AT&T Threatening To Raise Rates After Merger Failure 247
An anonymous reader writes "In the quarterly earnings call following the defeat of his attempted acquisition of T-Mobile, AT&T's CEO Randall Stephenson was quick to lash out at the FCC, claiming that because his company was unable to acquire more spectrum to handle the explosion of mobile data users, AT&T would be forced to raise prices and take additional action against the highest data users. PCMag looked into the other side of the story, finding that 'The FCC spokesman ... pointed out that the FCC has approved more than 150 commercial mobile transaction applications in the past year and more than 300 in the past two years, "facts [that] were completely ignored in the [AT&T] conference call," he said.'"
Aren't you glad... (Score:5, Insightful)
... you can still switch to T-Mobile?
Time to call their bluff... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, in retaliation to the government blocking their merger with T-Mobile, they're going to drive their own customers away to their competitors by raising rates and penalizing them?
Yeah, good call AT&T. That'll teach....uh....them?
Childish Reaction (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bye Bye AT&T! -- Nope, Verizon raises price (Score:5, Insightful)
It's easy. Verizon and AT&T collude on prices. AT&T raises, then Verizon quickly follows...
Re:Aren't you glad... (Score:2, Insightful)
As a former customer of at&t that switched to t-mobile, then had to sweat through the fear of at&t eating my escape company, I feel like this is a double win.
att and the baby bells (Score:5, Insightful)
just how did we let this happen AGAIN?
in the 80's we fought hard to break up ATT.
now, they're back again as a single entity.
how did that happen?? and why did we care back then but don't really care, now?
what changed over the last 30 or so years?
Re:Bye Bye AT&T! -- Nope, Verizon raises price (Score:3, Insightful)
Oligopolies almost always suck in customer satisfaction, always have, and always will.
Which is exactly how America keeps getting it wrong - the government should do nothing to make their lives easier - keep a low bar to new companies/investors who want to enter the market and offer something new/better. That's real Capitalism, not this bogus Corporate Welfare system.
Re:Time to call their bluff... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not if AT&T changes their terms (Score:5, Insightful)
You signed a contract with AT&T. They can either abide by that contract for the full two years and allow you to keep the same rates, or they can allow you to leave with no penalty.
Re:Corporate greed??? (Score:5, Insightful)
What I enjoy most is the retards that think the latter is somehow an excuse for the former.
I'm so heartily sick of people excusing anti-social behavior as "human nature", regardless of whether it's in an individual or organization. Just because there may be an instinctual drive to hoard more than one person needs to the detriment of others around you does not make it right. I have an instinctual urge to either beat the crap out of my boss or run from him screaming whenever he calls me to his office unexpectedly, but I doubt that very many people would just say "Eh, that's just human nature!" if I did either of those things next time I get a message from him.
Lucky for us, we have evolved a rational brain that helps us see beyond ourselves and our own situation. Maybe that's the problem? Maybe those greedy among us just haven't finished evolving beyond their own self-centeredness?
Re:Yeah, that will show... (Score:5, Insightful)
It'll teach their customers a lesson - to switch to another carrier.
The idea that AT&T could ask customers to pay even more while at the same time offering such a crappy data network is patently absurd.
Re:Ah, nothing like corporate greed (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's ridiculous that AT&T calls their HSPA+ as 4G, but, as an AT&T customer with a "4G" phone, I must say that it is noticeably faster than an iPhone 4, which is the more traditional 3G. It has also spread to a lot more places than 3G used to be at; it now blankets the town that I grew up in when 3G hardly even reached my parent's house before the "4G" rollout.
In fact, it actually got so good at my parent's house that their MicroCell (the internet powered, fake tower for your phones in your house when service isn't actually good enough as-is) became an issue because the real signal would fight it for control on the phone, which was killing their phone's batteries.
Also, since I have moved away from the iPhone 4, I have noticed that my dropped calls have gone away significantly, except in one dead zone near my [highly trafficked, and highly populated] local grocery store. That is to say, they're not gone entirely, but they have been significantly reduced.
