Hacker News Reader

Comment by allendoerfer | Hacker News Reader

I find it amusing how a company that was owned by a state and had a monopoly in one of the biggest consumer markets only 20 years ago, is now treated like an underdog in the US.

In Germany it is the other way around: T-Mobile recently lost the leading position to Telefonica from Spain, which is called O2 in Germany, after several mergers.

View on HN

That's because T-Mobile US is an underdog in the US and is barely related to the international T-Mobile brand. T-Mobile US was an independent company named VoiceStream Wireless until it was purchased by Deutsche Telekom in 2001. It continued (and continues) to run as an independent subsidiary with its own CEO and board of directors.

After purchasing TMUS DT neglected to invest in them for capital improvements (spectrum purchases and equipment upgrades) and they fell further and further behind the competition (at its worst they were 4th out of 4 with 33 million customers[1] to #3 Sprint's 55 million[2] and #1 Verizon's 92 million[3]) until DT tried to dump TMUS in 2011 by selling it off to AT&T. The only reason T-Mobile US is competitive today is because the FCC blocked the merger and AT&T had to pay a substantial "break-up fee" in the form of $3 billion in cash and $1 billion in wireless spectrum (which is worth substantially more today).

[1]http://www.tmonews.com/2012/02/t-mobile-announces-fourth-qua... [2]http://newsroom.sprint.com/news-releases/sprint-nextel-repor... [3] https://www.verizon.com/about/news/press-releases/verizon-re...

Aha, that explains it.

Could we borrow John Legere for a bit here in the UK?

I'd love to get rid of the landline, but I need it for a couple of gigs worth of data a month. Believe it or not, it is cheaper to pay line rental to BT and £10 a month to EE than to get that from a mobile supplier using a mifi.

It's easy to believe. IMO wireless bandwidth will always be more expensive than wired, assuming the copper is already in the ground.

I can see your point, but then, that copper wire (actually solid aluminium wire in parts of the UK) has been down there since the 1950s/60s!

It's an underdog in the US because it doesn't have the infatructure that at&t and verizon do.

t-mobile is usually the better value but doesn't have the towers and signal strength

mvnos are changing the value part though, you can get verizon's towers and signal strength without paying verizon prices, it's just the average consumer has no clue

Pre-paid plans seemed to have started their lives as a huge ripoff, and I think they still have that stigma. But MVNOs have made them an amazing value now, and T-Mobile has helped a ton too. Even buying directly from the other big three providers, the cost has come way down.

I wasn't aware of any Verizon MVNOs though, it seemed like they all went away or got bought up. Mind sharing which are available?

i did a survey of low-cost MVNOs over the xmas break, focused on data-centric plans that cost approximately $10 per month (i use google voice). there's also a link to the full list on wikipedia, which you can sort by carrier

http://blog.nqzero.com/2015/12/at-mvno-pay-as-you-go-data-pl...

When were prepaid phone plans ever a ripoff? I used prepaid going as far back as 2001 and they were a good option for light users such as myself.

T-Mobile was actually pretty rockin', the best of the bunch, in my town in Colorado. The cheapest, too!

However service in rural areas and along the interstate system was awful. I was either roaming on 1X or without service entirely for very nearly the entire stretch of Cheyenne to Tahoe.

I had to switch, but I think it's the right strategy for the capital-limited underdog. You only need a few towers to cover a city compared to the Great Plains or the interstates, and many people spend nearly all their time in town.

This will change, somewhat, as the new bands come online (particularly band 12, which is at 700MHz, and so it can travel farther and through obstacles more easily than higher bands at the same power). I noticed in a tiny Texas town that my T-Mobile hotspot (which has bands 2 and 12) had very strong 4G service, while my phone and tablet (which don't) had literally no service. The drive from that town to Austin or Round Rock was also devoid of service for miles at a time on the phone and tablet, but the hotspot had it pretty much all the way.

As I understand it, Verizon has historically had the strongest presence in the low frequency range, which is part of their reputation for the strongest network. Fewer towers can cover more ground more effectively at lower frequencies.

>As I understand it, Verizon has historically had the strongest presence in the low frequency range,

Yes this is correct, and the reason they have this 'monopoly' on the low frequency range is because Verizon has been the most shrewd at getting the government to grant them licenses for this spectrum.

I think the MVNOs, combined with smart phone market penetration, are the real driving force removing 2 year contracts. People aren't so bad at math that they won't eventually figure out that $200 (or less) + 24 * $40 is less than 24 * $60.

I guess the price point on good enough smart phones is also at least headed below $300 (for me it's less than $200, but people like shiny things).

> It's an underdog in the US because it doesn't have the infatructure that at&t and verizon do.

I get that. Still it has nearly as much employees as Verizon and AT&T combined. Telekom is one of the least start-up-like organization you can think of. Some of these employees still have the status of German Beamte and are unfireable. I do not know if you are familiar with German bureaucracy, but Kafka wrote some books about it …

Nevertheless articles like this treat T-Mobile like it's a small fast-moving start-up battling against evil corporations.

The US company appears to operate largely independently from the international owner.

And they keep trying to sell it.

Yep. In the past five years they've had four different suitors. In 2011 it was AT&T (blocked by FCC/FTC), in 2013 is was Softbank/Sprint (could not get enough assurance from FCC/FTC the deal would not also be blocked) and Iliad (French telecom, couldn't raise enough cash to meet DT's asking price), and in 2015 it was Dish (similar situation to Softbank/Sprint). My guess for the next suitor will be a cable company like Comcast or Time Warner Cable shortly after the 600 MHz auction.

As long as tmo doesn't adopt DT's peering policy, I'll be happy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com