I would prefer to see Verizon or AT&T broken up before T-Mobile is. TMobile wasn't anywhere near as big as Verizon or AT&T pre-Sprint merger. And they still aren't as big.
Maybe at this point we should be talking about all three major players as opposed to selecting one victim for partition. They all suck hard. They all stand to benefit from TMobile raising prices, because it will give them an excuse to do the same.
I am personally tired of the oligopolies in US. Bring in some competition. I thought the free market was a thing here ( or is it just lip service ) .
Realistically the huge capital expenses involved in building reliable nationwide 5G networks make it impossible to have more than three carriers. Breaking up one of the incumbent carriers could only be done along regional lines, so regardless of where you live you wouldn't actually have more choices.
we don't need 5G nationwide. You (or someone copying and pasting you) have said this two or three times in this thread, and i am not sure why we need to be educated that there's "huge capital expenses" for building out a network that requires orders of magnitude more points of presence than the LTE networks. None of the three actually have unlimited service (at least on post-paid) as an option, so giving us "gigabit cellular" at a huge capital expense doesn't make sense to us, as consumers.
The only way it makes sense is if the wireless companies have other customers that are served by having orders of magnitude additional antennas everywhere.
And regardless of the arguments against the above, the cellular carriers were given billions and billions of taxpayer money, and tax breaks, and all manner of kid-glove court and legislative decisions in the past 30 years. Consumers are getting screwed from every side possible, more taxes, more fees, and more monthly service charges.
but at least the ads load blazing fast while i'm on the train, i guess.
You seem to be making things up or are just ignorant of the market dynamics. Regardless of your personal limited needs, there is actually huge demand for fast, reliable 5G service nationwide. Customers have voted with their wallets.
Moving to 5G with more antennas also allows for more efficient spectrum use in most cases. Spectrum is extremely expensive, and a limiting factor in some areas.
How have customers “voted with their wallets” when all of the major players released 5G to all their customers? It’s not like any actual choice was made by the customer.
I mean, I want 5G when I go travel without needing to pay extra, and that happens right now. I don't want to pay roaming charges just because I fly to Detroit or a small town in Missouri.
And history has shown that smaller carriers aren't going to provide that kind of service.
Roaming charges have nothing inherent to do with the presence or absence of 5G. You can have multiple networks with their own 5G hardware that charge roaming fees, and you can have a mixture of 4G and 5G but agreements that no roaming will be charged.
If you've got a plan that specifically limits you to 5G if you want to avoid roaming charges, then that's between you and your (likely oligopolistic) carrier.
> The only way it makes sense is if the wireless companies have other customers that are served by having orders of magnitude additional antennas everywhere.
The big reason to push 5G is surveillance. You could always be tracked to within half a mile or so with cell phone towers, but with 5G the cell towers alone can track you within a specific building. mmWave 5G provides location information with sub-meter precision. Telecom companies sell our location data, and with 5G that location data becomes much much more valuable.
5G does not require more points of presence than LTE. They can run on the same frequencies, which is where properties of range and penetration come from. 5G has additional higher frequencies with those issues yes, but they're not the only form of 5G.
It's like the difference between 2.4Ghz wifi, and 5/6 Ghz wifi. The 6Ghz spectrum has less penetration than 5ghz which has less than 2.4ghz. But you're still going to be running Wifi 6 on 2.4ghz instead of Wifi 4 because it still has improvements at those frequencies. In that same way, new towers are going to be 5G. The only drawback of running 5G instead of 4G on the same frequency is device compatibility.
You have the freedom to choose between 2 identical services and one inferior one. At least where I live, T-Mobile stops working if I head 10 miles west or north. There's even a dead zone half a mile from my home in the middle of a suburb of 100,000 people.
Free market has always been lip service in the US.
Infrastructure is a natural monopoly. Of course it isn't a free market, just like roads. I wish we had privatized roads, maybe we wouldn't be so car-dependent.
T-mobile was the main driver for all the user fees against every smb in the US though… IMO they did the most damage to text messaging as a reliable method of reaching a customer…. Telco industry is massive so yes break them all up
Honestly, with things being as they are, I think the general sentiment of customers is that they do NOT want customer outreach; or, they want a single, high quality, hand written outreach. Apparently we don't like being brow-beaten into purchasing anymore. Basically, like being treated as something other than cash cows.
For ads, I don't. For customer support however, a verified phone number (that I can look up myself, easily, perhaps as part of a FCC website function, for example) would be a huge win though.
I used the Apple Business Chat feature for support for a shipping issue I had recently with Everlane and it was actually amazing. It had its own verified icon, so I knew it wasn't a scam, I could answer when I was able, and they were able to respond as they were able (though, I did find it quite timely, even when I wasn't) and not at all did I have to call someone, or talk talk to a chatbot (as far as I could tell anyway). It was a seamless experience and it got my issue resolved.
