I know what you mean but I'm not certain Spring was viable long term against Verizon and Sprint. Hopefully this won't be the end of T-Mobile being somewhat more pro consumer.
I was told by a T-Mobile person that they are not closing the T-Mobile stores and the cuts will come from the Sprint side. Hoping that's true since Sprint is absolutely horrific.
Sprint was on the verge of going out of business, they basically had no choice but to approve the merger, sprint's assets would have been sold either way.
I think this is generally a good thing for consumers. One strong company with a solid network can provide more effective competition against Verizon and AT&T than two weak companies with crappy networks can separately.
Well, one thing is being profitable, and the other is how much money you can spend "right now". AT&T is posted Q3 revenues of 44.6 billion [1], and T-Mobile of 11.1 billion [2]; that's a significant margin. Building network infrastructure is not cheap and the move to 5G will be even more expensive, but users move to the network that is better for them _right now_.
No it's not, now T-Mobile will have as much leverage as Verizon and AT&T and will become horrible like them. T-Mobile so far is nice here, but for example in Germany is one of the despised companies.
The companies don't need to merge to become better for customers. They could for example have agreements and share their towers to improve each other's coverage.
Can you explain why? I am not German but I have fairly significant amount of infrastructure colo'd in Germany - DTAG/T-Mobile/T-Online/whatever is obnoxiously bad.
They refuse to peer with neighbouring networks, they hold back deployment of local connectivity (DSL is still the best you can do in 2019?), they demand the doubly charge in the way of Netflix v Comcast.
Sending data to/from with any customers on their network (which, of course, considering how big they are...) costs so much more per megabit due to this bullshit.
Despite that they are still regarded as one of the least bad telcos because their customer service sucks much less than that of their competitors (e.g. Telefonica O2, which is a large one, was basically impossible to contact for most customers for months at a time because of "technical difficulties"). Their mobile network is comparably good and all in all they are seen as the premium option on the German market.
People downvoting this are not seeing the whole picture. Yes, 4 competitors is better than 3. The problem is that Sprint is no longer a competitor and is on a downward spiral. Without a massive cash injection, they no longer had a viable path to catch up. Their service is bad because they don’t have enough cash coming in to improve their infrastructure, and customers aren’t giving them cash because their service is bad. So they charge less, and get further behind.
T-mobile is the underdog. They are making a remarkable recovery and putting up a fight against VZW and ATT. But they still have coverage and congestion issues that are dealbreakers for many potential customers. They have already put pressure on VZW and ATT to lower prices and start bundling third party perks this year. Giving TMO an infrastructure and subscriber boost by allowing them to acquire Sprint is going to put a lot more pressure on the other two, especially once their 600mhz Band 71 rollout is done and consumers upgrade to newer chipsets that support it, essentially solving their infamous building penetration problems.
With Sprint’s assets and subscriber base, they’ll go from being the underdog to being a serious threat to both ATT and VZW. Instead of thinking that we went from 4 players to 3, think of it as though we went from 2 players to 3.
Edit: Actually it’s better than that. The approval requires TMO to provide Dish with spectrum access for 5 years and operate as an MVNO while Dish builds out it’s own nationwide 5G network to go independent. That means this deal puts 4 players in the market, as opposed to 2.75 players if it was blocked.
I would love to see a startup completely change the game in this space. Google is the most techy company that I’ve seen have an actual chance at carving away some customers from the big carriers with Fi. Of course, they are piggy backing on Sprint/T-Mobile infra, but they have a compelling pitch.
I also use Ting! Never met another person that used it. Hands down the best service plan for people that don't use much data/text/minutes. I recently switched my wife to Mint Mobile because she uses a lot of data, and so far that has been a good experience.
Having been with all the usual providers I feel T-mobile sucks the least, but on a wim I got a Ting SIM card for a spare phone and I ended up using it a lot. I love the transparency and have no complaints so far.
I'm the reverse. I use Mint and my wife uses Ting. Having previously been with Ting, I've cut my monthly bills in half, from ~$30 to ~$15, with 3GB of data a month, which is more than enough for me. Granted, with Mint you have to prepay for a year to get that rate. But it's on the T-Mobile network, and I can't complain about the coverage!
I guess I meant spectrum. Spectrum is far from cheap. You have to buy it from whoever won it at auction. The spectrum suitable for cellular signals is limited.
Which is why this merger makes sense, I honestly believe there is only enough spectrum for three truly competitive physical carriers (networks) in the states.