Now, with all of that, I will turn around and say, "screw you, AT&T." Their entire reason for buying T-Mobile was to remove the only significant GSM competitor in the US. They have proven that they do not compete on price, rather Verizon and AT&T play a cat-and-mouse game of raising prices, while the other follows shortly afterward. First, they removed Unlimited Data before any other network because they had refused to upgrade their own network while making significant profits. Recently, they raised the stakes again by adding a GB for an extra $5, but removing the existing plans. So, we went from $30 Unlimited Data to $25 2GB data, to $30 3GB data in the course of a year and a half. Only AT&T and Verizon could think that is reasonable. And the low-end data is an aggressive slap to the face. Originally 200 MB for $15, to 300 MB for $20. The minimum cost of entry is $20 for a nearly worthless data plan? My mother, of all people, gets too close to 200-300 MB usage to make that a reasonable plan because overages cost as much as the data plan for the cheaper option, and $10/GB for the higher plan.
AT&T can compete without the merger, and they are doing quite well now that Verizon forced their hands by pushing LTE, which was only because, frankly, CDMA data speeds are garbage. They are just sticking it to the FCC so that people blame them when they raise rates. However, the fact is, anyone with any knowledge of the business knows that it is a bogus money grab that needs to be stopped before it gets even further out of hand.
Re:Bye Bye AT&T! -- Nope, Verizon raises price (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you do about those industries that require such a huge investment of capital to get started and such high fixed running costs that it's basically impossible to start up a new company without prohibitively large amounts of capital?
Imagine, for instance, a world in which there are no regulations on telecoms other than the easements required to put lines on government-owned land. Now you want to start up a telecom company, but you don't have the startup capital to set up lines all around the country, so instead you create a plan to set them up all around your town. But the thing is, even if your service is somewhat cheaper or better, nobody wants to buy it, because they want to call people in both Boston and Los Angeles. You could set the price so low that people in your town would buy it, but then you'd be losing money every month (due to the high fixed running costs) and have already burnt through your startup capital. You could negotiate a peering agreement with the big companies that control the telecom backbone, but since your service is much less valuable to them as theirs is to yours, they're going to charge you more than you can afford. Being a shrewd businessperson, you make this analysis before spending cash setting up telephone lines in your town, and don't start the company. And since all other businesspeople in your universe make the same choice, there can be no new sellers in the market, leaving the oligopoly intact. Which leaves everyone else either doing without whatever the oligopoly is selling, or going with the least bad option, and the members of the oligopoly trying to ensure that the least bad option for the customers is lousy service at a way-too-high price.
That's real capitalism, not the bogus libertarian fantasy.
Re:Bye Bye AT&T! -- Nope, Verizon raises price (Score:5, Insightful)
Oligopolies almost always suck in customer satisfaction, always have, and always will.
Which is exactly how America keeps getting it wrong - the government should do nothing to make their lives easier - keep a low bar to new companies/investors who want to enter the market and offer something new/better. That's real Capitalism, not this bogus Corporate Welfare system.
However, the American government is itself an oligopoly (two parties that will do their best to keep any others from getting into the game), so expect shitty customer (citizen) satisfaction, i.e. more of the same.
Re:Yeah, that will show... (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea that AT&T could ask customers to pay even more while at the same time offering such a crappy data network is patently absurd.
No, the idea is entirely believable. In fact, I would question it if I heard anything to the contrary. This is how big business in America works these days: Take all you can, give nothing back. Or was that pirates? Close enough...
Re:Yeah, that will show... (Score:3, Insightful)
this blog comment says it all (Score:5, Insightful)
Original story here [reuters.com], comment is the one dated 2011-09-01 at 14:55:
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.
Re:att and the baby bells (Score:2, Insightful)
From the same Wikipedia article you're quoting:
"The Bell System divestiture, or the breakup of AT&T, was initiated by the filing in 1974 by the U.S. Department of Justice of an antitrust lawsuit against AT&T.[1] The case, United States v. AT&T, led to a settlement finalized on January 8, 1982"
The ball was rolling well before Reagan's election, and the result was final less than a year into his first term.
And it's not that Reagan did something in particular with regards to AT&T. It's the entire mindset that he championed, and which the Republicans continue to champion to this day. A mindset which puts profit above all else, and pushes the foolish (intentionally dishonest?) notion that if you make the 1% super-duper-rich, some of that money will trickle down to the rest of us. A mindset that says taxes should always go down, the government should always be weaker, and corporations should always be more powerful.