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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.'"
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.
... 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?
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.
It's easy. Verizon and AT&T collude on prices. AT&T raises, then Verizon quickly follows...
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."
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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.
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."
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!!!
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...
fuck you, too.
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.
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.
What I enjoy most is the retards that think the latter is somehow an excuse for the former.
I'm so heartily sick of people excusing anti-social behavior as "human nature", regardless of whether it's in an individual or organization. Just because there may be an instinctual drive to hoard more than one person needs to the detriment of others around you does not make it right. I have an instinctual urge to either beat the crap out of my boss or run from him screaming whenever he calls me to his office unexpectedly, but I doubt that very many people would just say "Eh, that's just human nature!" if I did either of those things next time I get a message from him.
Lucky for us, we have evolved a rational brain that helps us see beyond ourselves and our own situation. Maybe that's the problem? Maybe those greedy among us just haven't finished evolving beyond their own self-centeredness?
It'll teach their customers a lesson - to switch to another carrier.
The idea that AT&T could ask customers to pay even more while at the same time offering such a crappy data network is patently absurd.
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.
The idea that AT&T could ask customers to pay even more while at the same time offering such a crappy data network is patently absurd.
No, the idea is entirely believable. In fact, I would question it if I heard anything to the contrary. This is how big business in America works these days: Take all you can, give nothing back. Or was that pirates? Close enough...
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.
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!!!