Slashdot Mirror
Big Telecom: Terms Set For Sprint To Buy T-Mobile For $32B
First time accepted submitter Randy Davis (3683081) writes 'A report from Forbes says that Sprint buying T-mobile for $32 billion is almost done. This will clearly rock the top two telecommunication companies in the U.S., Verizon and AT&T. The news report also said that T-mobile will give up 67% share in exchange of 15% share of the merged company. Officials of both Sprint and T-Mobile are confident that FCC will approve this deal since AT&T's $48.5 billion acquisition of DirecTV got approved.' One reason for that confidence: "The predominant feeling is that combined T-Mobile and Sprint will be able to offer greater competition to Verizon and AT&T , ranked first and second respectively in the U.S. market. It will also give Sprint greater might in the upcoming 600 megahertz spectrum auction, especially since part of it excludes both Verizon and AT&T from bidding."
InforWorld puts the potential price even higher, and points out that the deal could still fall apart.
InforWorld puts the potential price even higher, and points out that the deal could still fall apart.
Also, AT&T's acquisition of DirecTV has not yet been approved. Huge factual error in the summary.
No, fuck you. This is exactly the opposite of introducing competition. It's an extremely shitty company with incredibly shitty service (Sprint) buying a smaller competitor with far better service (T-Mobile) in order to make a much more massive, shittier company than before possible.
This is an anti-trust violation, so fuck these guys!
But they would have to give back some spectrum which would go back for sale to someone else.
Aren't the two using two different cell technologies? How are they to be combined? Do tmobile users need to get new phones?
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Now I know that Sprint and T-Mobile don't have the best wireless coverage, but you're going to have to try a little harder to justify the claim they have the worst customer service. I was under the impression it was just a universally accepted fact that Verizon's customer service is the worst in the industry despite their otherwise excellent network service. As I've heard someone say, Verizon is the hottest girl at the prom, and worse, she knows it.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
"'A report from Forbes says that Sprint buying T-mobile for $32 billion is almost done."
Who talks like that? It's grammatically incorrect.
The proposed AT&T+T-Mobile merger made sense, because they both use GSM over similar wavelengths. But how would Sprint and T-Mobile combine their network services? Their voice data at least is on completely different infrastructure.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
It's all relative. I had Verizon and bailed to T-Mobile a few months ago. Both had okay customer service, though I did have a Verizon person intentionally hang up on me. I had to call T-Mobile on Monday to make changes to my plan - I couldn't make the changes via the web site, nor could I go to a store to do it - I had to call. The person I spoke with was pleasent enough and made the changes quickly.
As you say, they have the best network, highest prices, confusing and awful plans, and terrible ETF/subsidy policies.
If increased competition is the goal, then give the smaller companies preference in spectrum auctions.
Multi-billion dollar spectrum auctions are a scam anyway, just a hidden tax that we all pay through higher cellular bills.
Both are moving to LTE. By the time it gets approved and implemented we'll have VoLTE and it'll become even less of an issue.
"The news report also said that T-mobile will give up 67% share in exchange of 15% share of the merged company"
Can someone explain that to me? They're giving up a 67% share in a company that's about to not exist in order to have a 15% share in a company that is about to be themselves that they'd effectively own 100% of, because it is them.
My guess is that Sprint has seen the writing on the wall, and wants T-Mobile precisely for GSM. By offering GSM, they can now sell and support phones they couldn't before, especially international models that will all be GSM-based, and Sprint has to pay good money to get manufacturers to make CDMA models.
If the FCC doesn't have power to regulate the internet, then it shouldn't have power to prohibit people from transmitting on any crazy frequency they want.
Actually, new Sprint phones use both CDMA and TDMA at the same time... oops, that's called GSM!
Sounds just like the GTE / Bell Atlantic merger that created Verizon.
In C++, your friends can see your privates.
