T-Mobile to acquire most of U.S. Cellular in $4.4B deal | Hacker News Reader

T-Mobile to acquire most of U.S. Cellular in $4.4B deal

cnbc.com

65 pointsjmsflknr45 comments

US Cellular has great coverage back home (Maine) but shoddy coverage where I live now (New York) and T-Mobile vice versa. I've been on Google Fi for the past ten years because it is the only option (at least when I last looked) that jumps seamlessly between the two, and at a reasonable enough price (for a guy who doesn't use much data). If this merger makes another carrier that has good service throughout the northeast, that could change the game for a lot of customers.

I'm not optimistic, though; the T-Mobile - Sprint merger was supposed to improve their service but ended up [0] jacking their prices.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40379028

At least as of 10-15 years ago US Cellular owned their rural markets and leased their urban markets. In NYC they are likely reselling Verizon’s network.

isn't google fi using t-mobile network as the backbone?

Yes, Google Fi is an MVNO of T-mobile's network.

Basically exclusively at this point.

Google Fi used T-Mobile, Sprint, and US Cellular behind the scenes. At least, they did at the time I signed up, which was why I signed up. Sprint merged into T-Mobile a few years ago; Fi dropped US Cellular last spring.

Since then, I've stayed on from inertia. I'll probably switch to T-Mobile's $15 / 5 GB plan soon, since it's half the price I'm paying for now-no-better service from Fi and I rarely use more than 1 GB per month.

> shoddy coverage where I live now (New York)

Do they have any coverage in New York? I thought they were using national roaming on AT&T there?

> US Cellular has great coverage back home (Maine) but shoddy coverage where I live now (New York) and T-Mobile vice versa.

US Cellular as of 2012 no longer operates in its headquarters city of Chicago. <https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-cellular-to-sell...>

Ah yes, more consolidation. I’m sure this will in no way end up being anti-consumer. Maybe they can rebrand as Bell System as well.

What’s the alternative? Continue to have worse rural coverage than Verizon and AT&T and hope for the best?

4.4 billion could also pay for a lot of rural cellular infrastructure. As in most of the US, but it wouldn’t directly bring in customers.

This deal makes a lot more sense from a business perspective. They simultaneously improve coverage and acquire customers. Building out is much more time consuming with uncertain return on investment.

Sure but only if regulators allow it.

Currently US Cellular and T-Mobile are profitable so they can each grow their business and make cellular service even more competitive. But post merger there’s few reasons to add a bunch of cell service anywhere.

Why wouldn’t regulators allow it? Since the Sprint merger this industry has been a three horse race. This doesn’t meaningfully remove competition for the average American consumer. What it does accomplish is strengthening T-Mobile’s rural coverage, which is really their last remaining major weakness. Now they can hopefully compete with Verizon and AT&T on more equal footing.

I suspect they will allow it, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

Each of them are already competitive enough to attract customers and be profitable. They might not be targeting you yet, but reinvesting into growth is all about finding new ways to cut into Verizon and AT&T and thus attract new customers. Post merge I suspect the goal will be cutting redundancy which is good for shareholders, but not really customers.

Considering the economics around cellular in rural developing nations, I suspect a US carrier could operate a nationwide network on something like single digit percentage of total customers. There’s a lot of room for competition.

As a current T-Mobile customer I am looking forward to the improved rural coverage this merger should provide. Not all mergers are bad. I used to be a Sprint customer and service is much better now that T-Mobile bought them.

There are still 2 remaining major carriers that will provide plenty of competition to keep T-Mobile in check.

The options aren’t just this or nothing. Just about anything can beat T-Mobile doing nothing.

So in terms of what benefits you get vs what it costs as the company’s merge you are IMO getting hosed on this deal.

I hope AT&T buys up T-Mobile soon. I've been yearning for the halcyon days.

T-Mobile is almost twice the size of AT&T.

A quick Google search says t mobile has about half the customers of att. But 75% of the revenue.

> T-Mobile is almost twice the size of AT&T.

But if T-Mobile bought AT&T, the back-to-the-future telephone monopoly wouldn't be so obvious.

They're just making a comment about the consolidation reversing the anti-trust breakup of Bell/AT&T.

I think Legacy AT&T made the wrong choices in divesture - they should have held on to WECo (and the labs) and the local BOC's - and spun off Long Lines - I dont know how they would have worked culturally though (or if it would have passed DOJ muster) because Long Lines was part of the core identity of AT&T.

this says AT&T is twice as big. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_network_operato...

are you measuring by something other than subscriber count, or is wikipedia wrong?

