

  (Source: Comedy Central)

Say goodbye to the T-Mobile girl









Comments     Threshold


By ElderTech on 3/20/2011 3:27:43 PM , Rating: 3
As the only other GSM carrier of any size in the US, this purchase of T-Mobile was a very smart move by AT&T to monopolize this technology and to align itself with Deutsche Telekom for international expansion potential. It effectively shuts out the ability of AT&T customers to easily migrate to a different carrier once their contract is up assuming the phone has the appropriate hardware to accommodate the T-Mobile spectrum. And with the potential for more quad-band phones appearing, this will likely be the case.

There are at least two problems with this proposed purchase. First, will it pass FCC and anti-trust scrutiny. That's a big one. While Verizon still will have competition from Sprint on CDMA technology, if the deal goes through, AT&T will effectively have none on GSM. Is that a deal breaker? In the end, AT&T will probably prevail, due to it's wide political influence, but it's still something to watch.

The second problem is integrating the somewhat different bandwidths from and customers of the two providers, from a variety of perspectives including plans and pricing. This will likely be solved over a period of time with new offerings on plans and hardware that's compatible with both, or possibly a conversion to one standard. And in doing so, how will the customer owning legacy hardware fare in this process? That's another big one and a potential problem for both current AT&T and T-Moblile customers and suppliers. I'm guessing Apple will have a great deal to say about how AT&T addresses this issue, and will obviously want to keep their own customers happy, hopefully including those owning older iPhone hardware!

By DanNeely on 3/20/2011 4:35:43 PM , Rating: 2
With ATT and VZW both going to LTE, the competition for 3g techs is going to matter less in the future. They may get stomped on for overall scale, but most likely ATTmobile will just have to sell one set of their customers to a 3rd party in areas with out coverage from a 3rd party, similar to how VZW sold several bocks of altel customers to ATT in order to get the acquisition approved. With luck the number of blocks they have to sell will be large enough to be able to promote a major regional player (eg US Cellular) to national level, or to push Sprint up enough to no longer be a joke.