Naw, I'd put Sprint as dead last both from my friends, coworkers and family with T-mobile slightly ahead of them them in terms of customer service. I had Sprint for years, disconnected calls, no network access, slow network and then 3 years ago I cancelled. After 6 years with them they sent a $400 nasty gram saying I had 10 days to pay or they'd turn it over to collections even though my bill was current. The $400 was for a smartphone and early termination of that. I then went with T-Mobile who I'd been with before Sprint. When T-Mobile filed for bankruptcy it really went south from there. Although the network performance was better customer service sucked badly, so instead of dealing with that I switched to Simple Mobile which uses T-Mobile's network and I don't have all the bullshit. So consumers will have the worst coverage unless your in major metro areas and with spending $32 billion for T-Mobile I doubt Sprint will have the resources to build out the network further, much like when they acquired Nextel.
Verizon's problem is, well they're Verizon and you're not. Their terms and conditions/business practices are recognized as the worst but their customer service and network are top notch. For my business accounts I use Verizon, personal stuff SimpleMobile.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
until a few months ago, I was working at a cell phone tech company (android software and server back-end stuff) and we had to be able to test our stuff with all the local carriers.
we moved our site and wouldn't you know, we could not get any t-mobile reception (and I have a t-mo phone). stepping out of the building didn't help much. putting a real antenna/repeater on the roof and repeating to the bottom floors didn't help!
we had to rent hotel rooms nearby, for days and weeks at a time to do our testing. our corporate headquarters just did not have good cellphone reception (pretty much across the board but tmo was the most useless). if I got an EDGE connection, I felt lucky (sigh). if you can imagine a cell phone company not doing a check of the RF reachability before picking a new HQ, maybe its good for a laugh or two right now. was not very funny at the time, though.
I do like the unlimited plan and no-contract of tmo but letting giants merge to become bigger giants NEVER helps the consumer.
if this is allowed - and we all know it will be - its further proof of the utter detachment of those who make the laws and rules from those who are forced to live under them.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
you realize that these links don't actually disprove the op's anecdote, right? The jd power link says that verizon has the best network reliability and neither company is mentioned as having good or bad wireless customer satisfaction.
actually if sprint and t-mobile combine their networks they might be able to compete with verizon, which is a good thing for everybody. right now each company only competes in certain markets.
Sprint is CDMA.
Anyone have any idea what this will do for Sprint-based MVNOs? I am quite fond of the one I use (Ting), and am curious whether this will change anything, either good or bad. (Bad would be their service getting crappier or prices being forced upwards; good would be, for instance, Sprint phones being sold that allow swapping out sim cards because they support GSM. That'd be cool.)
Not that Sprint and T-Mobile aren't the worst already in customer service...
They aren't, or at least T-Mobiles not so bad. Verizon... boy, there's a company with some terrible customer service.
What worries me more is that Sprint is buying T-Mobile, and not the other way around. Though, I don't know why anyone would want to buy Sprint. My impression is that their customer service isn't so bad, but... boy, there's a company with some incompetent management.
I disagree. 1st. tier cellphone companies DO in fact have to be big .... The dollar amounts involved to roll out and maintain a cellular network across a whole country the size of the United States is steep enough that the little guys just can't accomplish it well.
What we do have room for are the 2nd. tier "regional carriers" -- and personally, I'm disappointed we haven't really seen more happening in that arena. If you're not big enough to compete with the likes of Verizon or AT&T in nationwide coverage, fine. How about focusing on providing top quality coverage and customer service, with good data performance, all within a few states?
For many years, I had an account with U.S. Cellular, in St. Louis, Missouri, and was very pleased with them. Their little marketing strategy of "all incoming calls are free" meant I didn't really need to buy a lot of cellular minutes on my plan. (It's relatively rare I place a call to someone vs. all the times I'm taking a call.) Signal strength and call quality were excellent too. Really, the only downside was a relative lack of choices in phones, because you had to select one designed to work on their network - and they didn't have as much pull as the top carriers to get the latest handsets first. Still, they'd typically manage to get at least 1 or 2 of the "hot" phones out there at any given time. (I had a Motorola Razr flip phone with them, when it was still the in thing.)
T-Mobile, IMO, has really gotten on a roll with upgrading its network to become something respectable. It has a lot of issues still, but as a current customer, I see evidence all the time that change is happening. (My phone has carrier updates pushed to it practically every week, as new towers come online.) Just last week, something changed where I live, too. For a couple days, all of us received "no service" or weak signals throughout the business day, but then suddenly, things came back up with a signal strength far superior to what we ever had before. (I used to use a signal booster in the house, but was able to turn it off after the upgrade.) Can't say if it was a new tower, or a modification or repair made to some existing one -- but it was a nice improvement.
