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AT&T Threatening To Raise Rates After Merger Failure
An anonymous reader writes "In the quarterly earnings call following the defeat of his attempted acquisition of T-Mobile, AT&T's CEO Randall Stephenson was quick to lash out at the FCC, claiming that because his company was unable to acquire more spectrum to handle the explosion of mobile data users, AT&T would be forced to raise prices and take additional action against the highest data users. PCMag looked into the other side of the story, finding that 'The FCC spokesman ... pointed out that the FCC has approved more than 150 commercial mobile transaction applications in the past year and more than 300 in the past two years, "facts [that] were completely ignored in the [AT&T] conference call," he said.'"
...yourselves?
Investors too.
In the public's defense, At&t's 4g is a joke that's lost all humor, & they drop calls like it's going out of style. Sounds more like they're saying "we can't compete without this merger". My advice = fix your customer service then your revenue margins.
It was nice knowing ya! They are already struggling to keep the customers they currently have, how is raising prices going to help?
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
"In the quarterly earnings call following the defeat of his attempted acquisition of T-Mobile, AT&T's CEO Randall Stephenson was quick to lash out at the FCC, claiming that because his company was unable to acquire more spectrum to handle the explosion of mobile data users, AT&T would be forced to raise prices and take additional action against the highest data users. PCMag looked into the other side of the story, finding that 'The FCC spokesman ... pointed out that the FCC has approved more than 150 commercial mobile transaction applications in the past year and more than 300 in the past two years, "facts [that] were completely ignored in the [AT&T] conference call," he said.'"
It's not just heavy users AT&T attacks, it's also regular users. AT&T was just denied the means to get rid of competition that was doing just fine.
Perhaps AT&T should think about improving their own service and removing those caps. It's not like Sprint has suffered much with the iDevices having sane, flat-rate data.
Trying to push metered data in a flat-rate world just doesn't work for superior service.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
AT&T already lost me as a customer permanently based on their high rates and higher opinion of themselves and their quality of service.
Double 'em, Triple 'em, that'll show the consumer!
... you can still switch to T-Mobile?
Ok my karma is maxed out. When do I become Enlightened?
So, in retaliation to the government blocking their merger with T-Mobile, they're going to drive their own customers away to their competitors by raising rates and penalizing them?
Yeah, good call AT&T. That'll teach....uh....them?
If higher prices were more profitable (i.e. could be used to increase revenue and offset losses), then they would've raised the prices either way. Claims that they need to raise prices now are just posturing.
Did anyone else picture this guy throwing a tantrum and raging like a toddler when they read the summary? I think that's a fair description of what's going on here.
I just don't see why they continually force Pay-As-You-Go platforms when the U.S. seems to be best off on an All-You-Can-Eat platform. They seem to think that they are big enough to throat plunge their customers into higher bills and the customers will gracefully allow them to do so. There is a general awakening in the U.S that if you suck long enough without changing then you will be placed behind and left to die. See AOL or Yahoo for example.
One of the core concepts of "cellular" phones is that "cells" enable frequence reuse. Now this has to be carefully done to prevent interference, but in general, decreasing the size of cells will increase capacity. Of course this adds infrastructure cost.
Why do you hate 'Mer'ka? Why do you love socialism? There is no such thing as corporate greed! There is only corporate glory.
It's easy. Verizon and AT&T collude on prices. AT&T raises, then Verizon quickly follows...
They are hoping their rapidly dwindling customer base will create an "Anti-Sopa" like backlash and force the government to back off and approve the merger.
AT&T is just a big bundle of fail. Now, after a merger attempt that they should have KNOWN would fail given the history of a monopoly Telecom Industry in the US (the history, in fact, of AT&T!), AT&T is complaining again that the FCC is prohibiting them from getting too big (Too Big to Fail?).
But worse, they keep throwing out claims like "take additional action against the highest data users." Yet, just Monday, they raised the rates on their data users AND increased data caps...even though their own statements from prior in the year gave the picture that 90% of users didn't USE more than 2GB! Do they understand how pricing works in an economic model??? If you want users to use LESS data, LOWER THE PRICING ON YOUR LOWER DATA TIER AND INCREASE THE PRICE ON THE HIGHER TIERS! Furthermore, set tiers levels to actual DATA USAGE PATTERNS! There is no reason there is a 300MB tier (was a 200MB tier) and a 3GB (2GB) tier when all the study data is showing most users are consuming 500-1300MB, with an average of 850.
