near unusable these days, and satellite adds too much latency, negating benefits from Web 2.0 based sites, and conferencing/communication software. Low caps also prevent rural users from taking advantage of services like Netflix.
Positives:
One could argue that smartphone handsets might be more "locked down" over time, but I never saw AT&T handsets being more locked down in any way than their T-Mo counterparts. They might throw more crapware in (can't believe I'm using that term for my phone), but as long as rooting exists, there will be ways of removing them.
While I'm making armchair predictions, Verizon will buy Sprint within the next two years. Sprint has been losing customers for a while now and their WiMAX technology isn't taking off fast enough. I hope the FCC does something to control the monopolies that will ensue when that happens. This should get interesting really quickly.
Funny how T-Mobile is an underdog in the US and people seem to actually like them there (or hate them less than the competition). At home they're the ex-monopoly. They have the highest prices and the most civil-servant like customer service.
They must be a different company in the US or the telecommunications sector is abysmal in the US.
Oh, and the wireless version. I think this one's beautiful:
You take your nonprofit organization and provide it some spectrum and enough capital to build a couple of towers and the fiber between the tower and the central office. The fiber goes to a switch in the central office where any wireless ISP can hook up for their share of the maintenance cost of the tower. Then you do constant live spectrum dutch auctions: You allocate a tiny piece of the spectrum for a control channel and then split the rest into slices of e.g. 5KB/sec each and auction them off at e.g. 2 second intervals. Then anybody who wants to use wireless transmits a message on the control channel that says "I want three slices for the next 2 seconds, I bid $0.0004/slice/second" and the tower either responds with a message saying which frequencies to transmit on or denying the request because the requesting device has been outbid. If there are more available slices than there are bidders then everybody gets what they want and nobody pays anything, if there are more bidders than slices then the highest bidders win and each one pays the amount per slice that the lowest winning bidder pays.
The result is that if there is sufficient capacity then everything is free, if there is contention (and to the extent there is contention), the nonprofit collects revenue. The revenue then goes to buying more spectrum or building more towers to alleviate the capacity shortfall. It's like magic -- a direct connection between supply and demand. How's that for free markets?
The above commenter almost certainly works for one of the recent "reputation management" companies that work to subvert online communities from discussing stories that may reflect badly on very big companies. This particular UID was created a few days ago to perform a similar function in a story with the headline "Time Warner Cable Cuts iPad Live TV Access 50%". The tactic is to create a very large section of long, useless trolling comments at the very beginning of the comments section made up of a lot of anonymous idiocy broken up by idiocy from registered users, almost always very recently registered.
I've seen this tactic used on a lot of stories that always seem to be about some very very large corporation, sometimes on the very same stories reported at other websites with large and active commenter communities. I'm not exactly sure how the technique would work, but it's too widespread and too uniform to be anything but an organized effort. You even see variations on the same user names in different social networking and discussion-based websites.
I know for a fact that companies like New Media Strategies and all the "Reputation Defender" and reputation.com companies that have recently sprung up are not shy about using some very disruptive and underhanded tactics to try to achieve their goals for their clients, and will sometimes even brag to their clients about their techniques. I know someone who worked for one of these outfits and the stories he would tell are pretty disgusting. And these companies are very richly capitalized. There's a lot of money in obfuscation it seems. Corporations do not want us to know what they are up to.
Information is already often untrustworthy. We either have to find a way to thwart these efforts or we have to speed development of ad hoc networks on a large scale. If there's not going to be meaningful net neutrality, then we're going to have to do it ourselves.
By the way, AT&T buying T-Mobile is a terrible development. We can hope that the Justice Department steps in and stops this, but they've been pretty soft on anti-trust. AT&T should not be getting bigger, they should be getting broken up. We will all lose on this deal.
You are welcome on my lawn.