I left AT&T's superior coverage for T-Mobile's superior customer service. I'm not going to say they're perfect because, let's face it, they're not; I've had billing issues with them, but nothing on the recurring-have-to-call-every-month-to-get-a-credit-because-they-refuse-to-fix-the-underlying-problem scale I had with AT&T. Strangely, my phone also seems to work in more places on T-Mobile than it did on AT the only place I have spotty coverage is in my office, where my AT&T phone only worked because I had a microcell (when that could get GPS signal).
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Strange. I actually got a prepaid phone for a few months from TMO so I could try the data and voice connections (I'm in eastern MA). Connections everywhere were great except for a few parts in the western part of the state. In some cases I got better signal than my Verizon phone.
My current Nexus 5 doesn't offer it, but the prepaid phone lets you do phone calls over wifi. Worked pretty well.
I'm sure if I lived in a more rural area I'd go with Verizon for the coverage, but what I have now works good enough for the price I'm paying.
It certainly is not anti-trust territory, but I did in fact leave Sprint because of their appalling customer service. I've been with T-Mobile for probably 10 years or so, though on prepay for the last 2.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The Nextel merger worked out pretty poorly for Sprint. Remember why? Because their two networks were incompatible, yet Sprint was required to keep it operating. It didn't get 3G upgrades, yet they had to keep operating until quite recently. There was a massive customer exodus, and Sprint was left holding the bag.
T-Mobile, similarly uses a different and incompatible 3G cellular standard than Sprint, and on entirely different frequencies. Yet Sprint is out to do this all again.
Seems like they've been planning this for some time, and are absolutely dependent on the merger going through, because Sprint has been a complete laggard with LTE deployments, despite their massive modernization effort, and doesn't seem to be trying AT ALL.
Frankly, the Nextel merger could have given Sprint the best network and LTE coverage around, as a happy-accident... Nextel, with their 800MHz spectrum had great coverage, on-par with Verizon's, particularly in mountains, valley, indoors, etc. AT&T and Verizon spent their 800MHz spectrum on 3G networks and have none left. They're using 1900MHz spectrum for their LTE networks, with a resultant reduction in coverage depth.
Sprint wasn't allowed to touch Nextel's spectrum, in the 3G days, so they only freed up their big block of 800MHz when LTE was first being deployed. With a little foresight, they could have put 800MHz LTE radios on their towers, and immediately boasted the best LTE coverage. With great LTE coverage, they could save money by neglecting their 3G network, and pretty quickly stop selling phones that are able to fall-back to anything other than 800MHz LTE. After all, LTE can do simultaneous voice and data, even if AT&T and Verizon have been slow to use it, perhaps for the above reasons.
But Sprint was half-hearted about their great opportunity... first saying they'd use some of that 800MHz band to improve 3G coverage, then later retracting that incredibly stupid idea. And while they've promoted their "Network Vision" upgrades for a couple years, they've still only very slowly expanded their LTE coverage to more than the very biggest urban areas, even skipping some major ones.
And they didn't ever leverage the WiMax network they spent so much money deploying. Sure, it's not LTE, but by just releasing a dual WiMax/LTE phone, Sprint could have boasted the biggest "4G" network from day #1, and they could have begun LTE deployments everywhere they didn't have WiMax, giving wider coverage, quicker. Instead, there's no WiMax/LTE phones to be found, and their LTE deployment simply overlapped their early WiMax deployment, resulting in no net-gain of extra coverage area.