I'm tired of hearing this crap from AT&T, greed shrouded in pleas of victimhood. What I don't understand is how it doesn't constitute fraud, or cause securities issues. Public companies making patently false statements face consequences. Furthermore, I'm even less impressed with the media and the tech media, in specific, for not doing a better job calling AT&T out and making them look like the greedy pricks they are.
Scott
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."
I thought the real issue with the merger was the loss of competition in the mobile market, going from 4 major players to only 3 (and only one on a GSM network), rather than the consolidation of the wireless spectrum. Sure, it sucks that now AT&T has to give spectrum to T-Mobile, but I suppose that was just part of the risk of going for the merger. They shouldn't blame the FCC for this.
AT&T already lost me as a customer. My base bill with them was $80. Mysterious charges and taxes always made my bill be about $110 a month... and this is for a regular single line smart phone plan with 2G of data and a rather small amount of minutes(though I never use them all). So now I have T-Mobile and I pay $50/month and get 200M of data. I could upgrade my plan to 2G of data for $70. There are a few taxes placed on top of T-Mobile's base bills as well, so my actual bill is $55/month.
Much better deal. And so glad I never have to deal with AT&T's retarded support staff anymore. Also, T-Mobile has service everywhere AT&T had service for me.. though they do have noticeably less 3G areas. I'm so glad this acquisition didn't go through
Verizon's line up and availability of their '4G' have already had me considering the switch from AT&T, I'd rather pay premium and get premium than pay premium and get AT&T. =/
/*
Is this a case of a government agency actually turning down big business when it is supposed to, or was there an even bigger backroom deal with another company?
*/
In all reality, I had a cheap AT&T prepay phone, and it was terrible. I know little about how GSM networks handle voice calls, but it seemed obvious that I was getting extra compression on my calls. The sound quality was so bad as to be almost unusable. I have since switched to a secondary reseller that operates on Sprint, and the quality is good, I have yet to have a dropped call, and there are no surprises. Of course, I use a different phone as well, so the phone could have had something to do with the sound quality, but it sure sounded like excessive digital compression to me, which screams network function, not phone function.
Silence is a state of mime.
I might just have to drop AT&T if they up their rates. All of my family is on it, and I've had it for at least a decade, but having an iPhone w/ data plan, unlimited text and 450 minutes a month just isn't worth the cost. I mean, I use all of these functions, but not to the extent that I think I'm being charged. Yes, I feel I'm over-paying.
If they'd just go to metered billing, I think a lot of these supposed problems, would sort itself out. What I'm using is right their on my billing statement. Just a matter of setting a rate for each function, and doing the accounting math, isn't it? Or would metered billing somehow change 'carrier status', and put them in some sort of legal limbo with the FCC, etc... ?
So we are going to act like we succeeded and raise rates anyway!
LMFAO.
Go ahead and raise prices! Verizon-wireless will stand by.
Sprint won't mind.
Awww...didn't get your way? So what do you do? Punish the customer! yeah!
... will have to go get a job now.
So if you raise rates, more people will switch to Verizon, Sprint, or T-Mobile.
AT&T Mobile sure is whiny.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
just how did we let this happen AGAIN?
in the 80's we fought hard to break up ATT.
now, they're back again as a single entity.
how did that happen?? and why did we care back then but don't really care, now?
what changed over the last 30 or so years?
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Oligopolies almost always suck in customer satisfaction, always have, and always will.
Table-ized A.I.
Anyone know if this would violate contracts with AT&T? I mean, if you agreed to a 2-year contract, and after a month they double their rates, I would think you would then be allowed to move to a different carrier.
Not only do you get to keep a good plan, you get to keep it. For ages.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Have you seen how slow is Sprint's network? Who cares if it's unlimited when your download speed is below 1k/sec!
Where are you at? BFE?
I'm a Sprint user and I have exactly ZERO issues with their service. Downloads aren't a problem (and throughput is MUCH better than 1k/sec). I can even game while tethered to my phone.
Maybe if you come out from inside that faraday cage.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Another dummy spit by some smug, business class wanker with a massive sense of entitlement.
