Hacker News Reader

Comment by dres | Hacker News Reader

This is complete bullshit, and would give AT&T an effective monopoly on GSM based wireless communications in a number of key markets. I say we collectively work to lobby against this deal, as it will be bad for all of us who are based in the US and looking to do ANYTHING in mobile. Imagine if Apple had tried to get their iPhone AppStore arrangement in a single-GSM carrier world?

It's 2011, folks. We can't let oppressive regimes have their way.

View on HN

I'm in. I've been a happy Tmobile customer for years. Not looking forward to ATT ruining it all.

Why do we care what the market share is for specific transmission technologies? The overall wireless market is extremely competitive.

20 cent text messages both ways is competitive?

So, buy a Sprint phone with unlimited texting?

(Wait a minute; I don't appear to be paying $0.20 for text messages either, and I'm AT&T.)

It costs an additional $19.95 a month for unlimited texting on the (at&t) iphone plan last I checked.

Sprint plans with unlimited texting are still much more expensive than similar in Europe. Their 450 Minute "Everything" plan is $50/mo with a 2 year contract. That might be good for the US, but its not good relavitely speaking. Just as an example, I looked through vodafone UK's 24 month plans and I found 600 minutes and unlimited texting for the equivalent of $32 per month.

Virgin Mobile USA (owned by Sprint) has similar plans. Unlimited texts + 300mins/month for $25 prepaid. 1200mins for $40.

Wow, on a sim-only quit-any-time plan in the UK, I pay £10 per month for unlimited texts, unlimited internet (though tethering is apparently against the TOS) and 250 minutes (I never use these up). And I've never had to pay to receive a text on any network.

You realize that 40 ct per 160 bytes makes those bytes more expensive than sending the same data to the hubble space telescope?

It's actually only 140 octets. :(

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#Message_size

You've obviously not been in the mobile handset business.

Very, very few handsets are built for both GSM and CDMA, which is a situation that won't change for quite a while (upcoming next-gen LTE handsets should work on all carriers, but we will see about that).

At the time of the iPhone deal, T-Mobile and AT&T were Apple's only two real options for deployment (Verizon was a negotiating tactic) -- they wanted to build a GSM handset they could deploy globally. The situation would not be any different today. AT&T only won that war because of their dominant position, which allowed them to throw billions at promotions and guarantees -- which, of course, only further worsened T-Mobile's ability to compete (imagine if they had gotten the iPhone instead).

In today's world, if you were Apple, AT&T would once again be able to sit back and dictate terms, as they will be the only real nationwide GSM network in town. It's 1998 all over again, and I don't like it one bit. The other players -- MetroPCS, etc -- are clearly regional / metropolitan plays and do not offer the footprint necessary for an iPhone type device.

As an aside, I would appreciate if your responses were more than one liners.

You think Apple might have launched on T-Mobile, the last-place network?

Nationwide wireless networks are extraordinarily capital-intensive. Absent a massive technological shift --- which may be coming and which AT&T and Verizon are powerless to stop --- there are always going to be a (1) few (2) very large companies providing cell coverage. It may be more expensive to launch a nationwide wireless network than it is to launch an airline.

Meta, responding to your aside: respectfully, no. I'm trying to avoid typing for the sake of typing. I asked a serious question; you answered it; I responded to it with my take. That's how the system should work.

Yes, which is why regulations regarding non-discriminatory network access are beneficiary to consumers.

Absent a massive technological shift --- which may be coming and which AT&T and Verizon are powerless to stop ...

What are you thinking of?

Nothing specific other than the ubiquity of RF in modern consumer electronics designs and off-the-shelf hardware becoming powerful enough to handle software radio with minimal hardware assistance.

The thing that makes the "OMG $0.20 SMS PAY TO TETHER WTF" people isn't going to be a better cell carrier; it's going to be something that obsoletes cell carriers. Look at the RIDICULOUS PHONE you have in your pocket right now; nothing like it even existed in 2005.

There were a lot of similar phones in 2005. The two main differences are app ecosystems and capacitive screens. Both apps and touchscreens existed back then. What we have today isn't magical or revolutional, but just evolution, and slow at that.

