AT&T Stops T-Mobile Merger Bid With the FCC 169
An anonymous reader writes Relationships are tough and it looks like AT&T and T-Mobile's has stopped before it even started. From the article: 'AT&T and T-Mobile have announced that they will remove their pending applications to the FCC for their merger bid. This comes after statements from the FCC chairman 'strongly opposing the merger'. In doing so, AT&T has agreed to pay T-Mobile 4 Billion US dollars to cover accounting and other costs that this may have caused. While AT&T would still like to merge, it is unlikely that they will gain antitrust clearance from the Department of Justice. It's the antitrust aspect that this is mostly about, in that AT&T has said that they want this move to free up the FCC to consider all options, and focus both AT&T and T-Mobile on the pending antitrust.'"
Re:$4 Billion? (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't think the issue is how big were their costs but why they paid $4B. The article makes it sound like they just felt bad for the company and decided to give them the $4B. But obviously it is some under the table payment for something rather substantial as $4B is like the yearly revenue of a giant multinational company.
It is not something that a company can just afford to give away or even write into a contract as a "if things don't work out" clause.
Re:Corporate Dead Pool 2012 (Score:2, Interesting)
Which is why Apple will shockingly buy them and then make them the only domestic iPhone carrier once their deals with other companies are over.
re-upping my contract with T-Mo (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been with T-Mo for almost 15 years, and this is good news. Not great news -- I'm sure there will be more trouble for T-mo in some form or another -- but at least not this year, and probably not next. But you know what this does mean? I'm re-upping my contract with T-Mo. When T-Mo came calling last year (one of several "PLEEZ don't jump ship" themed customer retention campaigns) I told them desire to have a GSM phone was only trumped by a desire never to be an AT&T customer again. As long as the death star doesn't gobble them up, T-Mo can keep having my money.
Oh, and btw -- T-Mo coverage is more than adequate across the US & Canada, (Iirc I still don't have coverage in rural Neb and WY, but no trouble anywhere else), data services are cheap, and they actually have decent humans in the corp stores. T-Mo isn't making money hand over fist, but they're doing _ok_, and that's good. In these times, in this economy, I want to give my money to an org that's doing _ok_: neither going out of business, nor robbing me. You hear that, T-Mo? "Ok" and "staying in business without f__king your customers" is the new black. So keep on keeping on.
Re:Corporate Dead Pool 2012 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Corporate Dead Pool 2012 (Score:5, Interesting)
Their coverage might not be all that great in the middle of the desert like Verizon is, but I've got Verizon in one pocket (courtesy of work), and T-Mo in the other. In the New York suburb where I live, coverage is mostly comparable; places where T-Mo drops the call, my Verizon phone is showing less than -100dbm coverage itself. Also, while I've found Verizon to have a bit better latency numbers, my download speed on T-Mo 3G is sometimes double Verizon's numbers, likely due to the fact that there are relatively fewer people saturating the backhaul.
As for phones, fine, they don't have the iPhone officially. They do, however, unofficially support unlocked iPhone models on their network. T-Mobile has the Blackberry Torch now, though using a Blackberry as an example did cause a slight lol. They have more Android phones than anyone else, in more form factors, and if memory serves more WP7 phones as well.
While I unfortunately agree that T-Mo's future is questionable, I think that making it well known that they're officially not becoming AT&T will likely help spur sales. I knew a lot of people who were considering going to T-Mo, but didn't want to become AT&T customers. This may restore enough confidence to make the growth start happening for them.