I really hope Starlink starts a boom in low orbit, low ping, internet providers... Because that's the only way we're going to see any competition emerge in wireless telecommunications. This merger is unlikely to do anyone good, IMHO, and is very likely going to make prices rise in a few years once the FTC isn't watching them. Look at the very expected level of bullshit AT&T has done with Dish Network's pricing...
If the government wanted competition they'd figure out a way to make starting a new wireless carrier cheap by providing network, power, and physical locations for startups. Reducing the barrier of entry enables more competition; consolidating spectrum into even fewer hands, more wealthy hands, does not.
Its not hard to get any of those things - heck, for about 150k you can build a site greenfield with nothing there - but consider that Crown Castle, American Tower and a couple other much smaller ones, own 95% of tower sites out there - its not as if T-Mobile is renting from Verizon, most of the big carriers dont own their own sites anymore, and have not owned them for decades.
The real thing we're short of is spectrum, not cell sites. I'm skeptical that satellite will fix any of this, they have the same spectrum shortage issues too, with infrastructure that costs gobs more.
This is a perfect example of how Silicon Valley mentality and technocratic solutions often overcomplicate, to a ridiculous degree, the mostly solved challenge of how to get obtainable and affordable high-speed internet in the United States.
It's called municipal broadband.[1] Not everything has to be disrupted the way that SF startup cats want to. There is legitimately no reason you couldn't de-privatize spectrum and return control to local stakeholders in the same manner.
My municipality cannot even deliver water without making our kids mentally disabled from lead poisoning. Not sure I want them with a monopoly on telecoms too.
The average American "small-government" ruling class mentality chronically starves public goods and the commons from widely available resources, and then points to the failure of said services and goods as a reason why government cannot work. Eliminate this vicious circle and you see massive benefits; Chattanooga's municipal ISP has been extremely successful and popular.
Also, municipal broadband or publicly owned broadband would not, on its own, confer a monopoly. There are numerous examples of industries and market sectors where a public option coexists with market options. This is commonly seen as the most likely solution to the healthcare crisis in the United States today.
> The average American "small-government" ruling class mentality chronically starves public goods and the commons from widely available resources, and then points to the failure of said services and goods as a reason why government cannot work. Eliminate this vicious circle and you see massive benefits; Chattanooga's municipal ISP has been extremely successful and popular.
You can't just use this as a blanket defense. There are plenty of inept and corrupt local governments that are well-funded as well.
> There are numerous examples of industries and market sectors where a public option coexists with market options
It's not rightfully a "public option" if one of those is funded by taxpayer money and is capable of operating at a loss, whereas the private ones have to sustain themselves.
> chronically starves public goods and the commons from widely available resources, and then points to the failure of said services and goods as a reason why government cannot work
This is the lie that people trot out to explain the myriad failures of American government. Our schools suck because they’re “underfunded.” Oh, actually, they’re among the best funded: https://images.app.goo.gl/r4QwEWefuP34DZSj8. Our public transit sucks because it’s “underfunded.” Oh, the New York Subway receives far more public funding than say London’s tube: https://nypost.com/2018/11/06/the-cure-for-new-yorks-ailing-.... If California could build HSR for what it costs France, half the line would already be done for the $6 billion already spent. There isn’t a failure of government that can’t be explained away by lying about its funding levels.
That first graph has no meaning without some granularity. Plot success of school against actual funding.
It could easily represent 9 schools with 1000 per student and one school with 9000000 per student and result in 90 percent failing schools.
ERCOT (Texas electrical grid system operator) is essentially a mutual company/co-op structured as a non-profit, very similar to muni broadband.
"ERCOT is a membership-based 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation, governed by a board of directors and subject to oversight by the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Texas Legislature. Its members include consumers, cooperatives, generators, power marketers, retail electric providers, investor-owned electric utilities, transmission and distribution providers and municipally owned electric utilities." [1]
Yes, that sounds like an ideal organization for connecting municipalities that own right of way and own or eventually take ownership of the fiber on their poles.
> water consumption is down, there are still an estimated 240,000 water main breaks per year in the United States, wasting over two trillion gallons of treated drinking water
> While drinking water infrastructure is funded primarily through a rate-based system, the investment has been inadequate for decades and will continue to be underfunded without significant changes as the revenue generated will fall short as needs grow.
Doing awful compared to what? The person I replied to said their municipal water supply was poisoning kids, which is an anecdote that doesn't represent most municipal water supplies.
