T-Mobile officially completes merger with Sprint, CEO John Legere steps down
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In my own opinion this merger is a good thing. Sprint holds huge amounts of spectrum but has absolutely failed to create a competitive network with it. It was a misallocation of a precious natural resource.
Sprint is the world champion of picking the wrong wireless technology.
Think I have still have some iDEN and WiMAX devices in a drawer somewhere.
It’s hard to recover one’s investment if you refuse to sell the product you built.
It was so frustrating to sell something and have it returned because they didn't have service even though we said they did. Metal roof? That's no good. Metal building? That's worse. Concrete? Sorry. Wood? Maybe... if you're not blocked by a large metal or concrete building. Oh too many people joined and now you don't get a reliable signal?
They refused to sell it to you because it wouldn't have worked.
It also fucked with certain satellite radio frequencies and other weird shit you wouldn't expect.
WiMAX was a 10/10 idea, but a 0/10 everything else.
But I was in the center of a pretty decent sized city. There wasn't even service in the burbs at that point, and by the time it got there, LTE was already a thing and Sprint was stuck with only a couple of odd-ball devices for their 4G network.
Momentum means a lot. It's hard to make money selling your service if the devices that people want don't support it.
It was like ~2010/2011 when WiMAX was a really hot tech. The iPhone 5 launched with LTE in 2012.
I really hope that we could see that in the next five years for Sprint/T-mo: existing Sprint customers get upgraded to LTE and/or 5G devices, and then the CDMA network gets turned off in 2025 or 2030, and the bandwidth repurposed for 5G or 6G or whatever.
If Sprint and T-Mobile are having such a hard time creating competitive networks, what are the chances that Dish will be able to do it from scratch?
Everything about this looks terrible for consumers. There's even less competition.
I agree that Dish is unlikely to become a major player. This is a desperation move for them as their satellite business dies.
Sprint was giving away service, devices, and running promos on top of all of that. Still consumers didn't buy it. What do you want to happen in a situation like this? There was "competition" in the space but consumers had zero interest in engaging with them.
It certainly will be used for that, unless they've been lying to everyone: http://about.dish.com/2019-07-26-DISH-to-Become-National-Fac...
as far as I see the same Sprint CEO is continuing as the CEO of the merged company so I don't think things will improve. If he failed to create a competitive network then how are things to improve all of a sudden?
Yes. Not from US but as far as I am aware there are pretty much only 2 Network in US, AT&T and Verizon. With T-Mobile and Sprint being a very distant third and fourth. Basically they are so minor that even they have combined they are still a distant third. But it does gives them a fighting chance, assuming they follow on with their T-Mobile orderly execution.
Hopefully this would bring US closer to world quality standard in terms of Mobile Network. Because as far as I can tell it has possibly the worst mobile network out of all the developed countries. ( Edit: Sorry I forgot Canada, which I have heard is similar to US.)
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/30/17301392/t-mobile-sprint-...
A short term discount to break into a market niche? That looks like overy antitrust "dumping".
T-Mobile was so terrible I couldn't even pay my bill in their store. Their service was awful and if you couldn't do something online you might as well forget it. It turned into modern banking, where going to a physical location would just get you people telling you they can't do anything and that you have to everything through their website while pretending that that isn't ridiculous.
Dumping generally related to international trade and describes selling at a loss to drive off competition [1].
It is not clear T-Mobile is selling the plan at a loss. And it has no hope of driving AT&T or Verizon out of the wireless market. This is plain old discounting, not dumping.
I even assume that you are getting prioritized depending on how much you pay or how politically important you are for the networks. I.e. a $20 prepaid ATT customer is lower priority than a $80 post paid unlimited customer which is lower priority than a US Senator.
For instance, Straight Talk on AT&T isn't (or wasn't) even throttled. Other MVNOs, even if they were throttled on Verizon, were still quicker than Sprint's network.
Overall T-Mobile has the best bang for buck if you live in an area where they have coverage.
Although US carriers are sometimes quite behind what other countries offer. I am constantly blown away at how cheap and fast cellular internet is in India with Jio. Or south korea, or japan.
Asian countries make US look like a joke when it comes to internet speed and cellular technology.
If, like most people, you were buying a phone from your carrier, the cost at early termination was near identical. Verizon's ETF already reduced each month left on your phone's upgrade period, just like a phone payment plan would have.
Legere's a Jobsian marketing genius, but only because he managed to sell people the status quo as something new.
T-Mobile was very different and I hope it stays that way.