In his overblown imaginations, he's a Galtian superman. In reality, he's just another huckster, who happened to make the big time.
Their price change won't affect me, as I've long ago switched to another provider, where my calls are not dropped, call quality is better and download speeds are faster. I actually had to pay early termination fee because there were still a couple months on my contract, but that was worth every penny.
Maybe they could get more customers or avoid customers switching to other providers if they fixed the issues with their crappy service. Common sense would tell me that increasing their pricing will make matters worse.
I don't have any experience with their 4G service, so can't comment on that. But I doubt I'll ever go back to check it out.
Oligopolies almost always suck in customer satisfaction, always have, and always will.
Which is exactly how America keeps getting it wrong - the government should do nothing to make their lives easier - keep a low bar to new companies/investors who want to enter the market and offer something new/better. That's real Capitalism, not this bogus Corporate Welfare system.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The funny from my perspective is that in a decade as an AT&T customer, first just long distance, then wireless, I always got great customer service from them. The problem was when I bought my house the reception was terrible and I couldn't get cell calls in my own living room or even in my driveway. Oh yeah, and dropped calls were fairly common.
I hated leaving the good customer service but I ended up switching to Verizon because their coverage in central CA is much better than AT&T. I almost never drop calls now and customer service is at least not bad. However I'm also paying about $10 more per month for the same plan I had with AT&T.
So, if AT&T raises their prices to be even closer to Verizon's in this area they will definitely lose lots of customers.
Maybe their plan is to raise prices, lose business, go bankrupt (resulting in one less choice for consumers), and then say "See! We told you denying the merger would be bad for competition!"
does anyone know if i switched from AT&T to T-Mobile, could I keep my phone (Samsung Galaxy S, AKA Captivate/Fascinate). love this phone and hate to get another one.
About sick of AT&T after 10 years.
http://www.att.com/Investor/Financial/Earning_Info/docs/4Q_11_IB_FINAL.pdf
Look at the FULL-YEAR RESULTS section in the pdf.
According to their 4th quarter report, they made 4 billion dollars this year and increased dividend payouts. They also had to roll out the LTE network so they won't incur that cost next year. They only lost money in the 4th quarter not the entire year. Its complete bs.
WHY ARE THEY BITCHING??? They just made 4 billion dollars while rolling out the LTE network and a failed merger. And yet they say because of government they need to raise rates to make more money than they are already making.
Then people switch to T-Mobile and the issue corrects itself?
then try to get back to a duopoly. If you can't get back to a duopoly, whine and throw a fit. Great strategy. AT&T still appears to be "competing" by soaking their customers (junk fees, anyone?) and killing competition. The happiest day of my recent techo-life was when I dropped the last bit of AT&T - T-Mo and Ooma for me. And, frankly, T-Mo ain't that great either, but they still look pretty good as compared to AT&T, which lowers expectations...
AT&T has a point, even if I think they're reacting to it badly. Despite the knee-jerk "Corporate Greed" reaction, the FCC determines what, if any, spectrum is made available and whether or not a merger or acquisition can happen. Since the government has decided that no more spectrum is to be made available, despite the obvious need, and that none of the big 4 are allowed to merge, government regulation has caused more than a few problems that AT&T simply isn't allowed to fix.
AT&T may be acting like a spoiled teenager, but the FCC is very much acting like the stereotypical low-level bureaucrat that gets off on making other peoples' life difficult just to exercise a little power.
And yes, I'm a customer, so this would impact me.
We're not suckers. You're a business. If you can make more by raising rates, you will. That's an absolute given. The only reason any business led by someone with a brain doesn't raise rates is because it will cost them money because people will leave. The FCC told you no because your proposed merger would significantly reduce consumers' options to do just that. Leave.
The irony is I, and a lot of others, are only your customer because you had an iphone exclusive. In other words, you had a deal to suppress competition. I am ditching you soon and going to Verizon now that that's over and it's about new phone time.
I may sound anti ATT, but I'm not. Just give me good service and as good a deal or better than your competition and I'll be delighted to stay your customer. Unfortunately, that's not what you've done, and not what you're trying to do. You're trying to limit my options so I have to be your customer. That alone is reason to leave.