I'm cautiously hopeful that this merger will be what they need, to finally compete. But each time before that they've gotten a big opportunity, they've squandered it. From the outside, Sprint seems to be deeply dysfunctional and lacking in any foresight or innovative ideas, copying the big two in the slowest and least efficient way, possible. The opportunity they have to merge the Sprint and T-Mobile LTE networks with dual-band phones, and quickly deprecate their 3G networks, seems just as likely to be squandered and bungled.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Sprint can't give up on LTE. Sprint 3G IN THEIR HQ CITY is worse than dialup. Go to a baseball or football game here and you can just forget about having any data at all, which is funny, because they're a big Royals sponsor and have all kinds of in-stadium promotions where you text or tweet something, or use MLB At the Ballpark, or whatever. They keep saying "network vision is going to be awesome!" but I got tired of years of that promise never materializing and jumped to TMobile. And I have a close relative who works for Sprint.
GSM and CDMA are both DEAD, the very second their LTE networks have equivalent coverage area.
And the market for international travelers, who want to keep using their cell phones, is positively MINUSCULE. I doubt practically ANYBODY other than Verizon Execs are signed-up for Verizon's "Global" service plans.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Doesn't this mean that *Softbank* is buying T-MO? I realize that mechanically Sprint is "a wholly owned subsidiary" or something, and can go about buying other corporations, But in the end the control of what (is now) T-Mo does will come from HQ at Softbank, yes? (Naturally, they'll have to sign and abide by agreements with the NSA, FBI, other security interests, etc. etc.)
Nice knowing you T-Mobile, it will be sad seeing you run into the ground. Say hello to Nextel when your face is in the dirt.
I've had nothing but good experience with T-Mobile customer service. I can't speak to Sprint's level of service, however.
CHOICE: 2 bowls of candy, and 2 bowls of steaming dog crap, isn't a lot of "consumer choice". If a merger turns that into 3 bowls of candy, then consumers will have MORE choice as a result of the merger. That's a big "IF," but both outcomes are possible.
PRICES: While prices could rise a bit, AT&T and Verizon are both desperate to get a foothold in the prepaid cellular market. To do so, they have dirt-cheap service plans that are nearly competitive with Sprint and T-Mobile, without that whole lousy coverage issue. I don't see how SprinTMobile will be able to raise their prices much, without losing all their customers to pre-paid plans from the big two.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I live in northern NJ and use T-Mobile; the reception here is generally pretty good. I've heard coworkers complain about reception in my office building, but mine is great.
My mom, who lives in a small town in VA, uses Verizon because everything else has terrible coverage there.
It seems to me that Verizon is the best choice if you really need good coverage in more rural areas, but doesn't have that advantage in more urban areas.
I think it's generally assumed that a poorly regulated monopoly is bad -- rent seeking, no innovation, etc. A duopoly isn't much better, even when it's not explicit you end up with defacto collusion on pricing and market segmentation.
Is a triopoly any better? Is there any economics that says how many vendors in a market are necessary to improve efficiency and consumer choice?
And accounting actually believed that? Bravo. "No, really, we're, ummm, testing. Yes, that's right. Testing. No, the room service was necessary for the testing. And the champagne."
That's just what they tell us. In reality, it's supposed to help shareholders, and ultimately ensure executive bonuses.
Mr CEO, you've just axed 20,000 jobs, what now .... "I'm going to Disney to spend some of this huge bonus I got, and then I'm going to raise everybody's rates to increase revenue".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
They ALL have bad service. But I thought it was generally accepted that T-mobile had the best service of the bunch (though still not great by any means), while Verizon was renowned for having the worst.
2 different systems on two different spectrums using 2 different technologies. Nextel II electric boogaloo. Just when you thought Sprint couldn't get any worse. Sprint is now the biggest reseller of AT&T minutes. Awesome. They will exit the branded retail market soon.
We don't have the choice of any bowls of candy. We only have 4 bowls of steaming crap of various kinds. One's dog crap, one's cow crap, one's horse crap, and one's cat crap (the stinkiest of all; any cat lover will agree with me on this).
This merger will only give us 3 bowls of steaming crap, and instead of more herbivore crap, we're going to get more carnivore crap.
That is the motivation, nothing more.
The Nextel merger worked out pretty poorly for Sprint. Remember why? Because their two networks were incompatible, yet Sprint was required to keep it operating. It didn't get 3G upgrades, yet they had to keep operating until quite recently. There was a massive customer exodus, and Sprint was left holding the bag.
