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Comment by FactualActuals | Hacker News Reader

I would prefer to see Verizon or AT&T broken up before T-Mobile is. TMobile wasn't anywhere near as big as Verizon or AT&T pre-Sprint merger. And they still aren't as big.

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This is not correct. As of Q3 2023 T-Mobile is number two by subscriber count:

* Verizon Wireless: 143.3 million (Q2 2023)

* T-Mobile US: 116.7 million (Q2 2023)

* AT&T Mobility: 105.2M million (Q2 2023)

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_network_operato...

By stock market cap:

* TMUS: $170.51B

* VZ: $150.84B

* T: $113.22B

(of course, VZ and T both have significant businesses outside of wireless so this isn't a super great comparison)

Hard to argue that you should break up either of Verizon or AT&T and not T-Mobile by literally any metric, unless you think wireless companies shouldn't also have terrestrial networks

This, plus break up the broadband carriers (Comcast et. al) and enshrine open access to infrastructure into law, bonus points for net neutrality.

That would be honest wins for the US telecom market, and drive lots of competition, while preserving some common sense / fair access to shared infrastructure for all.

T-mobile was the main driver for all the user fees against every smb in the US though… IMO they did the most damage to text messaging as a reliable method of reaching a customer…. Telco industry is massive so yes break them all up

As a consumer, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, I don't want businesses to find it cheap and easy to reach me by text message.

Honestly, with things being as they are, I think the general sentiment of customers is that they do NOT want customer outreach; or, they want a single, high quality, hand written outreach. Apparently we don't like being brow-beaten into purchasing anymore. Basically, like being treated as something other than cash cows.

For ads, I don't. For customer support however, a verified phone number (that I can look up myself, easily, perhaps as part of a FCC website function, for example) would be a huge win though.

I used the Apple Business Chat feature for support for a shipping issue I had recently with Everlane and it was actually amazing. It had its own verified icon, so I knew it wasn't a scam, I could answer when I was able, and they were able to respond as they were able (though, I did find it quite timely, even when I wasn't) and not at all did I have to call someone, or talk talk to a chatbot (as far as I could tell anyway). It was a seamless experience and it got my issue resolved.

I personally like this model of customer support. No reason this can't extend to SMS

Maybe at this point we should be talking about all three major players as opposed to selecting one victim for partition. They all suck hard. They all stand to benefit from TMobile raising prices, because it will give them an excuse to do the same.

I am personally tired of the oligopolies in US. Bring in some competition. I thought the free market was a thing here ( or is it just lip service ) .

I 100% back breaking up Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile to create more wireless carriers. More competition is good for everyone.

Realistically the huge capital expenses involved in building reliable nationwide 5G networks make it impossible to have more than three carriers. Breaking up one of the incumbent carriers could only be done along regional lines, so regardless of where you live you wouldn't actually have more choices.

we don't need 5G nationwide. You (or someone copying and pasting you) have said this two or three times in this thread, and i am not sure why we need to be educated that there's "huge capital expenses" for building out a network that requires orders of magnitude more points of presence than the LTE networks. None of the three actually have unlimited service (at least on post-paid) as an option, so giving us "gigabit cellular" at a huge capital expense doesn't make sense to us, as consumers.

The only way it makes sense is if the wireless companies have other customers that are served by having orders of magnitude additional antennas everywhere.

And regardless of the arguments against the above, the cellular carriers were given billions and billions of taxpayer money, and tax breaks, and all manner of kid-glove court and legislative decisions in the past 30 years. Consumers are getting screwed from every side possible, more taxes, more fees, and more monthly service charges.

but at least the ads load blazing fast while i'm on the train, i guess.

You seem to be making things up or are just ignorant of the market dynamics. Regardless of your personal limited needs, there is actually huge demand for fast, reliable 5G service nationwide. Customers have voted with their wallets.

Moving to 5G with more antennas also allows for more efficient spectrum use in most cases. Spectrum is extremely expensive, and a limiting factor in some areas.

How have customers “voted with their wallets” when all of the major players released 5G to all their customers? It’s not like any actual choice was made by the customer.

> we don't need 5G nationwide.

I mean, I want 5G when I go travel without needing to pay extra, and that happens right now. I don't want to pay roaming charges just because I fly to Detroit or a small town in Missouri.

And history has shown that smaller carriers aren't going to provide that kind of service.

