FCC approves T-Mobile and Sprint merger
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If the government wanted competition they'd figure out a way to make starting a new wireless carrier cheap by providing network, power, and physical locations for startups. Reducing the barrier of entry enables more competition; consolidating spectrum into even fewer hands, more wealthy hands, does not.
The real thing we're short of is spectrum, not cell sites. I'm skeptical that satellite will fix any of this, they have the same spectrum shortage issues too, with infrastructure that costs gobs more.
It's called municipal broadband.[1] Not everything has to be disrupted the way that SF startup cats want to. There is legitimately no reason you couldn't de-privatize spectrum and return control to local stakeholders in the same manner.
[1]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/chattanooga-has-its-own-broadb...
Also, municipal broadband or publicly owned broadband would not, on its own, confer a monopoly. There are numerous examples of industries and market sectors where a public option coexists with market options. This is commonly seen as the most likely solution to the healthcare crisis in the United States today.
This is the lie that people trot out to explain the myriad failures of American government. Our schools suck because they’re “underfunded.” Oh, actually, they’re among the best funded: https://images.app.goo.gl/r4QwEWefuP34DZSj8. Our public transit sucks because it’s “underfunded.” Oh, the New York Subway receives far more public funding than say London’s tube: https://nypost.com/2018/11/06/the-cure-for-new-yorks-ailing-.... If California could build HSR for what it costs France, half the line would already be done for the $6 billion already spent. There isn’t a failure of government that can’t be explained away by lying about its funding levels.
You can't just use this as a blanket defense. There are plenty of inept and corrupt local governments that are well-funded as well.
> There are numerous examples of industries and market sectors where a public option coexists with market options
It's not rightfully a "public option" if one of those is funded by taxpayer money and is capable of operating at a loss, whereas the private ones have to sustain themselves.
Also why would municipal broadband be a monopoly? There are lots of municipal broadband projects that are one of many ISPs.
This isn't a theoretical prediction of the future, there are already lots of examples.
> water consumption is down, there are still an estimated 240,000 water main breaks per year in the United States, wasting over two trillion gallons of treated drinking water
> While drinking water infrastructure is funded primarily through a rate-based system, the investment has been inadequate for decades and will continue to be underfunded without significant changes as the revenue generated will fall short as needs grow.
Now you're moving the goal posts to water main breaks for some reason when the point in the first place was that municipal internet is successful.
Safe Drinking Water Act violations are rampant among municipal water utilities: https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/city-new-york-comply-federa...; https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/12/climate/drinking-water-sa...
The trillions of gallons of water lost to leaks is another piece of the puzzle, wasting a natural resource due to poor maintenance.
Municipal sewer systems are another huge problem. They release enormous amounts of untreated sewage into waterways each year, because municipalities haven’t invested in capacity and rainwater separation: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/09/ameri...
There are isolated instances of successful municipal broadband, but hardly enough to say that the concept is “successful.” (We have some municipal cable systems on the eastern shore of Maryland. They were good at one time, but underinvestment has resulted in speeds falling behind over the years. Underinvestment is the same problem that plagues municipal water utilities.)
Most successful broadband networks around the world aren’t municipal services. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/10/uk-slips-...
Our privatized system does pretty well, doing better than France, Germany, the U.K., and Italy (which together have half the EU’s population). Most of the top countries, like Singapore and Norway, similarly rely on private companies. Part of Sweden (Stockholm) arguably has a municipal system, except it’s not like one that would ever be politically viable in the US. (The utility is publicly owned but not politically operated. They built out based on revenue potential and demand, not mandates to cover everyone. Imagine a US municipal utility that covered rich neighborhoods first and took 20 years to get around to wiring up poor neighborhoods.)
A few years ago Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns pointed out that the ASCE was asking to invest more in roads than the economic benefits that would be realized from them, even according to ASCE‘s numbers. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/3/12/revisiting-the...
