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AT&T Officially Ends Plans To Acquire T-Mobile USA
An anonymous reader writes "AT&T has officially announced that it no longer plans to purchase T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom. In a press release, the company said, 'The actions by the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice to block this transaction do not change the realities of the U.S. wireless industry. It is one of the most fiercely competitive industries in the world, with a mounting need for more spectrum that has not diminished and must be addressed immediately. The AT&T and T-Mobile USA combination would have offered an interim solution to this spectrum shortage. In the absence of such steps, customers will be harmed and needed investment will be stifled.'"
T-Mobile is the ONE operator that's pro-openness. GSM (bring your own device) from the start, no restrictions on how you use data, until the AT&T stuff started they even offered low cost, subsidy free, contract free talk plans. There's a reason it was T-Mo, and not AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint, who Google picked to launch Android.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Bite me, AT&T. Auto repair is competitive.
* Cell phones in the US have a small pool of providers, especially the nation-wide crowd.
* They primarily operate with 2 year contracts, and it's hard to get a phone without one.
* There's a financial disincentive for buying a phone without a contract.
* Text message rates (for which there is very little data usage, being measured in bytes) have been increasing.
* Data plans have been increasing in price and providing tighter bandwidth restrictions at the same time.
I loathe AT&T, and I'm stuck with them. Competitive? I'd get out in a heartbeat if I felt I had somewhere to go. T-Mobile has been the closest saving grace to AT&T, so I really don't want to see that absorbed.
Thanks to the Fed did -- they did one right there.
SIG: HUP
If the kind of service that I've gotten with TMobile over the last 10 years is "second-class", I'll have to say I like it. What would that make ATT customers? Fifth-class citizens?
Remember that TMobile is a PROFITABLE company. They are actively making money. If DT would just cut them lose and give them the freedom to succeed or fail, I am willing to bet that they would do pretty well.
Too bad the current AT&T isn't the AT&T from the 1970's. It is SBC, which was one of the baby-bell spinoffs from when AT&T was broken up. [...] So, the current AT&T is actually one of the spin offs that AT&T that you hated was broken up into....
So you're saying that the current AT&T actually is the old AT&T, since it's made up of one of the splinters of the old AT&T which has bought most of the other pieces of the old AT&T? Thanks for clearing that up for us.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why is that delusional? He paid T-Mobile for service. He got service. Why does he care who owns the towers?