You measure by market cap. Acquisitions are paid in money, not subscribers.

Edit: Also wikipedia says that the AT&T stat includes "connected devices". If that really means they count all individual connected devices, thats a useless comparison. One customer can have multiple devices.

Also those connected devices can be cars and things that nobody gives a fuck about.

ATT spends its money paying for debt used to buy DirecTV and Time Warner at obscene prices, even though anyone with half a brain cell would have known those were legacy businesses were on their way out.

You would literally have a hard time paying me enough to deal with AT&T ever again. Worst CS experiences ever, and I've managed to cancel XM-Radio and AOL before.

Totally agree i was an ATT customer for nine year who paid on time each month and then their network went down almost nationwide and the next month they reported they were hacked. Probaby both events are separate from each other but i felt uneasy and reached out to ATT for decent customer svc to find none exists as..

- You want customer svc in person at a ATT store they say call customer service

- You call and you have to wait 30 to 60 minutes to speak with someone

- You can speak with someone quicker by saying cancel service yet they offered me only a $30 savings and the temporary rate would take affect 3 months later(?).

- If you cancel your service in a billing cycle they force you to pay the full month (just snatched the money they didnt deserve as i left them in beginning of the month from my account).

Mine was similar but worse than your last point... They messed up my billing three months in a row, then they cancelled it 3.5 weeks into a billing cycle for being "late" 3 months in a row, and billed at a pro-rated by the minute billing that was over a thousand dollars, when the full month was under $200 at the time.

No negotiation, just "pay us."

But Ma Bell was a different matter altogether. They were so great that everyone was their customer.

Lina Khan still wasting her time on big tech (to prove out her paper) while other industries like this, glasses etc slip out from under her

Monopolization in big tech is far more economically significant. The Big 3 cell carriers make $250 billion in annual wireless revenues combined. Their profit margin is about 15%. Google alone makes $300 billion in revenue, and has a net profit margin of 25-30%. Meta’s revenue is $130 billion and its profit margins are even higher, over 30%.

The tech industry is extracting vastly more monopoly profits from consumers than any other industry.

Better at extracting monopoly profits from consumers or from the advertisers?

Most of Google revenue is not made from US consumer. Telecom revenue on the other hand is mostly attributable to the US consumer, whom FTC is responsible to protect.

Half of Google’s revenue is from the U.S.

Used to be more like 40% US. I suspect it is closer to but still less than half now with stronger USD and US GDP growth relative to RoW.

Monopoly is about choice, not revenue. I don't care how little Comcast or Spectrum makes compared to Google or Facebook when I'm forced to use their terrible service because there are no other options available.

In antitrust law, the key focus is on the excess profits companies can obtain from consumers through their monopolistic conduct. Profits is more important to that analysis than choice. Tech companies are in a state of monopolistic competition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopolistic_competition. There’s theoretical choices, but because tech companies have big moats, those choices are largely imaginary and the companies enjoy significant monopolistic pricing power. Telecommunications service, by contrast, is largely fungible. Even a small amount of competition is sufficient to curb the ability of providers to exert significant monopoly power to achieve excess profits.

No one is forced to use G or M but they make better products. It is not monopoly. There are excellent alternatives available very easily.

Comcast, ATT are different. You simply dont have much of a choice even in cities meant for internet. San Jose has like 1Gbps ATT and 100Mbps Comcast as the only options.

Officials tend to focus on internet services because they are a potent way to influence public opinion and consequently election outcomes.

Telecom mergers are handled by the FCC and DOJ, not the FTC, and the FTC has been bringing plenty of other industries than tech.

Lina Khan is the enabler of these things.

Lina Khan has honestly been doing an amazing job in her position. She's taking on the amazons of the world and you're complaining she isn't doing enough? In a perfect world we could just clone her so she could also break up these other industries.

She's single-handedly responsible for denying public markets investors the ability to reap the benefits (by investing in) from all of the hot tech startups that are too-small to go public but would have been attractive acquisition candidates in the past.

Now Meta/GOOG/MSFT/AAPL/AMZN know they cannot acquire anything large, so these companies either sell to PE or continue to raise from huge late-stage funds.

I don't like a lot of what "big tech" does but this isn't a good situation either.

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