T-Mobile, similarly uses a different and incompatible 3G cellular standard than Sprint, and on entirely different frequencies. Yet Sprint is out to do this all again.
This is going to be Apple buying Next, not Sprint buying Nextel - it's said that most of the TMO execs will be holding the reins..
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Sprint MVNOs offer some of the best deals in the US. I currently pay $10/mo for 400 Minutes, 400 Texts, and 300MB of data using RingPlus.
If they continue with the MVNO model and add T-Mobile towers to the network, that sounds pretty great to me.
So you're not just wrong, you are incredibly wrong. Every place I have ever worked, and every person I have met who travels internationally for work uses their work cell phone.
They don't buy a separate phone, they don't look for compatible SIMs to swap in or out, they MAY go so far as to notify their secretary or travel clerk that they expect to use their business phone while in XY country.
I switched from Sprint to US Cellular when I moved to Maine for graduate school. They were the only carrier with decent reception there, and were recommended to me by nearly everyone I asked. I too had a Razr flip phone, and my experience was fine.
Now, a regional carrier works fine for some people, but doesn't really cut it for others. Today, I'm on AT&T and wouldn't even consider US Cellular. That's because I no longer live in Maine and travel (for business and for pleasure) quite a bit. What good is a cell phone if I can only use it in my own neighborhood? It's one thing to rent a phone when you fly to Japan or get a local SIM when you land in France, but nobody wants to deal with this much hassle when they're just driving to the next state over.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Japan is pretty much all CDMA. I'm pretty sure they buy a lot of cell phones over there too. There's a large market for CDMA phones regardless of what Sprint does.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
I'm a T-Mobile customer, specifically because I have a GSM phone (Sprint ditched/is ditching GSM last I heard) and because T-Mobile doesn't have any stupid contracts. I pay, they give me service, we're both happy. I LIKE T-Mobile. Sure, I don't always have great coverage. it's a minor distraction at worst. It works fine.
I have my own phone (I buy used Nexus S phones, and reflash them with the latest stock Android. No stupid carrier BS on my phone!). I LIKE paying $150 for a phone, and still getting the latest wiz bangs. I LIKE not having a contract. Yes, I even like feeling a little superior to the Morons that buy new phones every 2 years and shell out $ for something that's not really essentially any better than what I have.
Damn. I hope Sprint doesn't buy T-Mobile. If they do, I hope they don't F it up...
In the U.S. cell phone market, when people who aren't RF engineers say "CDMA", they usually mean the CDMA2000 stack.
I've been on MetroPCS since 2006, which is now owned by T-Mobile. So I guess I will be under Sprint soon. If it changes my service for the worse, I will have to switch to one of the independents.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
The response to your quip was so weak that you could hear a pin drop.
Not to mention tourism, where visitors to the US will mostly have GSM phones, and don't especially like to be slapped with exorbitant roaming charges or no coverage at all outside the cities.
(I'm not mentioning US tourists with CDMA who won't get service abroad at all, because most Americans never travel outside their own state, let alone country.)
T-mobile has indeed been on a roll with upgrading it's network.
It's interesting to note that this was made possible by a $3bil cash infusion from AT&T because AT&T failed to complete their attempted acquisition of T-mobile a few years ago. So even if Sprint fails to complete their merger attempt, they obviously won't have to pay up quite as much, but they're likely to have to fork over something, which could result in even more expansion of T-mobile's network.
(I'm a current t-mobile customer and the coverage is quite decent in the northern NJ/NYC area, I too have noticed coverage in areas around me moving up from 3G to LTE service).
AT&T and Verizon can pick over the corpse. That's a near certainty. Sprint will be $54 billion in debt with a shrinking customer base and nothing but the same disasters on the horizon of pretending to 'integrate' two absolutely incompatible networks. It's as if Sprint is run by the Federal government or the Soviet Union.
If Sprint has $32B to spend on a merger, perhaps they could spend $16B to upgrade their AWFUL network. I bailed from Sprint to T-Mobile due to coverage and usability issues.
Yes, T-Mobile seems to have coverage issues in some areas, but I've been able to completely, and to my satisfaction, mitigate them with the Wifi-calling feature.
