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Sprint Files Suit Against AT&T T-Mobile Merger
zacharye writes with a news post in BGR. From the article: "Sprint ... announced that it has filed a lawsuit with a federal court in the U.S. District of Columbia in an effort to block AT&T's planned $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom. The suit is related to the Department of Justice's lawsuit, which was filed on August 31st. 'Sprint opposes AT&T's proposed takeover of T-Mobile,' Sprint's vice president of litigation Suzan Haller said. 'With today's legal action, we are continuing that advocacy on behalf of consumers and competition, and expect to contribute our expertise and resources in proving that the proposed transaction is illegal.'"
As a concerned citizen and avid consumer, I will file a suit against Sprint due to them attempting to block the AT&T & T-Mobile Merger.
Sent from my Vodafone iPad.
... Sprint / Nextel
Didn't the US courts block the merger anyways?
Grayson Gill Interiors
DOG PILE!
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
Reward everybody involved by breaking them up into 2 companies each (at least)! Sprint, AT&T, and T-mobile. Hell, throw in verizon and anyone else I'm forgetting just for good measure...
Herfindahl and Hirschman would be proud.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
The reasons I use T-Mobile:
They have reasonable prepaid plans. I can get unlimited text, voice, and data (throttled, but meh) at 50$ a mo. I can get unthrottled data at 70.
The android phones they offer can make use of my home wifi to make and recieve calls, even if the cellular coverage is spotty. I live in the boonies, and this is a major perk. It allows me to keep a big city number where the phone company would charge me long distance otherwise.
They actually give a shit about their customers, or at least appear to more than ATT does.
They are the only other US carrier that is GSM besides the bloated whore that is ATT. The last thing I want to see is ATT shove another cellular carrier up its chancre riddled snatch.
That said, ATT does NOT need T-Mo's spectrum. What they need to do is deploy the spectrum they have more sensibly. Rather than trying to shove 10 thousand subscribers on a single tower, then bitching when they all use the maximum allowed bandwidth-- they need to deploy 10 reduced power output towers that each service 1000 subscribers. They can go ahead and deploy the high power towers in rural areas to maintain their "We have the best coverage!" nonsense (because it is a lie, but meh), but for urban areas such persistent signal is deleterious due to reflections off buildings causing multipath issues, in addition to the obvious one of trying to satisfy the data demands placed on such a network.
So, rather than buying T-Mo, patching the problem in a manner that would require most ATT customers to buy new phones (that have the T-Mo/UK frequency antennas), and then using the GSM monopoly to play king of the mountain-- they need to use the money they would have spent on buying T-Mo, decommission the high power transponders on the urban area towers they have, replace them with lower power ones, and then build more total towers in the poorly serviced urban areas.
Oh, but that is that whole "Invest in infrastructure" thing that they dont want to do.
Fuck ATT. Fuck them with an iron spike on a jackhammer.
VP of litigation?
just... wow...
Something about the fact that "VP of Litigation" is an actual job title makes my head feel funny.
Any day the Death Star (ATT) is thwarted is a good day for everyone.
AT&T keeps wondering how many times they need to keep buying the politicians...
In each product area there are enough privately owned firms to ensure that no single firm can set prices or otherwise subvert impersonal market controls; as a result prices reflect the pressures of market competition
So yes becoming too big is a problem since that leads to a communist system aka the opposite of capitalist, and is why we have laws against it unless you've been legally granted an exception like with the power companies and other utilities. Why do you think we broke up old MaBell in the first place, and implemented a whole slew of anti-trust laws over the last 100 years?
Is it now illegal for a company to simply become too big?
Yes, as long as you understand that by "now" you mean since 1890, and specifically this kind of merger since 1914. Both those laws were created because of large firms engaged in various forms of price gouging and other efforts to artificially inflate prices on commonly used goods such as gasoline and steel.
I am officially gone from
Is it now illegal for a company to simply become too big?
Yes, it has been for quite some time now.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Spectrum was auctioned off to the carriers over several years/decades. Allocation at that level was a function of capital, more or less.
How the carriers used tha spectrum is a business decision. AT&T is regularly excoriated for their poor performance in hi-density areas, but this is as much system design as any complaints of spectrum. Here lies an interesting problem.
If you think AT&T can just build out a bunch of new towers to satisfy metro demand, you haven't tried renting out tower space. Many cities are not ready to let the carriers sprout up towers everywhere. And in some cities, like NYC, towers cannot easily voercome the challenging topology of skyscrapers.
