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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."
This is bad.
Less competition will lead to greater efficiencies and lower prices for consumers. Why are you all laughing? There's a first time for everything. And on this one, we're DUE!
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
Are we ever going to break up AT&T?
I switched to T-Mobile strictly to get away from AT&T's bullshit yet stay with a GSM carrier! And I love T-Mobile's support as well, though AT&T's wasn't that bad to be honest.
This still stinks to no end though. And the worst part is, I can't take my N900 to any other US carrier, as only ATT/TMO is GSM here.
Fuck.
Except that the two carriers use two different bands for 3g data and T-Mobile customers could already roam on AT&Ts network, but at edge only speeds.
This is bad. As a t-mobile customer I'm going to be awfully sad the day I have to give up my unlimited tethered internet. Sprint is looking like the only real option left and I really detest the $10 smartphone tax just on fucking principle.
The promise of unlimited wireless internet is looking bleaker and bleaker by the day.
zosxavius photography
The free market will save us!
Any minute now...
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.
You mean this is a victory for the Empire. Which makes Verizon and Sprint the only support for rebel forces.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
No, you will continued to be serviced by t-mobile folks locked away in some far corner of customerservicelandia.
I used to be an AT&T Wireless customer who was then gobbled up by Cingular who was then gobbled up by AT&T. I was still, however on my old AT&T Wireless account/plan. Every time I would call and talk to someone, they would eventually stop and "Oh, sorry, you're one of those old AT&T Wireless customers. I need to transfer you. And yeah, you're right, I can't offer you a better plan." I'd then be transferred to someone who, oddly, was actually helpful.
I guess this is the end of subsidized Nexus phones, for GSM networks anyway. But really, now Sprint is the only non-evil carrier left!
I have been a loyal T-Mobile customer for 8 years, and I've NEVER regretted the move for a single second.
I pay $50 a month for nation-wide no roaming coverage, 500 texts, IM, international calling, 600 free anytime minutes and free nights and weekends. NOBODY has a deal as good as that for what you get. Not Verizon, not AT&T, not Sprint...nobody.
I loved that T-Mobile would sign contracts with "small fry" to extend their coverage to areas previously untouched. When I moved, my cellphone said "Sun-Com" for nearly 2 years, but I never paid a penny more. They finally put a T-M tower in my area, and service has been outstanding!
Now I have to move to the Death Star?
And be lied to, over-charged and spied upon?
Fuck you, AT&T.
Maybe I should go pre-paid.
[End Of Line]
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.
AT&T&T
Now we celebrate them! All hail the invisible hand!
He committed suicide (then got better) to satisfy your end of a contract that you never agreed to.
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.
So, do we get a new round of AT&T vs. T-Mobile commercials? Does the hot T-Mobile Girl start making out with the AT&T Guy?
Or do we see him trying to woo her?
Who get's to be on top? *giggles*
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.
T-Mobile will give you the code to unlock your phone on request for customers of 3 months or more (I believe).
ATT will not.
I don't want anyone to forget their illegal warrantless wiretapping and the massive lobbying effort get themselves retroactive immunity for their cooperation over the illegal spying on you.
Except that the two carriers use two different bands for 3g data and T-Mobile customers could already roam on AT&Ts network, but at edge only speeds.
Actually, you can only roam when you are in an area without native coverage. So if T-mobile serves your area (but with spotty coverage), and an AT&T tower gives you a better signal, you can't roam to the AT&T tower.
Being as T-Mobile's reception sucks massively in many parts of the country, this can only be an improvement in call duration and quality for existing T-Mobile customers. I am a T-Mobile customer currently and look forward to perhaps finally dropping less than half of my calls in an average week. Maybe if I'm really, really, lucky, I'll even get decent reception at my house (where they have claimed 3 bars for years).
Besides, T-Mobile has generally been a niche player in the US market in comparison to the number of customers on any other network.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I carried a cell phone from about 1999 until about 2008. I did also briefly have a phone in 1994-1995, but it was for work.
In 2009, I pulled the plug, so to speak. My wife and I were with AT&T, and suddenly started seeing charges for $0.40 here and there, so I called to see what they were for.
"Those are for incoming text messages"
"But I don't want text messages, and I can't control who sends them to me"
"I'm sorry, sir, but we can't control it either. But, for $5/mo per phone, we can give you 200 texts per month and you should get charged anymore"
Right. So, first of all, they CAN control it. They simply choose not to, and it felt like just more extortion. So, fine. We paid the protection racket.
Then, we started seeing data charges. Out of nowhere. we hadn't even gotten new phones. So, again, I called 611 for the 411.
"It looks like browsing activity from the phones"
"But neither of us have browsed from our phones. Can't we just turn that functionality off on our accounts."
"I'm sorry, sir, but we can't disable the phone's web browser. That would be up to the phone's manufacturer, and we can't tell them what to put in their phones. But, for just $15/mo per phone, you can get unlimited data and won't risk getting charged anymore"
Right. Of course they can disable it. But, they choose not to. When all was said and done, their "protection" money would have been $60 (text and data) on top of our $50 plan.
$110 /mo? For phone service? In addition to another $30 in "taxes" and "government fees" which actually aren't.
Screw that. We dumped them and haven't carried cell phones since. We don't miss them. The constant interruptions. The constant worrying over hitting the wrong button in our pocket and racking up $10 in data charges. People bitching at us "why didn't you answer your cell phone?!?!" when "I didn't want to fucking talk to your annoying ass" is not a good enough answer.