I was paying something like $50 for 2GB of high speed data, and "unlimited" data.
Except after the 2GB it was literally unusable, no matter the time of day or location. Even plain email would stop working, and webpages would never load.
A lot of unlimited plans will deprioritze you (slowing you down) after a limit, but usually that limit is higher, and even when you are deprioritized, it still remains useful most of the time.
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You can downvote all you want, they were running this scam well after the era of per MB overage fees.
In fact they’re still running this scam if you don’t manual switch to their more expensive “One” plan.
I'll acknowledge they market it a little misleadingly. But I'm a big fan of anything that removes bill-shock which was a fairly normal problem before T-Mobile got into the market (both for local data overages and international data usage).
I actually should have switched back but didn’t feel it was worth it the effort at the time.
Last month I cancelled and switched to Visible, which is an MVNO with unlimited data for 25$, there are similarly competitive networks out there now
> Yes, Party Pay is available to all active Visible members. Real (or chosen) families, roommates, frenemies, or total strangers just looking for some sweet savings.
I didn't have to look for 4 people, their subreddit has hundreds of links you can join for 4 people.
If anything was a colossal travesty, it was Legere bringing "unlimited" data back from the dead.
I can’t say what people should do, but they use their phones to watch video, do video chats, play games, upload and backup photos, etc.
A couple of years ago an American company I worked for had T-mobile phones with a plan that included the free international roaming. This international roaming was 2G data by default. In many countries we had to visit these data plans for internet access were simply unusable because they were so slow. Opening pages a browser would simply time out. This would happen in large countries China, Australia and many European countries as well. The company ended up ditching T-Mobile as a result. While it was free in the sense that it allowed them to advertise it as such it was not functional.
When the alternative is to simply pop a local SIM into your phone and get working internet for the same $15 dollars it costs for the T-Mobile One World Plan what's the point exactly?
- without data, find open store
- wait in line for counter service
- choose prepaid package/carrier
- passport copy/screen: gov + random store
- store "forgets" to return passport
- run out of data due to opaque billing
- repeatYou might as well add "having to breathe" and "tapping your debit card" to this list of hardhsips. This list is really quite laughable.
In many parts of the world you can get a SIM at a 24 hour convenience store and without a passport. And once you have the SIM you can almost always top them up on line. I think most people would consider the 5 minute time investment to be a fair tradeoff for working internet on their phone.
It's quite amusing to me that sharing my experience with a specific carrier's international roaming plan would upset someone. Are people actually T-Mobile fan boys? I mean it's a telecom company for heaven's sake. Telecom is one of the sleaziest industries there is. Who cares?! They're all different degrees of shit.
For a little context during a 3 years period I was spending a little over 200 days a year on the road internationally with a work issued T-Mobile phone during that time. My experience is not unique either. You can check https://community.t-mobile.com/
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/geoffreymorrison/2018/02/07/how...
I'll give you a very real life example.
In 2015 my girlfriend needed to go on a long road trip. But her iPhone was dead toast.
Soooo we go to the Verizon store. The cheapest options were either to buy a 200$ 'flip' phone (not smartphone, just a flip phone) up front, or to get a new contract and lock in.
Mind you, By this time in 2015 it was very easy to find sub-75$ prepaid Android phones. In Brick and mortar stores. Hell Verizon even sold a couple, but you weren't allowed to bring them onto a postpaid plan (lol).
I wound up spending less than 100$ on a Lumia 521 (yeah, lol winphone, but the map app (HERE drive) had great offline map downloading support which suited her purpose,) and putting her on my TMO for a while.
If you looked at the top end of the market back then, yeah, there wasn't much real difference between what TMO did and a normal contract. But at the lower end of the market it made a huge difference, that's why TMO won so much of that market.
Most people bought a phone from their carrier because it was so heavily subsidized and the plans were so expensive. If you broke your phone, you were out a huge amount of money, AND you had an expensive plan to boot.
T-Mobile did the right thing and gave consumers an option.
T-Mobile just claimed their payment plan, which shafted you if you canceled service, wasn't an ETF (it is), and Verizon just said their early termination fee was part of the plan, though it was really paying off the rest of the phone (which it did). In both cases, you're paying off a phone you bought, and keeping it after ending service.
The only real difference was that in the past, you were "paying for the phone" on Verizon monthly even if you didn't actually upgrade/buy a phone from them. But since the vast majority of people buy phones from their carrier, it really impacted the bottom line very, very little. The HN crowd over-represents in the tiny group of people that would bring an outside phone to their carrier.