Letting AT&T become larger doesn't by itself solve this. When they get bigger, and if they choose to not build more capacity, then nothing is fixed. If they use TMO spectrum to overlay another network, well, let's see those penta-band phones come from Apple, and soon, or we are not fixing anything. If AT&T uses TMO tower locations, well, that avoids leasing new sites. Unless the cities decide the change of ownership causes a new application for the licenses. In any case, expecting AT&T to use TMO assets to improve performance presupposes that AT&T actually wants to improve performance. Is this so patently obvious to everyone that we need not consider their business decisions that may or may not make that desireable?
If our government decides to impose some rules for how spectrum is deployed and managed, why the hell don't we just nationalize these carriers? Oh, right, this is the United States. At least for now we don't actually take over these sorts of businesses.
Andf we are right back to the issue of how big can AT&T become without making the markert uncompetitive, and causing consumers excess cost and diminished quality of service?
The better solution is to encourage competition. And I suspect the FCC will try to do this by making AT&T give up relatively large chunks of spectrum to new competitors. Which won't work as well as they think it will, since a national carrier is needed to compete well, and that means making AT&T give up a national-sized chunk. Which denies AT&T any benefits from a merger. Which is stupid.
And we also need to consider that DT seems to have given up oon TMO. Who else will buy them? Sprint? No, Sprint can't seem to say either way, which means no.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
If AT&T succeeds in buying T-mobile, there will be only 1 nationwide GSM cellphone provider left in the USA and that provider will be AT&T. Effectively if you want a GSM cellphone in the USA, you will have to buy it from AT&T.
That will be a negative for the consumer and the market, since AT&T WILL use this power to drive up prices.
There is no possible way to spin this proposed merger as any gain for the consumer whatsoever.
The merger would result in a violation of the Sherman Anti-trust Act, since "The law directs itself not against conduct which is competitive, even severely so, but against conduct which unfairly tends to destroy competition itself." This merger would destroy competition itself in the GSM cellular space.
That says nothing about the absolute size of a company, it is about preventing monopolies in order to prevent anti-competitive behavior. ATT isn't buying T-Mobile in order to get a corner on the market. They are buying them to expand their network so they can have a hope of competing with Verizon.
Verizon is still going to be a big problem for ATT after the merger. If there were no Verizon, you might have a point, but as it is, I don't see how it could allow ATT to act in an anticompetitive way.
that leads to a communist system
So if AT&T buys T-Mobile their workers take over the company and make the decisions in a democratic council?
Stop saying bullshit, a huge monopolist company is just inefficient capitalism, it has nothing to do with communism.
Dilbert RSS feed
So yes becoming too big is a problem since that leads to a communist system aka the opposite of capitalist,
Communism has a very distinct meaning and it has absolutely nothing to do with a company becoming too big.
A monopolistic company is basically the most extreme result of pure capitalism - it's just that over time we've discovered that pure capitalism kinda sucks - hence why we have laws against monopolies and other such things that capitalism tends to promote. On both extremes of the scale, both capitalism and communism are terrible economic models - you have to strike a balance (the optimal balance leaning more towards capitalism, but not all the way over).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
So this is the continuation of that topic, that got me my "Terrible" moderation, and it's all really part the same discussion that even brought USPS to its knees.
I got many comments saying something like this: with fewer companies, others, like Sprint, will have too much competition in pricing and they'll have to shut down.
Then somebody in that thread noted: but we want low prices. And then the same person commented: we want Sprint to stay in business. And we want government to prevent this merger.
And now this:
With today's legal action, we are continuing that advocacy on behalf of consumers and competition, and expect to contribute our expertise and resources in proving that the proposed transaction is illegal.
Well let me propose to you that in fact this merger is an act of free market at work, if this merger goes through, then Sprint will have a formidable competitor, covering very large area, and this competitor will be able to bring prices down and hold off against inflation longer.
Will this hurt Sprint? It will force Sprint to compete, so Sprint just may bring down their prices. That same person, that commented in the old thread said: the SMSs are too expensive, but we must protect Sprint against competition.
Don't you see a problem with preventing powerful competition from arising? What is the incentive for Sprint to bring prices down? How about bringing prices down on things that don't actually cost anymore money, like the SMSs being sent around?
If AT&T and T-Mobile are not allowed to merge by government (so this is destruction of free market, which means it's prevention of individuals from making individual choices in the long run), then AT&T will have to pay around 7 billion in penalties. It's interesting to note, that there is a union at AT&T, that is on the side of the merger, because they see T-Mobile's workers as potential union members. Not that I am personally pro-union or anything, don't get me wrong, but the current administration in the White House supposedly is, aren't they?
So back to the real question:
WHO GETS HURT?
If Sprint gets hurt because they see more competition, that is GOOD for the customers.
