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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 $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom. The suit is related to the Department of Justice's lawsuit, which was filed on August 31st. 'Sprint opposes AT&T's proposed takeover of T-Mobile,' Sprint's vice president of litigation Suzan Haller said. 'With today's legal action, we are continuing that advocacy on behalf of consumers and competition, and expect to contribute our expertise and resources in proving that the proposed transaction is illegal.'"
No, the Justice Department has blocked the merger. AT&T could take that to court. Sprint is trying to get a court ruling first. By going to court before AT&T challenges the Justice Department in court, Sprint is attempting to get the case judged from a perspective that they believe is least likely to favor the merger. Sprint would prefer to see T-Mobile go out of business to seeing it gobbled up by AT&T (or Verizon).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The reasons I use T-Mobile:
They have reasonable prepaid plans. I can get unlimited text, voice, and data (throttled, but meh) at 50$ 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...
The Justice Department has not blocked the merger. They filed suit with the goal of blocking the merger. They can still lose, and the merger could still go through.
As a T-Mobile customer I would just like to say "Go fuck yourself."
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
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
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
Amen. If I wanted to switch from T-mobile to AT&T, I'd do it myself.
You can't reduce the # of nationwide GSM carriers in this country from 2 to 1 and try to pretend that somehow 'improves competition'.
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur