AT&T: T-Mobile sucks (and we'd like to buy it for $39 billion) | Hacker News Reader

AT&T: T-Mobile sucks (and we'd like to buy it for $39 billion)

arstechnica.com

56 pointsabraham19 comments

I've had T-Mobile for several years and I like them. They're innovative in their billing practices: If you don't want subsidized phones you can save $20/month and they don't interfere with tethering. This merger is bad news.

I'm pretty sure AT&T sees its highly segmented plans and aggressive billing practices as innovative, and considers T-Mobile's approach to be naive and old fashioned.

Only if they subscribe to the P.T. Barnum School of Business Newsletter.

Wait- are you saying you don't?

Agreed. T-mobile is awesome. Their customer service is all right, the last time I had to call them up years ago. If the merger goes through, I'll be jumping ship. Some of AT&T arguments on how much T-mobile suck is absurd.

| "AT&T’s network-capacity challenges, however, are not just 'looming' a few years down the road—they are here today, the product of AT&T’s mobile broadband leadership and its need to support multiple generations of services. And although other providers’ public statements indicate that they have sufficient capacity to cover their needs until additional spectrum is made available via auction several years from now, AT&T must move more quickly."

I recently moved from Boston to the West Coast. As an AT&T customer in Boston, I never had issues with service. I remember two dropped calls in over 2.5 years of service and that's it (I'm sure there were more, especially on the commuter rail, but the drop calls became rare as my contract/usage went on...) I was a customer who defended their service when reading about how "bad" it was.

Then I made the trek over to Silicon Valley. WOW, did things change. About two weeks I was talking to my dad and had five dropped calls in under three minutes. Usually I average 2-3 per conversation. Extremely frustrating, to the point where I no longer even pick up...

So while I'm sad that this merger is happening (I'm all for more competition and think T-Mobile offers great service - ex T-MO customer here...), I completely understand why AT&T is doing this. I'm sure weighing the cost of buying T-Mobile vs new towers (and the cost/time for those) just made sense.

Checking the coverage for T-Mo, they appear to have where I live extremely well covered. IF I'm still an AT&T customer in a year, hopefully this will help. I know a few other AT&T customers who would be happy with this as well.

For several months last year, I was involved in a long distance relationship, and phone calls constituted a very large proportion of my interaction with my BF. Unfortunately, at the time I was both living in SF, and an AT&T customer. The constant dropped calls drove me crazy -- as you pointed out, several dropped calls in a very short window of time was quite common. The nature of a conversation changes when you're always afraid you're about to cut off. You get paranoid every time you hear a pause in someone's speech. And sometimes you get the the point where after the umpteenth redial, neither of you says anything, because you know you won't be able to talk long enough to finish a thought. Eventually I switched to T-Mobile, and moved across the country to live with my BF again. Now, with this looming acquisition, I'm faced with the prospect of becoming a reacquired AT&T customer, and again being dependent on a company whose service was so crappy as to have literally brought me to tears more than once. Yes, AT&T's infrastructure is already stretched thin -- but I wish their approach to increasing network capacity didn't involve dragging me back in.

If the FTC/FCC approves this, they are utterly corrupt and beyond redemption.

Why do we forget so quickly that airwaves for tv, radio and cellular are licensed by the people, for the people, and we are not served by FEWER choices and only a handful of super-conglomerates owning everything.

AT&T buying T-Mobile is only good for AT&T. It would result in the US having only 2 major wireless carriers in a matter of years and falling behind the rest of the world in wireless technology. This is exactly what the FTC was created to prevent.

The full 381-page document: http://www.mobilizeeverything.com/documents/PUBLIC%20Descrip...

I can't speak for the broader AT&T or T-Mobile customer bases, but personally as an AT&T customer I welcome this change if it means I can roam to the T-Mobile towers for fast 3G/3.5G on the frequency my phone can use, while also supporting the AT&T towers that actually manage to have signal at my house (which T-Mobile fails at).

As for AT&T's insane capped plans, they suck, but in my case I have a $15/month unlimited data plan so that doesn't affect me. :)

I can't think of a single place where T-Mobile has better coverage than AT&T. As an amalgamation of almost all the former baby bells, AT&T has (geographically speaking) the best coverage of all the providers. Presuming your AT&T phone is a GSM one, you would be able to roam to a T-Mobile tower if AT&T and T-Mobile just had a roaming agreement. This wouldn't require a takeover and wouldn't affect competition in the market the way this buyout undoubtedly will.

As you pointed out, AT&T has better coverage than T-Mobile pretty much everywhere; a roaming agreement wouldn't help most AT&T customers, with the exception of those using phones that only do 3G on T-Mobile's frequencies rather than AT&T's. So, it seems unlikely that AT&T would sign a roaming agreement with T-Mobile that would primarily benefit T-Mobile's customers but not AT&T's.

maybe the will get suckered into net neutrality as part of the buying concessions with the FTC.

AT&T are scum. (But all the carriers are)

Virgin Mobile isn't so bad, although their service in the US is lacking compared to other countries.

Just FYI - Virgin Mobile USA is wholly owned by Sprint. Since they are just a Sprint MVNO, it's (at this point) just a way to discount their services without diluting their brand. The various Virgin Mobile brands in different companies are all(mostly?) independent of each other.

That's interesting, I didn't know that. Branson really doesn't own any of it?

I think virgin group does own the UK service. Apparently they did VM USA as a joint venture with sprint and then sprint bought them out. The rest appear to be franchise/licensing agreements.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Virgin_Mobile

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