My Dell Axim had a 624 MHz CPU, 256 MB, wifi, Bluetooth, 3,7 inch VGA screen, TV-out and two card slots, one that could be used to upgrade it. 2005.

Why does it matter that they're the only GSM provider? Why aren't other technologies competition?

It matters because it increases the switching cost for anyone that wants to go to a competitor. You can't bring your phone with you, so you MUST make an upfront commitment of either buying a phone or signing a 2 year contract to get the phone without an upfront cost. When there are multiple companies that provide the network type your phone uses, you can move between them at no cost.

But with only two providers of GSM, you already have emerging cartel pricing dynamics. It's not even as good as airlines (which are also somewhat collusively pricied), where you usually have 5-6 choices for any trip.

More competition is good, but, from a pragmatic perspective, the loss in competition (such as it is) might not outweigh the gain in efficiency for AT&T and T-Mobile subs.

> But with only two providers of GSM, you already have emerging cartel pricing dynamics.

And people already complain about the fact that there are only 2 GSM providers and 2 CDMA providers in the US. Your statement appears to me to be "I don't understand why you are complaining, it's not much worse than what we already have", but people already don't like what we have. This just makes it worse. Between a rock and a hard place, I guess. I completely understand your point, but slowly taking away options and freedoms to slowly turn a free and complacent consumer base into a single group under control of one entity is not a cool thing to do. Look at the current political debate over wiretaps and the PATRIOT act, it's the same idea.

Our choices as consumers and citizens are slowly being whittled away and no one gives a shit because "It won't be much worse than what we already have."

We don't have a small number of wireless providers because of some collusive conspiracy. We have a small number of wireless providers because it costs billions of dollars to create nationwide wireless networks in a country the size of the United States.

I completely understand your frustration at having to choose between two goliath companies for wireless access that works when you get off the plane no matter where you fly. But them's the breaks. What you really want isn't some legal action that increases to 3 from 2 our number of options; what you want is a technological improvement to reduce the cost of providing nationwide wireless access. You can, seriously, go work on that and maybe get somewhere.

Right. It's not the best situation to have one or the other. More would be great in an ideal world, but we have this right now and until you or I can deploy a wide wireless GSM network for a few grand nothing will change.

I was commenting on your point that it's not that big of a deal for AT&T to acquire T-Mobile. It is a big deal because, why it may not be easy (or in fact possible) to stick a third carrier in the middle of this in a completely hypothetical scenario, combining the two carriers in a real life, AT&T just announced it was planning on doing just that scenario is not good for consumers. It is worse than the already less than ideal situation we have right now.

I am saying that despite people's concerns that consolidation in the wireless market will allow AT&T to abuse customers, the wireless market is already so intrinsically consolidated due to capital requirements for entry that AT&T was already asymptotically close to the maximal level of customer abuse it could inflict. This is similar to the argument security people have about the "Microsoft monoculture", as if 2-3 more operating systems were going to be anything more than a speed bump to attackers. One is a monopoly. 2-5 is still a cartel.

Technology lock-in. Admittedly, it's rather pointless for me to argue this, thanks to phones locked to specific carriers, but competition is severely hindered by the fact that I can't just pop in a new SIM from a different GSM carrier. Instead, I have to buy a new handset and, as phones become mobile computing devices, I'll have quite a lot of setup and data porting to do.

Two words: Nexus One.

  Imagine if Apple had tried to get their iPhone AppStore arrangement in a single-GSM 
  carrier world?

Apple still had to choose between Verizon or AT&T. From what I've heard, Sprint, T-Mobile, etc. were never in the running.

Verizon was not a GSM carrier.

I'm aware. The point is that they were still only negotiating with a single GSM carrier.

Using CDMA in the US and GSM in the rest of the world would mean different hardware. Were they ever seriously considering that?

Yes, in fact, they approached Verizon about the iPhone before AT&T.

And one of the results of that talk was that it would not be beneficial to manufacture two handset models, so they walked away to look at the bigger picture.

Are you suggesting bombing the AT&T HQ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com