I dumped a pre-paid phone in the glove box of each car for emergencies, and I carry one of our old GSM phones on bike rides for access to 911. That's it.
FUCK THE CELL PHONE CARRIERS RIGHT IN THE EAR. The "modern convenience" is not worth the hassle at all.
Me too. I loathe AT&T and avoided getting an iPhone for years because I didn't want to have an account with them. I wasn't crazy about T-mobile's signal strength at my house, but stuck with them because my phone bill was so low. I just bought a Nexus S last week and then this happens. I'm so unhappy. This is most definitely NOT going to improve either prices or service for communications in the United States.
The situation for Internet service to my home office is even worse. There is literally only ONE company that can provide a reasonable broadband speed to my home: Time Warner Cable. TW Cable has raised my bill twice in 3 years. This might not sound so bad if I lived in East Cow Butt, AR but I live in the middle of Los Angeles.
I've been a very happy pre-paid T-mobile customer for years. I hardly use the phone and I average about $60/year... I'm sure that's going away :(
This sucks!! I hope it fails regulatory approval!
If Verizon represents the rebel forces, we're pretty screwed.
Sprint is looking like the only real option left and I really detest the $10 smartphone tax just on fucking principle.
The promise of unlimited wireless internet is looking bleaker and bleaker by the day.
The "tax" is just for Sprint's 4G phones, but even then, it gives you truly unlimited data (as in, no 5GB/month limit or anything of the sort) that their standard plans don't get. I went on a trip a couple of weeks ago and was tethered to my 4G phone almost the entire time, probably downloading more than 10 GB of data without a single complaint from Sprint. I don't pay for their tethering plan, either. I'm happy to pay the extra $10/month for that benefit.
I still have to hold in a laugh when some friends of mine who are stuck with AT&T complain about their tiny download caps and crappy limitations on their phones, and now with T-Mobile going the same way... From how I see it, Sprint is one of the only sane providers left. Here's to hoping they stay that way.
I'm pretty sure that Original Sin is basically a shrinkwrap EULA that you "agree" to by being born.
Attempts to explain the concept of "contract of adhesion" to a vengeful iron age deity have, as yet, been unsuccessful....
CDMA is already dead. Any movement you see in it is just gas escaping from the corpse.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
The problem with the US cell phone market is that there is not enough competition, and competition is stymied by technical incompatibilities and bad contracts. This merger won't make things any worse.
What really needs to be done is more regulation to allow a competitive market to function: all handsets must work on all carriers, customers need to be able to switch any time without penalties, and nebulous phone subsidies should be prohibited (carriers can still offer zero percent interest financing on phones, but the prices need to be transparent).
As a Canadian, I think we are in no position to pity or criticize our neighbours. Our media and telecom industries are in some ways even more integrated and oligopolistic than our neighbours' equvialents. Most of the private terrestrial broadcasters happen to be owned, in whole or in part, by the same companies that own what are known as "broadcast distribution undertakings" - basically, the cable, satellite, and IPTV providers. Several also own digital pay TV channels, cellular and landline telecom providers, and probably backbone services as well.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Do ya get locked into a one-year contract at yer grocery store wherein if your vittles suddenly start reeking of rotting chicken and have shiny little worms crawling around in them too bad, ya gotta eat 'em anyway?
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
I know you're being sarcastic, but the wireless spectrum in the US has never been competitive, and the telephone network even less so.
If anything, the US is structured more like a merchantilist society.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
I know several people using 3G and 3GS iPhones on T-Mobile. While the coverage is abysmal, the prepaid plans offer unlimited service for reasonable prices. One of them tried to put an unlocked iPhone on AT&T prepaid, and they detected it and said either convert to postpaid or get shut off. As soon as AT&T gets in control itll happen again.
Boost = Sprint. There are only 4 (now 3) real carriers in the US. ATT, T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint. The rest are subsidiaries, virtual providers etc. There are only 2 technologies CDMA and GSM which only GSM is an Internationally used standard and thus preferred by business. So businesses and people with any intention of traveling frequently are now forced to get AT&T while before you could go with certain handsets on T-Mobile (T-Mobile's frequencies for eg. 3G and EDGE are NOT according to standards). Besides that not all providers cover the same area so in most places outside cities you're stuck with 1 or 2 choices which now will most likely become 0.5 or maybe 1.5 choices.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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.
that leaves you sans a cell phone unless you're in an area with overlapping coverage from multiple carriers....
Care to name an area with a population density greater than 10/sqmi which doesn't have that?
> No, but if I did, I would be able to sue the grocery store for violation of their contract, as you can with the cellular companies if the service they're providing is suddenly sub-par and vastly inferior to its conditions at the start of the contract.
You almost certainly can't--read your contract. You can go to arbitration. Which you will lose.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
> No, but if I did, I would be able to sue the grocery store for violation of their contract, as you can with the cellular companies if the service they're providing is suddenly sub-par and vastly inferior to its conditions at the start of the contract.
You almost certainly can't--read your contract. You can go to arbitration. Which you will lose.
You can always sue somebody. If the court finds them guilty of violating their contract, then the arbitration clause doesn't matter.
SBC Communications (formerly Southwestern Bell) bought them in 2005 and renamed themselves AT&T since the name was already better known (as a source of overwhelming evil, sure, but still, better market recognition is better market recognition).
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