There are lots of successes, Colorado, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Chattanooga etc. and those are just in the US. It seems like you have some sort of axe to grind, going on huge rants about water and sewers.
> Most of the top countries, like Singapore and Norway, similarly rely on private companies
Interesting you mention that, since the government layed down all the fiber and lots of small startup companies just ran the endpoints. This example couldn't be more contrary to what you are claiming.
"ERCOT is a membership-based 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation, governed by a board of directors and subject to oversight by the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Texas Legislature. Its members include consumers, cooperatives, generators, power marketers, retail electric providers, investor-owned electric utilities, transmission and distribution providers and municipally owned electric utilities." [1]
edit: I've always avoided AT&T because they're always the highest priced offering even after bonuses.
Within a year or so, T-mobile moved all of Metro’s customers to its network and took advantage of MetroPCS’s bandwidth.
Sprint kept Nextel’s network limping along for years.
T-mobile is the underdog. They are making a remarkable recovery and putting up a fight against VZW and ATT. But they still have coverage and congestion issues that are dealbreakers for many potential customers. They have already put pressure on VZW and ATT to lower prices and start bundling third party perks this year. Giving TMO an infrastructure and subscriber boost by allowing them to acquire Sprint is going to put a lot more pressure on the other two, especially once their 600mhz Band 71 rollout is done and consumers upgrade to newer chipsets that support it, essentially solving their infamous building penetration problems.
With Sprint’s assets and subscriber base, they’ll go from being the underdog to being a serious threat to both ATT and VZW. Instead of thinking that we went from 4 players to 3, think of it as though we went from 2 players to 3.
Edit: Actually it’s better than that. The approval requires TMO to provide Dish with spectrum access for 5 years and operate as an MVNO while Dish builds out it’s own nationwide 5G network to go independent. That means this deal puts 4 players in the market, as opposed to 2.75 players if it was blocked.
The companies don't need to merge to become better for customers. They could for example have agreements and share their towers to improve each other's coverage.
that is bullshit
They refuse to peer with neighbouring networks, they hold back deployment of local connectivity (DSL is still the best you can do in 2019?), they demand the doubly charge in the way of Netflix v Comcast.
Sending data to/from with any customers on their network (which, of course, considering how big they are...) costs so much more per megabit due to this bullshit.
[1]: https://investors.att.com/~/media/Files/A/ATT-IR/financial-r...
[2]: https://s22.q4cdn.com/194431217/files/doc_financials/2019/q3...
The amount of spectrum that Tmo/Sprint will hold merged exceeds either Verizon or AT&T at last check.
Verizon and AT&T do just as badly, but not nearly as much (~8Mbps). Again, congestion, not because there are no towers nearby. I am on business postpaid higher tier plans, and should have tower priority according to them.
Sprint coverage disappears completely a few minutes after exiting major cities.
AT&T has a disgusting transparent proxy that breaks SSL half the time (if you try to negotiate purely-modern ciphers, your SSL connects typically fail) and modifies random files/headers in transit if plaintext. They do not/will not remove it. Plaintext HTTP exits through one IP (shared by an insane amount of people, seemingly), and all other traffic that it can't tamper with or doesn't know how to tamper with exits via another IP. This breaks some things.
Incidentally, I am typing this on a hotspot, and as my bus enters downtown CBD loading web pages (including HN, the lightest page of them all) ha started to take 10-30 seconds.
I've used a cheap ($30/mo) prepaid plan on TMo for the past several years and it's only gotten better in my city. Just ran speed tests on 3 different sites from my office (with passable signal strength but not "full bars" and without checking actual numbers).
All three claimed 24-25Mbps download and 5-8Mbps upload with 65-75ms latency. This is more than enough for my cell phone, but I'd imagine any drops or latency would be a lot more noticeable if I was tethered to a laptop.
I guess for me, the main uses of cellular data are web browsing and media streaming when I'm not at home or at the office (when I'd be on WiFi instead). This is plenty for me and I even get coverage outside of the city these days. 5 years ago I might not have said the same.