Now you're moving the goal posts to water main breaks for some reason when the point in the first place was that municipal internet is successful.
The American Society of Civil Engineers gives our water infrastructure a “D.” That’s what I mean by “doing awful.” Poisoning kids with lead is one particular problem, that’s actually fairly common: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lead-in-americas-water-systems-...
The trillions of gallons of water lost to leaks is another piece of the puzzle, wasting a natural resource due to poor maintenance.
Municipal sewer systems are another huge problem. They release enormous amounts of untreated sewage into waterways each year, because municipalities haven’t invested in capacity and rainwater separation: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/09/ameri...
There are isolated instances of successful municipal broadband, but hardly enough to say that the concept is “successful.” (We have some municipal cable systems on the eastern shore of Maryland. They were good at one time, but underinvestment has resulted in speeds falling behind over the years. Underinvestment is the same problem that plagues municipal water utilities.)
Our privatized system does pretty well, doing better than France, Germany, the U.K., and Italy (which together have half the EU’s population). Most of the top countries, like Singapore and Norway, similarly rely on private companies. Part of Sweden (Stockholm) arguably has a municipal system, except it’s not like one that would ever be politically viable in the US. (The utility is publicly owned but not politically operated. They built out based on revenue potential and demand, not mandates to cover everyone. Imagine a US municipal utility that covered rich neighborhoods first and took 20 years to get around to wiring up poor neighborhoods.)
It‘s worth noting that ASCE has an incentive to parrot out bad infrastructure reports, since the employment of their members can be boosted by big pushes to repair „bad“ infrastructure.
A few years ago Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns pointed out that the ASCE was asking to invest more in roads than the economic benefits that would be realized from them, even according to ASCE‘s numbers. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/3/12/revisiting-the...
> There are isolated instances of successful municipal broadband
There are lots of successes, Colorado, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Chattanooga etc. and those are just in the US. It seems like you have some sort of axe to grind, going on huge rants about water and sewers.
> Most of the top countries, like Singapore and Norway, similarly rely on private companies
Interesting you mention that, since the government layed down all the fiber and lots of small startup companies just ran the endpoints. This example couldn't be more contrary to what you are claiming.
Doesn’t matter how many people use the pipes. They get bad over time. Right now a lot of the shit in the suburbs we built for the GIs and boomers is old enough to start falling apart, and public budgets have been cut to maintenance mode.
I used to be a proponent of municipal broadband, and I still am, but as a person now living on the outer edge of a minor municipality, and looking to move further from municipal jurisdiction, I personally find offerings like Starlink a solution to a problem municipal broadband can't solve. At some point there isn't a city that provides utilities to an otherwise inhabitable location, but with existing well water and septic technology combined with emerging renewable energy options, a low-latency high-bandwidth internet option is the last piece of the puzzle to allow a rural technologist to live the life they want.
Both these companies are jokes. I had 45 prepaid 4g a month with Sprint and switched to the a prepaid program with Verizon that costs the same amount but gives me 16gb a month, and I actually have service on the islands.
Quick question. Why do people continue to use Verizon or AT&T when Sprint or T-Mobile are so much cheaper? It looks like I could cut my Verizon bill in half by switching to T Mo.
Personally I typically don't buy anything based solely on price. For me I could save ~$3/mo on tmo, however after a month with tmo I found VZ coverage is well worth $3 more.
T-Mobile might be cheaper but their coverage sucks in Wisconsin. In my previous experience with them, if you were not in Milwaukee or on the freeway you are out of luck.maybe it has improved but I won't bother with them.
I get sub-2 to 3 Mbps speeds on a postpaid business-type T-Mobile plan due to congestion/oversubscription. This is not in a rural wasteland, but in a major tech urban city.
Verizon and AT&T do just as badly, but not nearly as much (~8Mbps). Again, congestion, not because there are no towers nearby. I am on business postpaid higher tier plans, and should have tower priority according to them.
Sprint coverage disappears completely a few minutes after exiting major cities.
AT&T has a disgusting transparent proxy that breaks SSL half the time (if you try to negotiate purely-modern ciphers, your SSL connects typically fail) and modifies random files/headers in transit if plaintext. They do not/will not remove it. Plaintext HTTP exits through one IP (shared by an insane amount of people, seemingly), and all other traffic that it can't tamper with or doesn't know how to tamper with exits via another IP. This breaks some things.