Do customers get hurt? How do customers get hurt? Nobody forces customers to get out of Sprint and if what AT&T and T-Mobile merger creates is more expensive and worse quality, then it's just better for Sprint.
So Sprint believes that this action will hurt Sprint. No matter what they issue as statements there, don't believe a word of it, they are only thinking about themselves, which is fine, but this has nothing to do with the customers. Sprint sees a potential price/quality war. Customers WIN in a price/quality war.
I know that many of you will see this comment as some sort of a 'troll', but consider that I am posing legitimate questions and I am not on board of any of these companies, so to me the entire exercise is purely theoretical for this specific case. Of-course in reality all of this affects everybody in the world, because any such involvement of government into businesses destroys the free market, which by definition is made out of individual choices unrestricted by government power. Once the free market is destroyed, the power then takes over all businesses, creates monopolies, destroys choices and holds prices where it wants.
Without government involvement any market created monopoly only exists as long as it provides the best quality choices at lowest possible prices, once the quality is substandard and/or prices are too high, there is immediately space created for others to compete with the established business. This is not the case with government protected monopolies, which are always protected by regulations and free money.
You can't handle the truth.
I know what I think about why MaBell was broken up.. and I'm pretty sure you don't. Because you're implying that MaBell was creating a communist system simply by being too large.
A clue.. communism doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.
sprint is rumored to be getting the iphone this year but no work on T-Mo. Sprint will probably steal the rest of the profitable customers, AT&T will walk away from the deal due to the lower valuation of the company and we will have 3 big carriers in the US once T-Mo files for Chapter 11 and gets sold off piece by piece.
It really wouldn't shock me at all if Apple had something to do with it as well by giving the iphone to sprint but not t-mo. 2 super carriers is bad for apple since they will have the power to dictate pricing terms. 2 big carriers and a smaller under dog is OK since they can undercut the other 2 if needed.
most likely if your company is big enough that having a meeting with the whole staff would need a PA system in the room you should have at least one lawyer on staff. Now most of the time that lawyer should be working on defining "unacceptable liability" and not working on suing different people.
A company the size of SPRINT should have a whole department of lawyers (and clerks and paralegal ect) so the head of that department would be a VP just on principle alone (and so that the VP of litigation can tell the VP of marketing that the campaign they are starting up could get The Company sued in %region or Country%).
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
...think that Sprint's suit for "advocacy on behalf of consumers" carries just a wee bit less weight than that of the DOJ's suit?
ATT isn't buying T-Mobile in order to get a corner on the market. They are buying them to expand their network so they can have a hope of competing with Verizon.
You believed that line too? Too bad it's not true
Indeed, it would only be "communism" if every worker owned a piece of this massive company. Then it would be both monopolistic and communist! Hooray!
Check out my world simulator thingy.
Naivete and ignorance in one post. It has already been made public that expanding AT&T's network would cost about 1/4 (IIRC) of the cost of buying T-Mobile. This merger is all about taking out the competition, not improving AT&T's service to make it competitive.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Wrong: Tracphone with 17 million subscribers is GSM and its Nationwide- It is currently the 5th largest cell provider in this country.. The eight largest (in order of subscribers) are Verizon (102 million) AT&T (97 million) Sprint (51 million) T-Mobile USA (34 million) TracFone Wireless (17 million) MetroPCS (9 million) U.S. Cellular (6 million) Cricket Communications (6 million) Would people feel the same way if Verizon was trying to buy MetroPCS..i think not..Why ATT has the bad name since the break up, and Tmobile is a more known name...Doesn't matter if they are the only GSM provider that does not violate the Sherman Trust act because you are still not a monopoly in the cellphone market...only in certain types.
~~"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." ~~Dennis Miller
Size is not as important as control. By merging with T-Mobile, AT&T has control of all the GSM network in the USA. It would be the same as if Verizon were to merge with Sprint which would control most of the CDMA network.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Hey jackass, Tracphone does not have it's own network! They piggy back off of T-Mobile, AT&T and other carriers.
Fucking moron.
Who says the GSM network is a market. What does it matter if the network is GSM or CDMA where anti-trust is concerned. The market is Nationwide Cellular phone service, not GSM cellular phone service.
Sirius and XM were allowed to merge and they were the only two satellite radio companies. The market isn't determined by which technology is used, it's determined by which customers are affected. All of those customers would still have the option to switch companies, and in the few rural spots where the choice doesn't exist, the feds can regulate those.... like they already do.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-08/deutsche-telekom-is-said-to-discuss-sale-of-t-mobile-usa-to-sprint-nextel.html
Paranoia is a Survival Trait!
