

Jim Cicconi
AT&T still isn't done badmouthing the FCC


Sources: AT&T, T-Mobile

Comments     Threshold


RE: Not Bloody Likely
By vol7ron on 3/24/2012 11:03:37 AM , Rating: 5
Right, sure T-Mobile lost 1900 jobs, but what about all the field technicians, service reps/managers, accountants, sales staff, brick-and-mortar employees, etc that would be lost had AT&T succeeded.

It was too easy for AT&T to play the "told ya so" card. Really, T-Mobile and Sprint need to merge.

RE: Not Bloody Likely
By aebiv on 3/24/2012 2:34:49 PM , Rating: 4


RE: Not Bloody Likely
By Solandri on 3/25/2012 1:23:13 AM , Rating: 3
Sprint was financially forced into an interesting position. To raise cash, they had to sell off a bunch of their CDMA towers, and license bandwidth off them from the new owners. While this was a negative from the standpoint of a static business, it helped make them technology-agnostic. In many areas, they provide the phone service, while leasing bandwidth on the towers. The type of tower (CDMA, iDEN, or GSM) wouldn't actually matter. And they already have experiencing managing two incompatible networks (CDMA and iDEN). So it wouldn't be inconceivable for them to merge with T-Mobile.

I'm of the opinion that this flexible type of arrangement is where the industry needs to go, and that the current state of carriers owning all three aspects of the business - the phones, the service, and the towers - is maintained only because of locking in customers via multi-year contracts. From a competitive standpoint, I think the optimal state would be for the phone manufacturers to sell the phones, the carriers to sell phone service (and provide loans for subsidized phones), and for tower owners to sell bandwidth to the carriers. You could pick the phone you liked best, the carrier with the plans you liked best, and they could pick the towers with the best service. No more having to compromise on what plan you get in order to have good service, or having to deal with lousy service just to get the phone you want.

If that truly is the direction the industry will go, then Sprint is the furthest along at present.

RE: Not Bloody Likely
By mcnabney on 3/26/2012 9:48:10 AM , Rating: 2
Carriers don't own the phones. They may sell them, but you can activate almost any CDMA phone on Verizon and a hundred thousand iPhone owners have activated those jailbroken devices on T-mobile.

Now I like the idea of the same company owning both towers and switches. That is how networks become reliable. Changing from a roaming partner to an owned tower mid-call is a frequent cause of dropped calls. Imagine that happening every day instead of just on road trips into rural areas? There is also no guarantee of service feature compatibility since 3rd party tower owners generally don't keep their equipment up to date. Service would be terrible without carrier imposing their standards on the equipment that actually signals the phones. 3rd party tower owners don't install battery backups and generators too, so you can no longer expect service at all during power outages.

I agree on the exclusive handset contracts, but as we saw with iPhone - they can be critical to a carrier's marketing.

RE: Not Bloody Likely

iDEN and WiMAX are going away, from what I've read.


RE: Not Bloody Likely
By cbf on 3/27/2012 7:26:06 PM , Rating: 2
Actually, I believe a Sprint/T-Mobile merger makes more sense than it might first appear. The merged entity would have to continue to operate both a CDMA and a GSM network side-by-side for many years (although there might be some cost-savings and/or improved coverage from consolidating tower locations). But they'd have to do that whether they merge or not

The biggest issue for Sprint and T-Mobile is financing an LTE build-out to match the Verizon and AT&T LTE build-outs. A merged entity would have a much larger customer base to amortize that over than each carrier trying to do it on their own.

The real problem with the merger would be figuring out how to take advantage of the different spectrum that Sprint & T-Mobile own in each market. To take full advantage of T-Mobile's AWS spectrum would require multi-band LTE handsets. Hopefully the phone manufacturers can handle that technically, but Apple alone could probably mess the whole thing up.

RE: Not Bloody Likely
By BillyBatson on 3/24/2012 7:40:45 PM , Rating: 2
I refer you to aebiv's comment
Sprint and tmobile wouldn't work. It had to be AT&T.
They should have merged, I know tmobile is a stronger player on the east coast but here on the west coast it use to be the last choice when it came to picking a carrier and would only be chosen for its cheaper plans but now that MetroPCS is huge here for low cost contract-less no one even has tmobile anymore. It would have benefited AT&T customers for tmobile to be purchased.
I know you people care about jobs but it's a company trying to make money and I'm a customer trying to get the best service, and AT&T buying tmobile would have come closer to those goals

RE: Not Bloody Likely
By DeluxeTea on 3/25/2012 11:05:44 PM , Rating: 2
Nice try, Jim Cicconi.