Incidentally, I am typing this on a hotspot, and as my bus enters downtown CBD loading web pages (including HN, the lightest page of them all) ha started to take 10-30 seconds.
It really does come down to coverage and (as you say) congestion/oversubscription.
I've used a cheap ($30/mo) prepaid plan on TMo for the past several years and it's only gotten better in my city. Just ran speed tests on 3 different sites from my office (with passable signal strength but not "full bars" and without checking actual numbers).
All three claimed 24-25Mbps download and 5-8Mbps upload with 65-75ms latency. This is more than enough for my cell phone, but I'd imagine any drops or latency would be a lot more noticeable if I was tethered to a laptop.
I guess for me, the main uses of cellular data are web browsing and media streaming when I'm not at home or at the office (when I'd be on WiFi instead). This is plenty for me and I even get coverage outside of the city these days. 5 years ago I might not have said the same.
I hope this doesn't kill / raise prices for the MVNOs that run on the Sprint network, specifically Tello. I pay $17 a month total for my and my wife's phones and I would hate to lose that.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadThe amount of spectrum that Tmo/Sprint will hold merged exceeds either Verizon or AT&T at last check.
[1]: https://investors.att.com/~/media/Files/A/ATT-IR/financial-r...
[2]: https://s22.q4cdn.com/194431217/files/doc_financials/2019/q3...
The companies don't need to merge to become better for customers. They could for example have agreements and share their towers to improve each other's coverage.
that is bullshit
They refuse to peer with neighbouring networks, they hold back deployment of local connectivity (DSL is still the best you can do in 2019?), they demand the doubly charge in the way of Netflix v Comcast.
Sending data to/from with any customers on their network (which, of course, considering how big they are...) costs so much more per megabit due to this bullshit.
T-mobile is the underdog. They are making a remarkable recovery and putting up a fight against VZW and ATT. But they still have coverage and congestion issues that are dealbreakers for many potential customers. They have already put pressure on VZW and ATT to lower prices and start bundling third party perks this year. Giving TMO an infrastructure and subscriber boost by allowing them to acquire Sprint is going to put a lot more pressure on the other two, especially once their 600mhz Band 71 rollout is done and consumers upgrade to newer chipsets that support it, essentially solving their infamous building penetration problems.
With Sprint’s assets and subscriber base, they’ll go from being the underdog to being a serious threat to both ATT and VZW. Instead of thinking that we went from 4 players to 3, think of it as though we went from 2 players to 3.
Edit: Actually it’s better than that. The approval requires TMO to provide Dish with spectrum access for 5 years and operate as an MVNO while Dish builds out it’s own nationwide 5G network to go independent. That means this deal puts 4 players in the market, as opposed to 2.75 players if it was blocked.
If the government wanted competition they'd figure out a way to make starting a new wireless carrier cheap by providing network, power, and physical locations for startups. Reducing the barrier of entry enables more competition; consolidating spectrum into even fewer hands, more wealthy hands, does not.
The real thing we're short of is spectrum, not cell sites. I'm skeptical that satellite will fix any of this, they have the same spectrum shortage issues too, with infrastructure that costs gobs more.
It's called municipal broadband.[1] Not everything has to be disrupted the way that SF startup cats want to. There is legitimately no reason you couldn't de-privatize spectrum and return control to local stakeholders in the same manner.
[1]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/chattanooga-has-its-own-broadb...
Also, municipal broadband or publicly owned broadband would not, on its own, confer a monopoly. There are numerous examples of industries and market sectors where a public option coexists with market options. This is commonly seen as the most likely solution to the healthcare crisis in the United States today.
You can't just use this as a blanket defense. There are plenty of inept and corrupt local governments that are well-funded as well.
> There are numerous examples of industries and market sectors where a public option coexists with market options
It's not rightfully a "public option" if one of those is funded by taxpayer money and is capable of operating at a loss, whereas the private ones have to sustain themselves.
This is the lie that people trot out to explain the myriad failures of American government. Our schools suck because they’re “underfunded.” Oh, actually, they’re among the best funded: https://images.app.goo.gl/r4QwEWefuP34DZSj8. Our public transit sucks because it’s “underfunded.” Oh, the New York Subway receives far more public funding than say London’s tube: https://nypost.com/2018/11/06/the-cure-for-new-yorks-ailing-.... If California could build HSR for what it costs France, half the line would already be done for the $6 billion already spent. There isn’t a failure of government that can’t be explained away by lying about its funding levels.
