What about people who don’t live in NYC? That is only 290 Million people, yet all of the people who live in NYC assume the world is about themselves. Should they have to buy a phone from only three US carriers, one who has already shown how it puts pricing above quality? People forget that ATT already has the largest share of spectrum, they just are horrible at using it efficiently, due to previously poorly managed mergers of countless other carriers, lastly AT&T Wireless and Cingular. Why would this merger be any better?

They talk of adding 5,000 jobs from overseas that are low paying, care rep jobs. What about the 30,000 people who are duplicated across the US in high paying technical positions that will have to compete for their jobs? Part of the savings of having two companies merge is the reduction in the overlapping positions, to which in wireless, since all they needed was spectrum, you no longer need two engineers to handle one network. ATT refuses to talk about those positions.

I also hate to break the news to you, the network won’t become better with the merger, it will get a lot worse before it could ever get better. That is because you are going to try and add spectrum to the issue when the reality is that this about backhaul, engineering philosophy, optimization techniques and know how. If ATT cannot make what they have work, getting another overlaying network will only complicate things, let alone the mix of billing, back end and multiple vendors.

When ATT consumed Alltel properties in the Rocky Mountain region from the Verizon divestitures, they forced all customers to get UMTS phones and no longer provided GSM coverage in large areas of Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. Since they already stated they would be shutting down the UMTS network on AWS, converting that to LTE, what will happen to rural communities again, who don’t have those devices? They will be forced to buy another, or extend and already long contract.

As for MetroPCS and Leap, once again you are metro focused. They don’t have coverage across nearly 70% of the US, only in major metro areas and not all that many of those. Virgin is really Sprint, so what difference is there on what they cover, which again in many markets is very dismal.

So you should change the title to something like “Why I lose out, in my own sorely informed opinion.”

Now, with the disclaimer out of the way, I’d like to offer the observation that mobile telephony is an incredibly capital-intensive enterprise, and that all the carriers are struggling with the transition from the old days of “Ma Bell” and the black dial phone in your hallway when all that investment was amortized over a period of 25 years–now it’s more like five or less. If you have a lot of carriers competing in the same markets, there’s going to be a great deal of duplication of the same investment. Somebody’s eventually going to pay the cost of that, and inevitably it’s going to be either the customers or the taxpayers–which really means all of us either way.

Then there’s the aesthetic issue. You know all those ugly antennae sprouting from utility poles, the roofs of buildings and big towers build just for the purpose? Think of how much worse it would look if there were twice as many of them! Meanwhile, we have the government glomming onto more and more of the RF spectrum and auctioning it off to the phone companies, often for duplication of service in the same places. Not only is this obsoleting most of the wireless microphones in current use, but they’re even displacing military communications for the industry’s overarching appetite for bandwidth.

It might be heresy to say it, but there might be some virtues to a regulated monopoly (or a regulated oligarchy)–as long as the regulators actually do their jobs.

In this fight only guys with black coat win….as always

Just what they said already – sitting there while your cell provider buys mine so that you can have better service instead of switching to my provider?

“And second, it’s shortsighted to look at today’s pricing and market and use them as strict guides for the future.”

Nobody is using today’s pricing and market as a strict guide for the future. On the other hand, we know from marketing that the two major strategies are differentiation and low-cost. It only stands to reason that letting a differentiation company buy a low-cost company can only raise prices and low competition. Further, relying on MVNOs (Virgin) or regional carriers like MetroPCS to undercut the big three after you’ve already let AT&T take out one whole backbone provider and disrupter is a little silly. Remember, T-Mobile is cheaper, it offered Android FIRST of any US carrier, and it hit HSPA+ first.

“Meanwhile, there are some things that the Feds could extract from AT&T that would be better for consumers, even if it means less competition…”

No doubt the FCC and DOJ could wring some concessions from AT&T. The question would be whether those would offset the decline in competition. I think the consensus may be that concessions wouldn’t sufficiently offset the decline.