Honestly, AT&T's threat to raise rates is exactly the sort of thing that confirms that denying them was a good idea. If a company can raise their prices and expect to make more money, rather than lose customers to less petulant firms, they already have dangerously high market power(particularly for something as relatively homogenous as wireless telco services. Certain goods simply don't have much in the way of substitutes).
One could go so far as to say that, as a heuristic, anybody who could make, and make good on, such a threat if they don't get what they want, Should Not be allowed to get what they want...
You know, for single line comments, // seems a bit more efficient than /* */. . . just sayin.
T-Mobile wanted out and AT&T needed their bandwidth. The FCC nixed the deal over jobs or something like that. So fine...
But it seems the "tantrum" goes both ways. If you support the FCC's decision, you don't have to pretend there won't be any negative consequences. There can be negative consequences. Assuming there are absolutely none seems naive to me.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
You can have manufacturing in the US. High industry automation is the key. There's a cost to having everything we use made on the other side of the planet. If you can build a plant in the US with far fewer employees than an heavily "manual" plant in China you could be competitive. Who wants Foxconn plants in the US? We don't need to bump up our suicide rate or increase the number of poor workers in this country: the future of manufacturing in the US is not the Ford plant from the early 1900s, it's a modern plant employing few but skilled and well paid operators of complex machinery who can support a family and their community. Beyond employment, it's important for the industrial fabric of this country to keep manufacturing technology at home and not create a huge dependency on the rest of the world (especially on a single country). Whether in manufacturing or in agriculture, there's a quest for cheap labor rather than for mechanization. In the first case, jobs are moved abroad and in the latter case, cheaper labor is brought in, often illegally. For sure, we need design: whether S/W, H/W, robotics... H1-Bs help: H1-B are very well paid. I work in a high-tech company with many foreigners, most from Asia. I'm myself an immigrant, had once an H-1B and the bottom line is that H1-B are used to fill very well paid (well advertised) positions. I interview candidates for open positions and I can say that I rarely see resumes from US citizens. If it's hard to find employees in a location, salaries rocket up and sooner than later, companies just move somewhere else: more H1-B would keep high-tech salaries more in line with the world reality (and keep local cost of living more reasonable) and would actually help keep jobs in this country. Plus H1-Bs are a source of skilled immigrant and therefore of job creation... In terms of federal policy: better education (specially elementary->high school), support for fundamental research, possibly subsidies for industrial equipment would help.
fuck you, too.
Re-read what I wrote. I am not talking about reliability or problems with downloads. Sprint is consistently rated the slowest 3g cellular network.
http://www.pcmag.com/Fastest-Mobile-Networks-2011
next time, don't be so quick to get your panties in a bunch. I personally don't care what cellular god you pray. They all suck in one way or another.
We let ATnT bribe it's way into being a bigger monster than they were previously and this despite having 1 majorly huge competitor in the cell market. The two of them together screw us probably worse than 1 entity because it wouldn't take long (well maybe a decade) to split them up again. That is being optimistic; but they can do quite well with an excuse of competition; plus this time they can make sure the system doesn't work like it did in the past.
The public has Internet AND TV to distract them with "reality" programming so they do not have to deal with their actual reality anymore.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Whatever. Go blow a goat.
This is only tangentially related to the topic, but carriers keep promoting how fast their network is and how I can get 12mbit+ of bandwidth to my phone. But I wonder.... why should I care? Especially since I could hit my monthly download cap in less than an hour at that speed.
I can see why faster networks benefit the carrier since faster speeds means more people can share the bandwidth, but why should I care as an end user? Even if I regularly watched movies on my phone, I don't think I can really tell the difference between a 800kbs stream and a 4mbit stream on my 3" screen. And a 90 minute movie at 4mbit will use around 2GB of my download bandwidth. (compared to around 400MB for the 800kbs stream)
I don't have the latest phone, but with my 1Ghz single core processor, when I'm browsing the web, the browser rendering speed seems to be my limiting factor since browsing speed doesn't seem to be noticeably different whether I'm on my carrier's 3G network or my Wifi at home (with 15mbit of bandwidth to the internet).
So, why should I really care what the peak download speed of a carrier's 4G network is? It seems like I should be more interested in the average real-world speed they can provide on a loaded network than in whether or not I can download a short burst at some high peak speed.