"ERCOT is a membership-based 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation, governed by a board of directors and subject to oversight by the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Texas Legislature. Its members include consumers, cooperatives, generators, power marketers, retail electric providers, investor-owned electric utilities, transmission and distribution providers and municipally owned electric utilities." [1]
[1] http://www.ercot.com/about
Also why would municipal broadband be a monopoly? There are lots of municipal broadband projects that are one of many ISPs.
This isn't a theoretical prediction of the future, there are already lots of examples.
> water consumption is down, there are still an estimated 240,000 water main breaks per year in the United States, wasting over two trillion gallons of treated drinking water
> While drinking water infrastructure is funded primarily through a rate-based system, the investment has been inadequate for decades and will continue to be underfunded without significant changes as the revenue generated will fall short as needs grow.
Now you're moving the goal posts to water main breaks for some reason when the point in the first place was that municipal internet is successful.
Safe Drinking Water Act violations are rampant among municipal water utilities: https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/city-new-york-comply-federa... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/12/climate/drinking-water-sa...
The trillions of gallons of water lost to leaks is another piece of the puzzle, wasting a natural resource due to poor maintenance.
Municipal sewer systems are another huge problem. They release enormous amounts of untreated sewage into waterways each year, because municipalities haven’t invested in capacity and rainwater separation: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/09/ameri...
There are isolated instances of successful municipal broadband, but hardly enough to say that the concept is “successful.” (We have some municipal cable systems on the eastern shore of Maryland. They were good at one time, but underinvestment has resulted in speeds falling behind over the years. Underinvestment is the same problem that plagues municipal water utilities.)
Most successful broadband networks around the world aren’t municipal services. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/10/uk-slips-...
Our privatized system does pretty well, doing better than France, Germany, the U.K., and Italy (which together have half the EU’s population). Most of the top countries, like Singapore and Norway, similarly rely on private companies. Part of Sweden (Stockholm) arguably has a municipal system, except it’s not like one that would ever be politically viable in the US. (The utility is publicly owned but not politically operated. They built out based on revenue potential and demand, not mandates to cover everyone. Imagine a US municipal utility that covered rich neighborhoods first and took 20 years to get around to wiring up poor neighborhoods.)
A few years ago Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns pointed out that the ASCE was asking to invest more in roads than the economic benefits that would be realized from them, even according to ASCE‘s numbers. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/3/12/revisiting-the...
There are lots of successes, Colorado, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Chattanooga etc. and those are just in the US. It seems like you have some sort of axe to grind, going on huge rants about water and sewers.
> Most of the top countries, like Singapore and Norway, similarly rely on private companies
Interesting you mention that, since the government layed down all the fiber and lots of small startup companies just ran the endpoints. This example couldn't be more contrary to what you are claiming.
edit: I've always avoided AT&T because they're always the highest priced offering even after bonuses.
Within a year or so, T-mobile moved all of Metro’s customers to its network and took advantage of MetroPCS’s bandwidth.
Sprint kept Nextel’s network limping along for years.
Verizon and AT&T do just as badly, but not nearly as much (~8Mbps). Again, congestion, not because there are no towers nearby. I am on business postpaid higher tier plans, and should have tower priority according to them.
Sprint coverage disappears completely a few minutes after exiting major cities.
AT&T has a disgusting transparent proxy that breaks SSL half the time (if you try to negotiate purely-modern ciphers, your SSL connects typically fail) and modifies random files/headers in transit if plaintext. They do not/will not remove it. Plaintext HTTP exits through one IP (shared by an insane amount of people, seemingly), and all other traffic that it can't tamper with or doesn't know how to tamper with exits via another IP. This breaks some things.
Incidentally, I am typing this on a hotspot, and as my bus enters downtown CBD loading web pages (including HN, the lightest page of them all) ha started to take 10-30 seconds.
I've used a cheap ($30/mo) prepaid plan on TMo for the past several years and it's only gotten better in my city. Just ran speed tests on 3 different sites from my office (with passable signal strength but not "full bars" and without checking actual numbers).
All three claimed 24-25Mbps download and 5-8Mbps upload with 65-75ms latency. This is more than enough for my cell phone, but I'd imagine any drops or latency would be a lot more noticeable if I was tethered to a laptop.
I guess for me, the main uses of cellular data are web browsing and media streaming when I'm not at home or at the office (when I'd be on WiFi instead). This is plenty for me and I even get coverage outside of the city these days. 5 years ago I might not have said the same.