Roaming charges have nothing inherent to do with the presence or absence of 5G. You can have multiple networks with their own 5G hardware that charge roaming fees, and you can have a mixture of 4G and 5G but agreements that no roaming will be charged.

If you've got a plan that specifically limits you to 5G if you want to avoid roaming charges, then that's between you and your (likely oligopolistic) carrier.

> The only way it makes sense is if the wireless companies have other customers that are served by having orders of magnitude additional antennas everywhere.

The big reason to push 5G is surveillance. You could always be tracked to within half a mile or so with cell phone towers, but with 5G the cell towers alone can track you within a specific building. mmWave 5G provides location information with sub-meter precision. Telecom companies sell our location data, and with 5G that location data becomes much much more valuable.

5G does not require more points of presence than LTE. They can run on the same frequencies, which is where properties of range and penetration come from. 5G has additional higher frequencies with those issues yes, but they're not the only form of 5G.

It's like the difference between 2.4Ghz wifi, and 5/6 Ghz wifi. The 6Ghz spectrum has less penetration than 5ghz which has less than 2.4ghz. But you're still going to be running Wifi 6 on 2.4ghz instead of Wifi 4 because it still has improvements at those frequencies. In that same way, new towers are going to be 5G. The only drawback of running 5G instead of 4G on the same frequency is device compatibility.

AT&T runs 4G and 5G on bands 2. And are shutting down 4G on band 5 to deploy 5G instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Mobility#Radio_frequenc...

You have the freedom to choose between 2 identical services and one inferior one. At least where I live, T-Mobile stops working if I head 10 miles west or north. There's even a dead zone half a mile from my home in the middle of a suburb of 100,000 people.

Free market has always been lip service in the US.

Infrastructure is a natural monopoly. Of course it isn't a free market, just like roads. I wish we had privatized roads, maybe we wouldn't be so car-dependent.

VZW is the inferior one where I live, but your point stands.

The gov broke up "the phone company" once before in the 80s. And here we are again looking to do the same?

Sure. Why? But let's pause for a moment and make any other systemic changes necessary not to end up here again so quickly.

I don't think we want to see national carriers broken up. If you don't think a mid-size carrier won't make fucking bank on roaming fees you haven't seen what a lot of them did in the '80s.

What really needs to be done is the monopolistic elements of cell phone service like spectrum, tower, and backhaul provided at cost by a neutral (state owned) entity and the retail services built on top of reselling that.

The barrier to entry on a ground up cell network is almost impossible to surmount without billions in capital but an MVNO that can work on the same cost basis and network as the national chains?

I absolutely do. In my area, the Verizon and ATT towers are so unbelievably crowded that we literally cannot use data anywhere in a 20+ mile radius. Maybe if there were 5 companies here instead of 3 we would have more -> less congested towers

You're asking to rely on a smaller company with fewer spectrum licenses, fewer towers, and therefore spottier coverage.

You might have more towers, or you might have all 5 companies on the same set of towers. Regardless, I think the spectrum is fully sold, so a challenger network isn't going to have spectrum to use, and if they get spectrum reallocated, existing towers that lose spectrum will be less effective.

Edit to add: If your towers are as congested as they seem, the carriers should be aware, and the problem is likely a lack of available tower sites; either because of geographical considerations, site owners don't want towers, or local regulators don't want towers. Additional networks won't really help with that either.

I think it is more likely that they'd all outsource tower construction to a small handful of companies and leave congestion roughly equivalent to the current state.

TBH, this happens a lot in large stable industries.

The solution to congested towers is to add more towers and reduce the power levels making the coverage of each smaller. In a crowded room you can increase the number of simultaneous conversations by having people stand closer to each other and reduce voice volume levels at the limit people are whispering into each other's ears. Similar idea works with wireless devices. devices.

>>> you haven't seen what a lot of them did in the '80s.

The commercial mobile phone network was invented in the 80's. Comparing market behaviors during the industry's infancy to the behaviors of established industries is wrong. The market took some time to figure out best practices, for consumers and industry health.

20's years ago roaming fees and texting fees where expensive, but then corporations figured out unlimited packages were more profitable. We pay a set price now for texting for the month, but it still costs the carriers money for each text we send. The carriers just hope that the power texters balance with the infrequent texters allowing them to turn a profit. The same with calling.

I don't know if regional networks could compete with national networks. I just want to reinforce that market practices at the industry's infancy aren't the same as they are now.

The cost per text is in the microfractions of a penny now, if that.

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