Sprint had huge sections of my company that poor to no coverage. Calls dropped, data was unusable. 9 hour battery life on an S3. We had wifi for the data, but no relief for the calls. The other 3 major carriers had strong 4g signal throughout the property (Casino resort in Las Vegas).
Sprint pathetically fumbled the ball when it came to 4g, leaving some areas with 3g and 4g-wimax. Then they stopped selling Wimax phones in favor of 4g LTE phones. This seriously degraded the 3g experience everywhere I went. Orlando, Miami, Boston, Reno, Biloxi, Philadelphia, etc. were all places where I found the 3g to be unusable and on the rare occasions I got 4g it performed like 3g. My guess was that they were using the same 3g bandwidth backhaul to towers that had 4g equipment.
The short version for me was that it was years after every other carrier had 4g before I started to see the little 4g icon on my phone and a good year after that where it performed like everyone else's 4g in the much smaller number of places it was available.
In places like the LV Convention Center, I eventually had to turn off 4g because the phone would hold onto an unusable 4g connection rather than connect to the usuable (yet still slow by 3g standards) 3g connection that was apparently an in-building thing. Luckily the convention center had wifi so I could get data, but my call/text experience was pretty poor.
I don't have these problems with T-Mobile, nor my Verizon work phone. Some people here would use their work phone as a hotspot for their Sprint personal phone. My t-mobile phone does drop down to Edge at times, it's slow but consistent and has pretty good latency. The few places where I've lost voice AND data had wifi so I was fully functional which couldn't have happened with Sprint.
I can't help but think that for many years, this will be a bad experience for T-Mobile customers no matter what and a mixed bag for Sprint customers if they transition away from CDMA. I see a lot of people reluctantly jumping ship to Verizon or AT&T once the merger is final and network changes begin rolling out.
I thought it was generally accepted that T-mobile had the best service
I think T-Mobile's good reputation is based on an earlier period when they did in fact have excellent service. In the first few years when I was a T-Mobile customer, they called me on a number of occasions to say they had reviewed my usage and that I was paying too much. They offered each time to change my service plan, guaranteeing that my bills would go down. The first time, I was suspicious but risked it. My bills did actually go down. Now, however, they are no better than AT&T on service. T-Mobile had a rep at an HR-sponsored benefits event at the university where I work, and they offered an employee discount for new data plans. I moved my family plan from AT&T to T-Mobile. Getting the discount applied to my account turned out to be an extreme hassle. All the customer service people, including supervisors and managers, refused to apply the promised discount, even though I sent them documentation of the offer. It wasn't until I looked up the email addresses of VP level execs and CC'd them and our HR director on my complaints that they finally honored their promise.
One's dog crap, one's cow crap, one's horse crap, and one's cat crap (the stinkiest of all; any cat lover will agree with me on this).
You have obviously never been to a hog farm, cat crap is like smelling roses by comparison.
Time to offend someone
Sounds about right. I've been with Verizon for a long time now. It's not that their pricing or customer service is better than anyone else's, or that I feel any particular loyalty to them, but they do one thing really right. They have at least useable coverage nearly everywhere. I've found very few places where I can't get a signal. Work is iffy (in all fairness, I'm in a basement and service quality seems to depend more on the individual phone than the carrier), and last time I was in the mountains of Colorado there are some places that don't have signal, but that's about it. They would be a bad choice if I did a lot of international travel, though.
This is a lot of great info, but what I want to know is will Sprint move to GSM or T-Mobile to CDMA?
I have a Verizon CDMA phone, and *HATE* it. Call management (3-way or more, call waiting, etc) is a nightmare on CDMA. Plus, CDMA is not common outside North America.
I really hope to see Sprint drop CDMA, but will they, or will they remove features from their T-Mobile imports?
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
You're right, I've never been to one of those. But of the four animals I listed, I'm pretty sure cat crap is the worst-smelling.