Is there any reason to care about published 4G speeds? Or is it more like Megapixels in cameras - manufacturers promote megapixels because it's an easy term to explain and many people think that megapixels are most important when it's really just one of many factors (sensor size, lens, etc) that all need to be considered. A quality 5MP camera can give better images than a cheap 12MP camera.
Ass, they will never get another red cent from me. Several years back they pissed me off enough to kill their brand (in a dead-to-me sort of way)
Consumers really have the last word in the pricing argument, and I'm thinking that the 99% are finally figuring this out too.
Corporation is a nothing more than an image / brand / philosophy to a consumer.
AT&T has shown through the actions of its corporate leadership that it does not have the facilities to recover,or become a responsible business.
I hope this post inspires others to toss them can of judgemental bias...
What was your trick? We tried for 3 years to get any customer service and finally said fuck them,
I've had Sprint and Virgin Mobile (same network) forever and while I don't have any problems in cities, their coverage elsewhere blows. Five or ten miles outside the city (of Spokane) and I'm SOL, never mind that their coverage map shows coverage all along the major highways here. Sprint, Virgin, phone maker A or phone maker B, didn't matter, same crap coverage. Fortunately I'm in the city 99.9% of the time and furthermore, the VM low-cost, all-you-can-eat (data/SMS) deal is hard to beat.
The man who dies rich dies disgraced. -- Andrew Carnegie
You signed a contract with AT&T. They can either abide by that contract for the full two years and allow you to keep the same rates, or they can allow you to leave with no penalty.
CAPS? WHAT CAPS?
Obviously it depends on where you are at. Here are some older tests I found done with http://opensignalmaps.com/ Android app
http://j.mp/kfQCtR
Now that you have $6 billion of our cash and spectrum allocation, why don't you take our customers too?
The four customers they still have don't care since they're all using Palm Pres.
The more you tighten your grip, Stephenson, the more customers will slip through your fingers. Okay, so maybe I was paraphrasing....
Is anyone really surprised here? AT&T was going to raise prices anyway, no matter how this deal went. The only difference is, had they gotten T-Mobile, they would have probably raised rates even more, since there would have been one less competitor in the market for people to go to. All they're doing is trying to justify this increase in light of the deal falling apart. If the deal had happened, they'd have said that the rate increase was coming anyway, but it would have been larger had they not gotten T-Mobile.
And, in case anyone still thinks this had anything to do with the T-Mobile buyout not happening, consider this: big companies rarely change their prices on a whim. Before they do it, there's going to be market research to determine what they can change and how much, there will be discussions in upper management, and there's got to be time to change billing systems, point of sale systems, and advertising. This isn't something they cooked up overnight. There simply wouldn't have been time.
In short, AT&T was planning this price increase all along. Any rationalization for it is pure spin.
What do you do about those industries that require such a huge investment of capital to get started and such high fixed running costs that it's basically impossible to start up a new company without prohibitively large amounts of capital?
Imagine, for instance, a world in which there are no regulations on telecoms other than the easements required to put lines on government-owned land. Now you want to start up a telecom company, but you don't have the startup capital to set up lines all around the country, so instead you create a plan to set them up all around your town. But the thing is, even if your service is somewhat cheaper or better, nobody wants to buy it, because they want to call people in both Boston and Los Angeles. You could set the price so low that people in your town would buy it, but then you'd be losing money every month (due to the high fixed running costs) and have already burnt through your startup capital. You could negotiate a peering agreement with the big companies that control the telecom backbone, but since your service is much less valuable to them as theirs is to yours, they're going to charge you more than you can afford. Being a shrewd businessperson, you make this analysis before spending cash setting up telephone lines in your town, and don't start the company. And since all other businesspeople in your universe make the same choice, there can be no new sellers in the market, leaving the oligopoly intact. Which leaves everyone else either doing without whatever the oligopoly is selling, or going with the least bad option, and the members of the oligopoly trying to ensure that the least bad option for the customers is lousy service at a way-too-high price.
That's real capitalism, not the bogus libertarian fantasy.
I am officially gone from
Oligopolies almost always suck in customer satisfaction, always have, and always will.
Which is exactly how America keeps getting it wrong - the government should do nothing to make their lives easier - keep a low bar to new companies/investors who want to enter the market and offer something new/better. That's real Capitalism, not this bogus Corporate Welfare system.
