

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson   (Source: ZDNET)









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RE: Good for iPhoners my ass....
By vol7ron on 3/30/2011 7:20:48 PM , Rating: 4
Most of the time (there's little competition in electricity, which is highly regulated and allows for cheap prices), but less options does not mean less competition.

This could financially benefit AT&T to fix it's problems, or at least make it capable of being more competitive.

Of course, AT&T could have just spent that $39B on actually improving its network to possibly achieve better than 30% capacity improvement.

RE: Good for iPhoners my ass....
By RufusM on 3/30/2011 8:34:53 PM , Rating: 3
To compare cell service to electricity utilities the government would need to make cell service providers a quasi-government monopoly.

I further argue that electric utilities aren't exactly providing cheap electricity compared to what they should be charging since they are subject to the whims of government: expensive renewable fuel regulations, more emissions regulations, carbon taxes (if that gets going), labor unions with high fringe benefit costs, etc. Don't get me wrong, they need to be regulated since we don't want a bunch of Enrons out there, but there's a balance needed.)

T-Mobile is increasing their market share and AT&T is simply buying up their closest GSM technology competitor to increase their market share, end of story. After the purchase is completed, there will be less competition, less choice and will setup a cell phone oligopoly. We end up with another company the government thinks is too big to fail when economic pressures come home.

RE: Good for iPhoners my ass....



By shortylickens on 4/3/2011 10:30:06 AM , Rating: 2
Thats exactly what I was thinking. If they had put that 39 billion into the company itself in the form of more/better cell towers, more technicians, more customer service, etc, then they could have pwnd the other 3 carriers. As such a 30 percent increase in capacity is not really impressive.

And I've been looking over the tmobile & ATT coverage maps. I seriously doubt they will expand coverage across America by a a whopping 1/3. They mostly cover each other right now and tmobile is smaller than AT&T. There arent too many places where tmobile has full coverage and AT&T has none.