I can see why this deal is good for Sprint (they grow in size at a cost way cheaper and easier than self-growth) and T-Mobile (they get a lot of money) but this is most definitely NOT good for cell phone customers. Reducing the number of competitors from 4 to 3 will just increase the market leverage of the surviving 3 providers which will result in their product offerings and service plans being less competitive for cell customers. Do they think we are idiots? Reduced competition is great for the bottom line but leaves customers with fewer choices and higher costs. Beyond a certain size (which all 4 companies are way past) there are no economies of scale that would result in lower costs for a merged company. There is only less competition that allows higher prices. So...cell phone companies...what's wrong with having 4 companies compete for my dollar instead of 3? Aren't you in favor of free-enterprise and capitalism? Or are you all becoming socialists?
we rented uhaul trucks and had them sit in the parking lot, in the middle of winter (bay area 'winter', but still) and we ran long power extension cords from the main building to the trucks. I kid you not! wish I was kidding. was pathetic to see. the company bought wool ski hats for the poor engineers who had to sit in the truck doing phone/apps testing. I joked that we had a bunch of mike nesmith's working for us...
and the strange part was that being inside the uhaul STILL gave better reception than being inside the building with our repeaters.
but yes, the hotel rooms were real. we even bought UPSs to ensure that we would not lose power during our full day (sometimes many day) long tests.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
As I've heard someone say, Verizon is the hottest girl at the prom, and worse, she knows it.
I understood what you were saying up until that point, now I have no idea what you mean.
So then... what the hell was stopping them from merging? It's not like they'd be defiling the field of competition, and it's not like Washington is erring on the side of too much competition in mobile markets.
Sounds like poor planning on your companies part...
The combined T-Sprint will have to maintain both CDMA and GSM networks for some time. I hope that the tower hardware costs have dropped and dual CDMA/GSM hardware is available. I bet there will also be significant frequency waste.
Both carriers are dragging along a wagonload of MVNOs, so customers of several other companies will see migration impacts.
Verizon is dumping CDMA for their own customers, but keeping it for the MVNOs. This will become more problematic, as Android is dropping support for CDMA, so everything on the Sprint side is going to get a bad case of bitrot.
Well basically, and of course when you have to explain something like this it loses its bite...Verizon is what all the guys want, and knows it, so it gets away with acting as bitchy as it wants to. I only repeat the saying because it seems to aptly describe Verizon, not because I'm personally a fan of gender-stereotype humor.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
Get your own city-wide WIFI system installed and running with decent coverage.
Some people travel from city-to-city and don't like to carry 2 phones (or rent phones for a different network when they get there)...
FWIW, that was part of the dream that was WiMax and VoLTE... Maybe we'll get there with VoLTE eventually, but WiMax part of the dream is certainly dead...
As a T-Mobile customer, I welcome our new overloards. Ever try using T-Mobile outside a metro area (Kansas, rural Texas, etc.)? Even in some some metro areas (Omaha, Austin suburbs) coverage is horrible. Anything that gives T-Mobile more towers is fine with me (as long as it's not AT&T).
not really look what they did to iden with was far better then cdma. rather then update it they just ran it as long as they where forced to then killed it off.
I seriously doubt the first assertion is true. But even assuming it's true for a small majority of people, can you blame them? When a Western US state is the size of 3 European COUNTRIES, it takes a lot more effort and motivation to leave them.
And for the second, since the country in question, happens to be the size of a the continent, and has the two largest oceans on either side impeding travel, it's not comparable to leaving an EU "country" at all. And the Western US is far, far worse off in that regard.
Compare the numbers of Americans leaving the country, to the number of Europeans who travel over 15000km from home, and we'll talk.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Sprint has free roaming onto Verizon's network wherever theirs isn't available. If you really need great coverage in remote areas, but don't want to pay through the nose for it, sign-up with Sprint (proper Sprint. Not Boost/Virgin/MVNOs/etc) and keep using Verizon's towers. In-fact, RepublicWireless actively promotes this aspect of their dirt-cheap cellular plan, though they'll throttle you very quickly when you start using data while roaming on Verizon.
If you only want to make sure you have the best emergency (911) coverage, just make sure you get a dual-band phone from Sprint or T-Mobile (or MVNOs) so it has the right frequency to jump onto Verizon or AT&T's towers.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I would agree with that
Time to offend someone
Pound for pound, horse crap is maybe the least offensive crap in the animal kingdom. Horse piss, on the other hand...