However, the American government is itself an oligopoly (two parties that will do their best to keep any others from getting into the game), so expect shitty customer (citizen) satisfaction, i.e. more of the same.
Seriously, you have been fucking your customer well before I was even born in the late 70's and you continue to this day, meanwhile guess what? the world has been changing, and while you all are sitting around a table laughing to the bank on scams, people like me in 2010 could not even make a fucking voice call in a populated area with a god damned giant ass att tower visible in the distance! While a nobody prepaid from jersey piggybacking on the pcs network has been working great with less dropped calls!
I am not sorry you have squandered your money time and customers, and now feel a pinch, tough fucking shit, go to hell you worthless whiney bitch. And quit wasting taxpayer time and money with your little tantrums
And a chillingly-accurate description of an average American CEO. They may teach ethics in Business School (more as comic relief, I'd wager), but there is no way they even broach the subjects of selflessness and maturity.
Your competitors will laugh their way to the bank.
ATT already is having a hard time competing. If they raise prices they might as well go out of business.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
"Good news, customer! We're adding five more new, exciting channels you've never heard of and will never watch*!)
* - Because your bill will be going up next quarter due to our greed along with the greed of professional sports leagues, but we'll never admit that.
Sprint roams on Verizon...
Stockholders should start voting the CEO out now before it's too late. The guy obviously has tunnel vision and is completely clueless about how to fix AT&T's issues properly.
Translation: Because we made some bad business decisions, we have decided to past the consequences on to our customers instead of our shareholders.
The reality here is that the merger was never going to work, it was a "bonehead" idea from the beginning and the "adjustment" to cover the cost should come out of the AT&T Executive Bonus Plan. The Board of Directors and stockholders ought to be able to figure that one out.
But, if AT&T steals the cost out of the customer's pockets then it will indeed be time to find other carriers.
There is an awful lot of 'thank god AT&T was denied by the FCC' and 'this is just AT&T trying to be a monopoly again' as if AT&T's purchase of T-Mobile would somehow result in a monopoly of the sort that AT&T used to have on land lines. Some then go on to say that AT&T is nothing but 'business class wankers with a huge sense of entitlement,' which sounds to me more like the wireless market than the wireless providers.
At the risk of stating the tremendously obvious, a monopoly is when one company controls the whole market. This is very obviously not the case for wireless phones. 'Well,' you might say, 'a handful of corporate juggernauts are no different than a monopoly!' Actually, they're entirely different, because you have several large corporations all competing with each other. Let's look at why we ended up in this situation:
Wireless customers:
The old Ma Bell of POTS has got nearly nothing to do with AT&T today for the very simple reason that you don't have the same issue where everybody has got to share one set of copper. This issue hasn't gone away entirely, but it's more relevant to the ISP side of AT&T, and that hasn't got anything to do with the T-mobile deal.
AT&T is having a hard time competing because they need more spectrum. T-Mobile is having such a hard time competing that they decided they'd rather just get out of the market than make the necessary investment to compete with Verizon and AT&T. Deutsche Telecom, who owns T-Mobile, decided that an outright sale to their competitor was in their best interests, so they agreed to the sale.
These posts are full of circular reasoning like 'AT&T's service is so shitty, they would just screw up T-Mobile' when the biggest impediment to AT&T improving the quality of its service is more spectrum. Or maybe, like most people, you preferred the 'smaller company' feel of T-mobile; this is natural, but the things wireless customers want (to use huge gobs of data cheaply) are not conducive to smaller companies. If there's been consolidation, it's because we've demanded it, because we feel entitled to the unlimited usage that these companies were foolish enough to offer. Maybe you think that foolishness means your entitlement is justified, but it doesn't change the reality that more usage needs more bandwidth and more bandwidth means more spectrum.
I am an AT&T customer and I fit my own description here. I have no particular loyalty to them. If I got a better deal from Verizon or Sprint I'd probably change. But I'm annoyed that they're losing billions of dollars because the FTC decided that they'd be a monopoly in a market with at least three major competitors and several other minor ones. Instead of paying to get new spectrum and increase their capacity, they're paying through the nose to get nothing. The winners: politicians (who always win in anti-trust matters because of how easy it is to hearken back to the real monopolies of 100 years ago even when the analogies are paper-thin), lawyers, and probably Deutsche Telecom for having the win-win of getting a bucket of money no matter what happened.
