The Glade 4.0

Well, I always like to look to the positive. Perhaps my new wireless overlords will let me have an Atrix now...

Internally, we've always jokingly referred to AT&T as the "Death Star", and whenever we hired someone who was a former AT&T employee, we always said "Welcome back from the Dark Side" (and vice-versa when someone left and went to AT&T).

Needless to day, the mood is pretty glum at corporate HQ today. Not a lot of people are showing a lot of motivation. I can't imagine how the CSR's must feel. Something tells me we won't be winning any more JD Power Awards for "Best Customer Service".. =(

I found this image on dailytech.com, and though it was pretty funny.
http://www.dailytech.com/ATT+to+Buy+TMo ... e21173.htm


And then there is this old favorite from Comedy Central

Why the AT&T/T-Mobile merger is a disconnect
By DWIGHT SILVERMAN
HOUSTON CHRONICLE

Today, if you're interested in switching to a new cellphone carrier, you've got at least four options in major markets: AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon. All of these are big companies, with networks that cover much of the country and a variety of data and voice plans to fit different needs.

But a year from now, this landscape may be dramatically different. AT&T said on Sunday that it wants to acquire T-Mobile for $39 billion in cash and stock, effectively reducing the number of major carriers by 25 percent. By any definition, that means consumers will have fewer choices, with fewer players competing for your communications dollars.

AT&T and T-Mobile, of course, are spinning this as good for consumers, a position all merger participants adopt but which, in reality, seldom happens.

The combination of AT&T and T-Mobile will undoubtedly be good for the companies and their shareholders. AT&T gets T-Mobile's towers and spectrum licenses. It needs the former to relieve network congestion and improve call quality, and seeks the latter to have the bandwidth to roll out its planned 4G, LTE network upgrade.

But AT&T and T-Mobile, spin as they might, will be hard-pressed to argue that this will good for consumers. Because it's smaller, T-Mobile also is scrappier, and has been competing aggressively on two fronts. T-Mobile's pricing is generally lower, which helps keep AT&T and Verizon in check, and it has a reputation for better-than-average service, which sadly is not the norm in the telecommunications business.

You certainly could hope that T-Mobile's philosophy on pricing and its superior customer service would rub off on AT&T in a merger, but I suspect that wish would be about as reliable as an AT&T voice call in downtown San Francisco at rush hour. It's a pretty solid bet that the prices T-Mobile customers are paying now for voice and data would go up, and when they called to complain about it -- or cancel their service -- they'd be left on hold for a long, long time.

But there could be other issues resulting from the merger, and the combining of the AT&T and T-Mobile networks. While both use GSM technology, they operate at different frequencies. AT&T would use T-Mobile's spectrum to expand its deployment of LTE, and this would have implications for T-Mobile customers.




The bold emphasis is mine. If Reardon's scenario is correct, T-Mobile's customers will eventually find themselves forced to shell out for new hardware.

AT&T and T-Mobile said Sunday that they expect regulatory and other procedures related to the merger to take at least 12 months. The companies will remain independent until then, according a T-Mobile FAQ on the merger. That means they'll continue to compete and, presumably, continue rolling out their planned 4G network upgrades. Thus, it will be a full year before they can act in tandem, in which time Verizon and Sprint will have made further headway in the 4G race.

Both companies know that regulators may put the kibosh on the deal, though the U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission historically have been friendly to telecom mergers. Deutsche Telekom, which is selling T-Mobile USA to AT&T, will get $3 billion as a termination fee if the deal falls through. That's 8 percent of the deal, and The New York Times reports that the norm for such fees is about 5 percent. Clearly, this is a high-risk proposition.

I'd like to see the feds man up here and say no to this deal. It's logical to assume that this merger would force Verizon and Sprint to combine -- both of them use CDMA technology in their networks -- thus reducing the competitive landscape to two major carriers. And about the only upside to that would be that both giants would be moving toward LTE networks, unifying the telecom standard in the U.S. However, we'd have a duopoly, and thus limited choice and competition.

If the FCC and Justice do approve the deal, here's hoping they require the combined entity to take consumer-friendly steps, a suggestion made by The New York Times' Nick Bilton during Sunday night's episode of 'This Week in Tech,' in which I was a panelist. For example, when AT&T and Bell South combined in 2006, the FCC required that AT&T make affordable DSL available. For a while, you could order DSL service for $10 a month in AT&T's 22-state area, which brought a lot of cost-conscious dialup users into the broadband world. The feds could mandate similar actions to hasten the adoption of smartphones, for example.

But I'm not sure even that's worth the damage that will be done to wireless competition. The companies' insist that less will be more, but those who value real competition won't buy that fuzzy math.

Dwight Silverman covers the technology industry for the Houston Chronicle. He can be reached at dwight.silverman@chron.com.

You can go no-contract on AT&T too

FCC halts AT&T's acquisition of Qualcomm spectrum, bundles it with T-Mobile merger review

Hmm. Won't that make it more likely for the FCC to reject the TMO buyout, though? Bundling the two reviews into one means it's a bigger acquisition and a bigger step towards monopoly, rather than two small ones, right?

At least I'll get a new phone if the deal goes through