My understanding when this merger was first announced wasn't that T-Mobile was doing poorly, but rather that the company wasn't doing as well as Deutsche Telecom had hoped. The lack of the iPhone was likely one of the things that hurt them. But ultimately the impression I got was that Deutsche Telecom couldn't be bothered with T-Mobile.
I'm with AT&T. Not because I have any love for them, but because there's no better alternative. Verizon offers no better coverage in this area and their business practices are every bit as despicable as AT&T's. Actually, I've never had billing issues with AT&T, but friends with Verizon have had numerous problems. I've seriously considered T-Mobile, but their coverage, unfortunately is inferior to AT&T's. I've had first hand experiences of being side-by-side with T-Mobile users where I could use my phone and they got no reception with theirs. The fact that there are a lot of NIMBYs in this area ensures that newcomers are going to have a very hard time getting established. Otherwise, they're very attractive as they offer better prices and packages than almost anyone else.
But then, if the government shows little concern for a company like Bank of America, why are they going to really be concerned about what AT&T does? Has BoA lined the right pockets or is this all simply for show? Once the people have forgotten about this the merger will go ahead anyway.
I never had the impression that T-Mobile was in any danger of going out of business. I mean, if they're profitable they're profitable, even if that margin isn't huge. If this merger fails to go through and T-Mobile finally got the iPhone perhaps they'd have a chance of becoming a stronger competitor. If the people at Virgin Mobile see a market here in the States what's the problem with T-Mobile?
HAHAHAHA!
Tell that to wikileaks!
This was NEVER about expanding spectrum, it WAS about reducing competition.
Paranoia is a Survival Trait!
Ok, let's look at this:
March 8, 2011; Bloomberg reports Sprint is talking with DT about buying TMO.
March 20, 2011; AT&T announced merger with TMO.
Sounds like Sprint is out of the running.
Now, if DT will take maybe $25B from Sprint, then there may be a buyer. Will Sprint offer that much?
More to the point, and please turn up your hearing aid, Sprint has NOT made a counter-offer.
There was talk in 2010, but it never came to fruition. Even that was supposition.
BTW, these rumors go back to 2009. TMO and Sprint have been the subject of M&A rumors for so long I think these started when Sprint bought Nextel.
Unless Sprint starts talking like that again, we can, I believe safely say they are not making an effort to buy TMO. Unless their suit and other filings are intended to nix the AT&T deal and leave them in position to pick up TMO for substantially less than the original $25B alleged to be offered.
And note no one went on the record that this was a even an actual negotiation. In fact, before this all started, it was rumored that DT wanted to buy Sprint and gain enough market share to challenge the other tweo major players. Now, no one is going to admit that Sprint made an offer, since that;s the nature of these things. So in the absence of actual fact, shall I take your regurgitation of a rumor in Bloomberg as true, or more as an interesting possibility at the time, now off the table?
Really. Gimme some facts. You're confusing Bloomie's rumor mill with actuality.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
No, stop applying capitalist concepts. The workers wouldn't 'own' anything, since in a communist economy there is no private property*.
I don't "own" my country just because I vote for its direction. I just live in it.
* Not to be confused with personal property.
Dilbert RSS feed
Too excited to type "Sprint" ?
none
They had no problem with a "merger" when they acquired Nextel or the other companies that formed what is now Sprint.
This block is clearly politically motivated thuggery and greed. Sprint is in a precarious position because it's 4g is based on a technology nobody else went with (WiMax), and they have no LTE strategy. This merger could spell doom for them. Good, I was a customer for years and they suck. Basically all companies suck, it's just your own personal perspective of who and why.
Obama and FCC suck also, but that is a given....
Satellite ratio is not very popular, thus a monopoly really isn't a threat since anyone could start up a competitive company without much problem. Having a monopoly on GSM is *bad* since a LOT of phone are GSM-only. Remember the shit-fit everyone threw when the iPhone was only available on AT&T? Imagine if ALL gsm phones were only available on one carrier!
Say,you want to leave the us. Perhaps a business trip, perhaps a vacation. 99% of the rest of the world uses GSM. That means if you want to keep you phone, and go to another coutry, you will HAVE to use ATT.
You would be foolish to think att wouldn't abuse that natural monopoly, to fleece people it thinks have lots of cash. I would expect att to totally stop giving out unlock codes for their phones shortly after a successful att-TMo merger. Afterall, why would you, a consumer, need to unlock the sim lock if att was the only game in town anyway?
Allowing this merger is deadly to competiton, and unthinkable for international business.