And to those who say AT&T was going to raise prices anyway: so what? They can't raise them on you in the middle of your contract and if your contract is up, you (like me) can walk. As a small business owner I don't care a lot for big businesses in general, but I'm sure glad I"m not in the wir
Randall Stephenson's 2010 compensation was 27.3 million USD.
To put that in perspective, a doctor or lawyer who managed to earn $250,000 (the threshhold of Obama's definition of wealth) for 40 consecutive years starting at age 26 would have grossed 10 million USD by the time they reached retirement age.
Let them eat fees!
...for new smartphone customers anyway. The data plans all went up by $5 a month. They include 1GB more data, but that doesn't matter; people will still be paying more so it's a price increase.
Until someone discovers communications using the uncertainty principle and cell phones become obsolete. What you herald as an eternal oligopoly is only a short term inconvenience. You survived 4 years ago without your iphone, you can now survive with a tablet with forward facing camera. Real capitalism allows for this. Your paranoia will force restrictions to break up the oligopoly by forcing people into the same old technology. It happens again and again, regulation kills innovation.
How about you stop over selling and restrict everyone's data usage to what you can support if everyone wanted to use data every month and show what your network really is, instead of hiding its limitations by enabling super high speeds saying "Hey we're super awesome and have great prices" show that your tech isn't that far and charges realistic prices. Selling it for 40$ for all this data or whatever, praying they don't actually USE what they said they good.
Maybe you should stop using gimmicks like unlimited data usage to trick people into your service.
Exactly correct. Free enterprise is not the same as capitalism. And corporations, which cannot exist without government sanction, are the antithesis of true free enterprise.
Readers, check out distributism. "According to distributism, the ownership of the means of production should be spread as widely as possible among the general populace, rather than being centralized under the control of the state (state socialism) or a few large businesses or wealthy private individuals (laissez-faire capitalism). A summary of distributism is found in Chesterton's statement: 'Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.'"
The only thing I would fix in that summary is "laissez-faire capitalism," which should read "state supported capitalism," where state support in the form of laws without which capitalism cannot succeed in taking over a society, is essential to the capitalism.
Think carefully before you scoff at the idea that individual enterprise, with the assistance of guilds, and obviously entailing cooperative effort where necessitated by the scale of the enterprise, is not capable of replacing, and indeed yielding superior economic results, not to mention liberty and personal fulfillment, as compared to either capitalism or socialism.
"Chesterton" refers to an early 20th century social genius, G. K. Chesterton. See What's Wrong with the World; it's free read. Try not fixating on "Catholic" as you read it; I find it is entirely inessential to the insight there presented.
Life Inc: How Corporatism Conquered the World, and How We Can Take It Back is excellent contemporary reading.
Capitalism is NOT Free Enterprise is good reading too.
The point is that your 1k/sec is absurd hyperbole, judging from your reference or any other source.
So AT&T wants to raise rates for their services, which will become more like VzW prices.
So they want to charge the same (or possibly more than) VzW and they want to give a shoddier product, with their crappier frequency.
Imagine what they would do if they were still a monopoly. Insanity.
Original story here, comment is the one dated 2011-09-01 at 14:55:
I also hate to break the news to you, the network won’t become better with the merger, it will get a lot worse before it could ever get better. That is because you are going to try and add spectrum to the issue when the reality is that this about backhaul, engineering philosophy, optimization techniques and know how. If ATT cannot make what they have work, getting another overlaying network will only complicate things, let alone the mix of billing, back end and multiple vendors.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I work for one of the other ISP's in the USA. While not American myself (I am outsourced, even though my ISP advertises that all their staff is located in America), I am at least privy to some knowledge of my company and several others. There are only like three ISP's that dominate in the US, the rest basically sharing equal 1% marketshares. If AT&T can't handle, how about the rest of us? Why are some of us doing just fine? Didn't AT&T also get bailed out a few years back, and claimed they used the money to upgrade their infrastructure. Did that not work as well as they had planned? Why did tax money go towards helping a company that will now jack up prices on the same people who just helped them?
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
they would have claimed that they needed to raise rates to cover their acquisition costs.
All AT&T customers ditch them within 24 hrs. See how long before they crawl to us whining.
