AT&T to buy T-Mobile USA

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110320/ap_on_hi_te/us_at_t_t_mobile_usa

Holy Shit!

Yeah... that just about covers it!

Good news for Ranjit and Chad over at Metro PCS I would say! No contract, flat rates for everything are going to look better and better as the market consolidates.

A lot of Tmobile folks are going to be pissed.

I love this bit:

In CorporateSpeak, "look hard" translates into "find a way to make people forget this service ever existed".

I swear to god...

Two months ago I ditched my AT&T plan for T-mobile.

Maybe they'll kill this under the antitrust laws.

Well that explains the reaction I got from T Mobile when I complained about some practices they had in their store.

And I was planning on going to AT&T (they have better plans for me than the other two companies).

Just not ready for a smart phone $$ yet.

If MetroPCS had simcard tech I would have jumped ship a long time ago with my iPhone.

Hoping my no contract plan won't be disturbed... :rageface:

Shit like this makes me glad I have Sprint.

Of course then you realize you have Sprint.

That doesn't explain anything unless you were in the T-mobile store earlier this morning. Low level sales employees do not get this kind of info until the rest of us do.

Beats the hell out of T-Mobile and AT&T.

Yeah but no.

This doesn't surprise me. AT&T has a habit of purchasing wireless companies that have made recent upgrades. I remember years ago, almost a decade ago when AT&T Wireless (which at the time was a separate company from AT&T) had switched to the GSM system. At the time I was an AT&T Wireless customer. In order to get me to switch to their new GSM system they offered me a "lifetime" special of $99 per month for unlimited minutes and unlimited data. Of course it wasn't too long after that when Cingular stepped in and took over AT&T Wireless.

The service was better under Cingular then it had been when it was AT&T Wireless. Unfortunately, a year or so after Cingular took over AT&T Wireless, AT&T got its grubby little mits on control over the company and decided to change the name and logo so that it was under the AT&T banner again. Unfortunately, it seems like when they did that they farmed out a percentage of the customer service jobs to India, Rio, and the Philippines. With those jobs going to those countries, so did the quality of service as well.

I think the only ones who lose in these types of situations are the consumers in this country. For decades the ma/pa bell companies had monopolies over our phone service. Then cell phone companies started to spring up and created some fair competition for the old Bell companies. So what did the Bell companies do, they got together and began eating up cell phone companies. They may have different names, but ultimately they are still the same companies that they have always been.

Maybe not where you live, but in Michigan Sprint has better coverage, faster speeds and less dropped calls. My friends who have AT&T and T-Mobile hate it.

Any place in which I am is inherently more important to me than any place in which I am not, ergo, Michigan's cellular infrastructure is actually less than meaningless to me.

There is a Sprint tower 250 yards from my house, but no reliable Sprint service. There is an AT&T tower over 750 yards from my house, yet AT&T's service is robust.

Take that as you will.

The worse service for me was when I was with T-Mobile for about a year. I had so many problems with their service, I paid the penalty to get out of my contract early.

AT&T service itself works pretty much all through out CA. It also works well in the Southern most areas of our states. Suck as the Southern tip of AZ, NM, and TX. Verizon's service the last time I was in those areas was almost non-existent.

When traveling through Nebraska, Iowa, Wyoming, and parts of North Dakota, I had little to no service on my AT&T phone, yet the Verizon phone never lost signal.

AT&T is really playing the patriotic route in their efforts to get this approved. I find myself disgusted with that, since I don't find them to be a company that represents what I think America should be.

They're also going to focus on T-Mobile's limited spectrum. While it will compliment AT&T's spectrum nicely, it won't really be enough for T-Mobile to remain competitive long term. Sadly, there is only "so much" spectrum available to purchase.

I used T-mobile before moving to Korea. They were cheap, but the service wasn't always great.

Not sure where I'll go when I get back. All I need is a phone with a querty keyboard and unlimited texting. I don't need any fancy apps or anything of that sort.

From my point of view, things have come full circle.

When I got my first cell phone back in 1999, it was with a company based out of the Carolinas called Suncom. Suncom was great. IIRC it was $59/month and seems like I had about 500 minutes/month with no roaming or long-distance charges.

I'm not a big phone person and neither is the wife, so it was plenty of minutes. That's actually one of my personality quirks: I hate to talk on the phone. In person, I'll talk your ears off, but not on the phone. If you call me, say what you need to say and get off.

Suncom had a contract with AT&T, so you had access to both company's towers. You had a few dead areas, but service was generally pretty good.

It was great for a few years. In the meantime, Suncom sold off some of their towers and then lost their contract with AT&T. Seems like they then contracted with Cingular.

The service got pretty spotty. We took the kids to Dollywood and, of course, my wife and I took our phones with us in case we got separated. Got to Pigeon Forge and...no service!

That's when we decided to go with Verizon. They have the best service for this area.

In the meantime, Suncom was bought out by T-Mobile. Now T-Mobile has been bought out by AT&T.

Point of order: AT&T exists in name only. In the past couple decades they've made so many boneheaded strategic decisions and pissed away buckets and buckets of money that they eventually went under. But for some reason, someone at Cingular (or whoever owns them) thought "AT&T" was a better brand name than "Cingular", so they went with it.

Errrr... no, that's not exactly right. It's certainly convoluted, but AT&T (now) has just as much claim to use the name "AT&T" as any company ever did. It was, after all, bought by one of the "baby bells" (specifically SBC), which was actually once part of AT&T in any case.

In fact, the current AT&T owns and controls more of the original AT&T's assets than the "original" AT&T did between the breakup in the early 80's and it's acquisition by SBC in 2005.

...and the other shoe may be about to drop. Money has an article asking if it's time for Verizon to buy Sprint. LINK

IIRC, the CEO of Verizon says they've no interest in buying Sprint.

Well, that's what he would say at this point...

And just to fog things further, Cingular didn't become AT&T until a year or so after SBC bought AT&T (and renamed itself AT&T), because SBC still had to buy out Southern Bell, which had started Cingular as a joint venture with SBC.

Man, I miss Pac Bell... the whole industry really went downhill when SBC started buying everything in sight.

Eh, maybe. I can think of a few reasons why he might be serious about the matter. Given that there's likely to be a number of regulatory hurdles with the AT&T T-Mobile merger, I can only imagine that there'd be even more with a Sprint Verizon merger.

Yeah, I was gonna keep my service for when I came back to the States w/ T-Mobile, but I'll be damned if I give fucking AT&T any more of my goddamned money. I've got three more months with that contract, and I'm gone.

I'd just keep going month to month until the merger is approved. There will no doubt be delays, roadblocks, and hearings. It seems the more people get familiar with the merger, the more roadblocks appear.

Personally I see this as a 50/50.