Slashdot Mirror
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...
I don't get it. There doesn't seem to be anything anticompetitive going on here. Is it now illegal for a company to simply become too big?
If this is about wireless spectrum, maybe a better approach would be suing to get the rules on how it is allocated changed.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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....
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.