In the past, all AT&T ever really did to attract customers was to change their name...thinking consumers wouldn't realize it was the same company with the same lousy network and service. In New England, Cellular One became AT&T, became Cingular, then became AT&T again.
Re-read what I wrote. I am not talking about reliability or problems with downloads. Sprint is consistently rated the slowest 3g cellular network.
http://www.pcmag.com/Fastest-Mobile-Networks-2011
next time, don't be so quick to get your panties in a bunch. I personally don't care what cellular god you pray. They all suck in one way or another.
Howsabout I just quote you from your original post again.
Who cares if it's unlimited when your download speed is below 1k/sec!
Look at your link again. Notice that the chart displays a download speed for Sprint 3G well in excess of your claimed 1k/sec (as in .59 mbit/sec (or roughly 590k/sec).
Oh yes, and that piece of quote was your ENTIRE post. You said fuck-all reliability or it's rating compared to other providers. You made a single claim about speed which was pure and utter bullshit.
Rule #1: If you want to be taken seriously at all, don't make shit up and portray it as fact.
Rule #2: When bitch-smacked over making shit up, don't try to move the goalposts and say that you were really posting about something ELSE.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Natural physical monopolies like what you describe should be publicly owned or have line sharing requirements. Preferebly both. This goes for telecoms, power infrastructure, roads, airports, etc. (we got roads mostly right, but the same reasoning applies to all.)
Well then - it looks like you've got a choice between a shitty network and shiny phones, or vice versa.
With 'shitty phones' and decent network at least there's the possibility of getting better devices once the competition self-implodes.
However with a company like AT&T - whose response to not getting to buy out their competition is to throw a hissy fit and raise prices - the odds of them improving things after they win is tending towards zero.
Wonder how long it'll take their Board to figure out that the biggest drain on their profits is the fat leach running the place?
AT&T already raised their rates, just a few days ago.
Customers are paying for AT&T's bad business sense, by their guaranteeing T-Mobile several billion dollars compensation if the merger could not be completed.
Raise rates how, exactly? I've been on the same $40 cell plan through Verizon since early 2005. Every 2 years or so I just renew the same plan I had before. The only change is I added the $25 unlimited data this summer. I also know someone that is a tech for Verizon, and he informed me that they don't throttle or cap data overage, even for the unlimited plan.
The problem is that rates in the US overall are far higher than most other places. My friends in Europe tell me they pay something like 15-20 euros for the same unlimited data plan.
Aside from the abysmal battery life, I am quite enjoying my Epic 4g on sprint.
Go ahead, AT&T, make my day.
I"ve been insulted by AT&T representatives, coerced into paying fees for services I do not want,
and hassled by phone by AT&T when my bill payment was less than 36 hours overdue.
It's well known that AT&T is already losing subscribers, and those people are leaving
because they have HAD ENOUGH, not because they don't have money.
The problem with switching is that many phones sold in U.S. are exclusive to just one operator, and AT&T, being bigger, tends to draw better phones, leaving more crappy ones for T-Mo. And, of course, buying a phone from an operator usually also means having to get into a contract with them.
Buying unlocked phones from elsewhere (usually Europe) seems like it could be another option, but 1) they are more expensive than subsidized phones offered by carriers, and 2) most of them don't support T-Mo 3G network, because those frequencies are only used for 3G in North America.
It's easy to solve this issue. Make a federal law that any such changes in charges are considered a nullification of the original contract, allowing the contractee to renegotiate or seek a contract with another service. Let's see how big Randall's balls are when people leave AT&T in droves...if they aren't, already.
HTC EVO 3D with Gingerbread, soon to be Ice Cream Sandwich. The only place I don't get a cell signal is inside the elevator at work. And my "unlimited data" actually is unlimited. Sprint is the lesser of 3 evils here.
How does the federal government telling AT&T that AT&T cannot spend $34 billion to buy T-Mobile cost AT&T customers money? Why doesn't AT&T spend a fraction of that on their own network, let's say ONLY $10 billion.
You're right. Its a cleptocracy
You'd think that the extra charges associated with smartphones and dataplans vs where we were with feature phones might be enough to.... I dunno, cover the data infrastructure ? Plans went from $40 to $40 + 20+ to pay for something other than the CEO bonus.