Your statement "If AT&T succeeds in buying T-mobile, there will be only 1 nationwide GSM cellphone provider left in the USA and that provider will be AT&T. Effectively if you want a GSM cellphone in the USA, you will have to buy it from AT&T." No there would still be multiple nationwide GSM providers , they just wouldn't own their own network you idiot. All the other GSM providers might rent space from them but they are completely separate companies...JACKASS!
~~"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." ~~Dennis Miller
Wrong: only 80% not 99%, and the fact you can go to other providers for GSM in the US makes your argument complete BS. Any other company can startup their own GSM network.
~~"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." ~~Dennis Miller
Because it's cheap and easy!
There are certain markets where there's just no feasible way to compete with the entrenched players. If some company wanted to compete in GSM, they'd have to buy spectrum (oh, AT&T and various other providers own it all? And AT&T specifically owns all the world-standard GSM spectrum? And they don't want to sell? Too bad). On top of that, they'd be fighting against a company that could just drop their prices until the new rival runs out of cash, and then raise them back up. That's basically what monopolies do, and why we make monopolistic practices illegal.
You CANNOT go to other providers to GSM except in name only. They only "compete" as long as AT&T allows them to, and their calls will always have second-class status on AT&T's networks. That means if it gets busy, your phone is the first one to be cut off.
I'm guessing it's your ignorance coupled with your misplaced sense of superiority that makes you come across so stupid. Something like the Dunning-Kruger effect.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Any other company can startup their own GSM network.
They could, but they couldn't turn it on since they wouldn't be able to purchase spectrum, as all of it has been allocated to the current existing carriers.
>99% of the rest of the world uses GSM. That means if you want to keep you phone, and go to another coutry, you will HAVE to use ATT.
Or a Sprint MoPho (Motorola Photon). It can roam on GSM & UMTS worldwide. The only catch is that it apparently refuses to use GSM if it sniffs any hint of local CDMA service in the air, which annoys people who travel to countries where there's a local CDMA network that only has 1xRTT data & the phone refuses to use the faster UMTS provider's network instead.
Truth be told, if Sprint were to merge with T-Mobile, here's basically what would happen:
* New high-end T-mobile phones would come with Wimax radios tacked on, just like the Evo & other Sprint Android phones. T-Mobile would instantly acquire a nationwide 4G network in relatively urban areas, though people who currently enjoy 4G Tmobile would probably feel like it was a step down because it's not a seamless experience the way T-Mobile's current 4G is.
* New high-end Sprint phones would all be like the MoPho -- CDMA + wimax out of the box, but capable of doing UMTS as well.
~2 years later, when Sprint decided enough of their phones were UMTS-capable, they'd start repurposing 1900MHz EVDO spectrum to UMTS, and pair it with 2100MHz spectrum repurposed from T-Mobile's 1700/2100 network to create 1900/2100 uplink/downlink pairs. Nobody at T-Mobile would really notice, because every T-Mobile phone is perfectly capable of 1900/2100MHz operation as well (they HAVE to be; if they weren't, they couldn't roam in Europe). As the shift continued, Sprint's phones would recognize areas with more UMTS bandwidth than EVDO bandwidth, and would automatically switch to UMTS for data instead of EVDO.
Where Sprint went beyond that point is anybody's guess. Probably, Sprint would end up looking like Telus in Canada: new phones capable of voice and data via UMTS, but able to fall back to circuit-switched CDMA where UMTS isn't viable. At some point, the distinction between "T-Mobile" and "Sprint" would become academic, because "Sprint" phones would be capable of operating from either network, and most/all new T-Mobile phones would be capable of it as well. GSM-only phones would work on the combined network, because by that point Sprint would be using UMTS for the bulk of its 3G data anyway, and ancient CDMA-only phones would work (albeit possibly only with 1xRTT data at that point) as well.
10 years ago, a merger between a "GSM" and "CDMA" network would have been as disastrous as the merger between Sprint and Nextel was. Now, it's largely academic, because UMTS *is* CDMA, just wider channels and a few protocol-level refinements. Making a phone that can do CDMA+UMTS isn't rocket science, or even terribly hard.
39/3.9 Buying t mobile is about ten times more expensive then just upgrading the network. Not 1/4
It's well established that large magnitude increase competition, reduce prices, improve customer service, and spur innovation. Here are five examples, uh... nevermind.
Unrelated question. Can anyone tell my why the heck voice quality for ALL the carriers is so insanely horrible. Is it not relistically feasible, is it prohibitively expensive, what is it? It seems to me a carrier providing better voice quality would give a great competitive advantage.
So yes becoming too big is a problem since that leads to a communist system aka the opposite of capitalist
*sigh* Why are people who are still worried about the commies all so clueless? Or did I just answer my own question?
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal