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Seven States Pile On To Block AT&T/T-Mobile Deal
An anonymous reader writes "New York, California, and five other U.S. states have joined a lawsuit initiated by the Department of Justice that would block AT&T's merger with T-Mobile. 'The revised filing comes ahead of a court hearing next week, when the two sides are scheduled to discuss the prospects of a settlement. AT&T has said that it will contest the Justice Department's lawsuit, while also seeking a potential settlement.' CNet notes that 'States don't have the power to block the deal, but they can influence the federal regulators and make it more onerous if AT&T attempts to negotiate for concessions to close the deal. They can also slow down the process with their own lawsuits.'"
You should write your state attorney general, that is the official who deals with this. You have [theoretical] power over the attorney general, since that office is usually elected.
As much as I detest government interference in business, I hope that these anti-trust lawsuits are successful. This is exactly the sort of thing that the anti-trust laws were intended to prevent. Given the resources ($$$) of AT&T, I expect strong lobbying and eventual approval of the deal.
JSL
Normally, one would write to your state's Attorney General. Judging from your comment about Rick Perry, that would be Greg Abbott, the AG of Texas. He's already suing Google, so he might be OK with this.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
For Republicans, you need to be a "discrete" 18 year old boy
That's siamese twins out, then.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I've worked with, for and among political offices. It's very well known in that biz that a written letter is much more effective than email, unless you're already an associate of the recipient.
Snail mail is always best for corresponding with politicians and officials with whom you don't already correspond regularly. They're more likely to have it handed to them, because they're mostly old and think email is for people who think for a living, not schmooze. And even if it's just a staffer who reads it (and maybe mentions it to the politico - or better yet, gets it to influence the work their office actually does among other staffers), a letter is better. Lawyers and other official correspondents use snail mail, sometimes as required by law or contract. And the people who write letters tend to be people who vote. Both because they tend to be older, and more office-oriented, and to be people who put actual time into the political process.
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make install -not war
It's perfectly valid for anybody - T-Mobile customer or not - to argue against the formation of a monopoly. It's won't be easy to stop this one before it forms. But if it is allowed to form, it will be virtually impossible to fix later.
"whom" is dead. Even the textbooks admit that "who" is acceptable (even if not correct or recommended) for the objective case. We have a descriptive language, and as such, you are wrong.
What you say is technically correct but you miss the point. Like most people who miss a good point that says a lot about our culture, you're suddenly concerned with some technical way to give a "pass". So be it.
... 'who' is listed as 'acceptable' so I'll never have to rub two brain cells together and really master my own native language. I found a way to avoid all those horrible milliseconds of thought. Cool." They probably also say things like "man, mediocrity and anti-intellectualism are wonderful, nothing is ever worth exploring or discovering or learning about after all, and I'm really fulfilled as a human being spiritually." Okay, so they never say that last one but they think that's a coincidence.
The difference is actually useful. If you witness someone correctly using "whom", you can bet serious money that they are educated and actually read a book once in a while. The average person is intellectually lazy and can't understand why anyone would read a book without being forced to by a teacher, professor, or employer. This is particularly true of any book written above the 4th-grade reading level that newspapers and advertisers target.
Ergo, they say "hmm
Anyway, the correct use of "whom" naturally tends to distinguish the thinking man from the sheep who need to be herded. The latter avoid learning and thinking as much as they can. They only do it if the cost of it is less than the consequence imposed by failing some external requirement. Even then, they do it reluctantly and only to the minimum degree necessary to appease the authority figure in question. Anyone who isn't part of this crowd stands out instantly.
T-Mobile would be worse off without a merger since they are treading water as it is.
Rejection by regulators would leave AT&T liable to pay Deutsche Telekom $3 billion in cash, to give T-Mobile USA wireless spectrum, and to reduce charges for calls into AT&T’s network, a package valued at as much as $7 billion, Deutsche Telekom has said.
So actually T-Mobile will win a big concession if this falls through.
LTE is great but unnecessary for most phone transactions.
What we really need in this country is not so much faster speeds, but more reasonable prices and terms on what we already have! So far those that are going LTE have capped their data and raised their rates (Verizon & AT&T).
If T-Mobile bothered to market themselves on a low price/liberal terms angle they would have to fight the new customers off with a stick and could get by with HSPA+ for 3 more years! That's the reason those of us that like T-Mobile are with them in the first place.
You're the one that looks like a jackass here.
> Sprint and T-mobile use different technologies and have different market shares.
Believe it or not, the difference is more one of business policy than actual technology. As a practical matter, any phone built like the Motorola Photon could easily work on Sprint and T-Mobile (it can't now, because Sprint had the UMTS radio specifically created to block use of AT&T and T-Mobile). With the next version of the baseband chipset, it could probably even do HSPA+ ("4G on T-Mobile") as well.
If Sprint bought T-Mobile, the first thing they'd do is require all new high-end phones -- Sprint AND T-mobile -- to be like the Photon & able to do CDMA2000, UMTS, GSM, and wimax. After a year or two, they'd start repurposing some of their 1900MHz "Sprint" spectrum to UMTS uplinks, and pair it with chunks of T-Mobile's 2100MHz UMTS downlink spectrum. It wouldn't break a single T-Mobile phone, because they can all do 1900/2100MHz UMTS as easily as they can do 1700/2100MHz UMTS anyway.
Sprint would keep circuit-switched CDMA voice, but start phasing out EVDO in favor of UMTS for data, just like Telus did in Canada (except Telus skipped EVDO and went straight to UMTS). After 3-4 years, when all their high-end users were solidly migrated to phones capable of UMTS data, they'd probably shut down EVDO entirely in markets with tight 1900MHz spectrum (like San Diego) and only provide 1xRTT to the few remaining users who couldn't use UMTS (1xRTT can coexist alongside CDMA voice and dynamically share channel space with it, whereas UMTS needs dedicated spectrum). I believe this is what CDMA carriers in India have done as they've migrated users from EVDO to UMTS for data.
5-10 years down the line, the distinction between "Sprint" and "T-Mobile" would be academic. The towers would all be shared. Sprint would use a chunk of 1900MHz spectrum for legacy GSM voice & 2(.5)-G data (GPRS and EDGE), another chunk of 1900MHz spectrum for circuit-switched CDMA voice and 1xRTT data, and a third chunk of 1900MHz paired with T-Mobile's 2100MHz for 1900/2100MHz UMTS. They'd probably pair a fourth chunk of 1900MHz with their ~850MHz Nextel spectrum for premium UMTS (850 uplink, 1900 downlink), and use their 1700MHz spectrum for LTE. In the meantime, Sprint and T-Mobile customers with new phones would both get to suffer with Sprint's crap 4G service ("crap", because it doesn't work in moving vehicles due to the way Clear fucked up their tower-tower hand-offs... or more precisely, didn't bother to implement at all, so they all act like wifi access points with ~1km range instead of a real cellular network; instead of handing off gracefully, Sprint 4G just drops the connection and leaves you with no network connectivity for 10+ seconds while it handshakes with the next tower and gets a different IP address).
Anyway, the point is that there IS a graceful way to merge Sprint and T-Mobile's networks. That said, if Sprint and T-Mobile were to "merge", I'd only want it to happen if the Justice Department made them:
1. sell all their tower assets to TowerCo (the company Sprint created to own its towers), to maximize their availability for lease on open terms to competing networks
2. create a new company to handle everything RF-related. In other words, own the spectrum leases and run the CDMA2000, GSM, UMTS, and LTE radio services. Let's call this "RFco", and view them as the equivalent of an RBOC.
3. keep "Sprint" and "T-Mobile" as separate companies who provide their own data backhaul & provide actual PSTN connectivity, sell phones (but require Sprint to fully support USIMs, require both companies to allow the use of any hardware that's physically compatible, and publish their standards and protocols in open format to allow end users to implement them on their own hardware as desired).
In other words, Let's suppose you're a "Sprint" customer. You might (or might not) buy your phone from them, but it has a USIM (which works on everything from UMTS to CDMA), so Sprint can't lock you into their own propr
First, it won't form a monopoly. There will be 2 other major carriers besides AT&T.
An oligopoly is hardly much better. Oligopolies have a reliably tendency to act a lot like monopolies. Each of the firms is well aware of the actions of the others and while they will compete, in general prices will generally be higher and the firms will retain more profits. If you want to see this in action look at the pricing of text messaging. The cost of it to the carriers is a good approximation of zero and yet they are able to charge huge margins on it. In a competitive marketplace this should be impossible but instead we have an oligopoly where each of the carriers is smart enough to not rock the boat on text message pricing. Technically it's not collusion but the net effect is identical.
Furthermore, one of those other major carriers (Sprint) is limping along and is very likely to be absorbed by someone else. I really would be surprised if they were around in another 10 years. I figure they'll either be bought by Verizon or sell their assets to some other players. Wouldn't entirely shock me to see Apple or Google or even Microsoft (maybe all three even) buy Sprint's data network though that is a rather remote possibility.
Monopolies are only created by government intervention. The lawsuit is brought forward by companies, who are afraid of incoming competition from a larger entity, but the only real monopolies are always enjoying government protection.
Free Market is market that is free of GOVERNMENT intervention, not a market that has no larger economies of scale. Consumers gain from economies of scale, and in this case especially, this is a good move for consumers, as they will see increase of competition, not decrease of it. Government cannot create free market by decree, it only destroys free market by regulations, taxes, subsidies and by creating franchises.
You can't handle the truth.