A change which materially impacts less than 5% of your customers isn't game-changing, but T-Mobile marketed it like it was important to 100% of their customers.
IMHO, not really - HN is niche compared to everyone who was using HowardForums to hack on their Motorola and Nokia phones back in the day, myself included. T-Mobile was on the 900/1800 (?) spectrum which matched Europe and other places you could buy eBay phones, and T-Mobile was always free and open to people doing this. You could call support and get someone to help you with adding the right APNs and whatnot, they were always the "un-carrier" to many of us.
As an international traveler, I've never even considered Verizon or Sprint as I would never be able to pop another SIM from a different country.
(Bear in mind, a SIM is really just a hardware manifestation of a unique identifier and some settings. It's not impossible to do these things entirely digitally, and now with eSIM, that is happening on GSM/LTE networks as well.)
There's also a lessened urgency to upgrade phones under the T-Mobile model. There's still the Jump program, for those who do want to keep on a trade-in cycle, but if you're happy with you're phone you get rewarded with a lower bill at the end for sticking with it until you aren't.
About half of all phones sold in the US are iPhones and probably more on the major carriers.
Apple sells a lot of phones both online and in their retail stores and have their own payment plans.
You can buy an unlocked phone from Apple and optionally have it registered with one if the major providers.
Edit: The move being lying about throttling. His exact words were: "who the fuck are you, anyway, EFF? ... Why are you stirring up so much trouble, and who pays you?"
Compared with his industry counterparts, Legere was a breath of fresh air.
What is the "myopic view" in this situation? That poisoning the well is a good strategy for deflecting criticism of your dishonesty?
Kind of like Elon Musk. He called that guy a rapist and he's a bit weird/asshole, but he also made several successful companies that have benefited the world in a positive way. The world isn't black and white and I honestly think people should be judged by the combined weight of their sins and deeds. We're complex human beings.
There is strange uptick of "love" of corporate leaders all over social media for some reason. Certainly PR is at play, but also it's likely that the internet and social media has become more popular and attracted more uniformed masses. Just the other day on reddit, there was a Gates' thread and the "love" there was cult like.
(About a decade ago, I got trapped in a contract with T-Mobile and ended up forfeiting almost $1500.)
Also, I'm less than convinced that he was somehow a leader in eliminating contracts. I think it was simply an inevitable result of changing economics, and he was likely just dragged along with everyone else.
I appreciate what John Legere did to stir some competition in the carrier space, so it's a bummer to see him go, and I have no doubt T-Mobile will slowly rollback all its consumer-friendly changes (not that they've continued to make many more in recent years).
On the TMO side, I got the buy 3 get 1 line for free Magenta promo, an insider account code/discount, and a $200 visa card per line. I think I'm paying about $112/month for four Magenta lines.
The thing is, I switched in the first place because TMO always shafted their existing customers and gave new port-ins great deals, so switching to a "good" Sprint deal allowed me to get a better deal going back to TMO.
I say "good" because it was $30+/month for 4 lines, but Sprint's network blows and the price it reset to was just nuts.
For the record, I actually have T-Mobile and it is acceptable. I can't wait for service to get worse as it inevitably does after such mergers.
If they had a chance of surviving in a meaningful, competitive way, then I’d definitely disagree with a merger, but I’ve not seen a strong argument that they would.
ATT and TMO certainly did. And yes it worked out gangbusters for them because it wasn't -just- the money for the deal falling through, but the 'free roaming' that TMO users got on ATT networks.
This was HUGE for TMO at the time. They didn't have any lower band spectrum (Sub 1000mhz). But ATT obviously did because they were earlier into the game.
This helped them a lot, both as far as general coverage as well as usability in areas with lots of buildings and the like. By the time the agreement was running out they had purchased that sweet sweet 700mhz band and were rolling it out.
I thought it was he who was supposed to lead the merged Co...
There are some concerns around reduced competition, but I'm thinking that might not actually be a concern in the same few years it will take to gauge how this merger actually shaped the market, e.g. StarLink. Even if something like StarLink doesn't pan out, and Dish as a cellular provider turns out to be dead in the water, having three carriers on almost entirely even ground competing is probably better than having two strong carriers, one flashy but still generally uncompetitive carrier and one dead fish carrier. Probably better to not even bother trying to prop up Dish to be #4, but this is what the regulators have decided to push for in their attempts to throw the right levers and twist the right knobs to maintain "competition".