I personally like this model of customer support. No reason this can't extend to SMS
This, plus break up the broadband carriers (Comcast et. al) and enshrine open access to infrastructure into law, bonus points for net neutrality.
That would be honest wins for the US telecom market, and drive lots of competition, while preserving some common sense / fair access to shared infrastructure for all.
I don't think we want to see national carriers broken up. If you don't think a mid-size carrier won't make fucking bank on roaming fees you haven't seen what a lot of them did in the '80s.
What really needs to be done is the monopolistic elements of cell phone service
like spectrum, tower, and backhaul provided at cost by a neutral (state owned) entity and the retail services built on top of reselling that.
The barrier to entry on a ground up cell network is almost impossible to surmount without billions in capital but an MVNO that can work on the same cost basis and network as the national chains?
I absolutely do. In my area, the Verizon and ATT towers are so unbelievably crowded that we literally cannot use data anywhere in a 20+ mile radius. Maybe if there were 5 companies here instead of 3 we would have more -> less congested towers
You might have more towers, or you might have all 5 companies on the same set of towers. Regardless, I think the spectrum is fully sold, so a challenger network isn't going to have spectrum to use, and if they get spectrum reallocated, existing towers that lose spectrum will be less effective.
Edit to add: If your towers are as congested as they seem, the carriers should be aware, and the problem is likely a lack of available tower sites; either because of geographical considerations, site owners don't want towers, or local regulators don't want towers. Additional networks won't really help with that either.
I think it is more likely that they'd all outsource tower construction to a small handful of companies and leave congestion roughly equivalent to the current state.
TBH, this happens a lot in large stable industries.
The solution to congested towers is to add more towers and reduce the power levels making the coverage of each smaller. In a crowded room you can increase the number of simultaneous conversations by having people stand closer to each other and reduce voice volume levels at the limit people are whispering into each other's ears. Similar idea works with wireless devices. devices.
>>> you haven't seen what a lot of them did in the '80s.
The commercial mobile phone network was invented in the 80's. Comparing market behaviors during the industry's infancy to the behaviors of established industries is wrong. The market took some time to figure out best practices, for consumers and industry health.
20's years ago roaming fees and texting fees where expensive, but then corporations figured out unlimited packages were more profitable. We pay a set price now for texting for the month, but it still costs the carriers money for each text we send. The carriers just hope that the power texters balance with the infrequent texters allowing them to turn a profit. The same with calling.
I don't know if regional networks could compete with national networks. I just want to reinforce that market practices at the industry's infancy aren't the same as they are now.
(of course, VZ and T both have significant businesses outside of wireless so this isn't a super great comparison)
Hard to argue that you should break up either of Verizon or AT&T and not T-Mobile by literally any metric, unless you think wireless companies shouldn't also have terrestrial networks
I'm pretty sure that it has been the case in 99% of scenarios were consolidation always ended up in a shittier experience for the consumer and employees regardless of the promises the merging companies made.
My brief experience with Sprint a couple years before the T-Mobile merger had basically unusable coverage. Was genuinely surprised how far it had fallen.
And T-Mo inherited all that and is now the bottom feeder. It's just a matter of time before one of the other two merges with them to "increase customer value and create jobs".
T-Mobile acquired both Sprint and MetroPCS to increase their spectrum allocation. I literally travel all over the country and don’t have an issue with T-mobiles service
Right now I am in small town south GA and getting 120/40 on cellular.
Meanwhile I live in a city of 300k people about a mile away from the capitol building and I can't get cell access when on the incorrect side of the BK down the road.
Anecdotal: I've been quite happy with T-Mobile's coverage for many years now. At least where I'm at they have just as good, if not better, coverage than Verizon does.
I was quite happy with T-Mobile's service for the last 5 years, in that I had no signal at all at my house and my work phone was, conveniently, T-Mobile!
The universe enforced me being unreachable outside of work hours and I didn't mind that at all.
Probably not a surprising fact, but fun fact: Sprint tried buying t-mobile first and it was blocked by courts. It was quite surprising to hear it happening the other way around since I thought Sprint was always larger than T-Mobile.
But yes, the nextel merger and the bad gamble with wiMax definitely sunk them long term.
>In December 2013, multiple reports indicated that Sprint Corporation and its parent company SoftBank were working towards a deal to acquire a majority stake in T-Mobile US for at least US$20 billion...On August 4, 2014, Bloomberg reported that Sprint had abandoned its bid to acquire T-Mobile, considering the unlikelihood that such a deal would be approved by the U.S. government and its regulators
I guess saying it got blocked is subtly inaccurate, though. They simply stopped because they weren't confident in getting through antitrust.
> Sprint Corporation and its parent company SoftBank
Why am I not surprised to see that name. Is there anything that SoftBank touched that's not a complete failure? What the fuck have they been doing besides burning Saudi oil sheik money?
There is, however, a world where they might've been bought up by Comcast and/or Charter and turned into a real 4th competitor
DISH is about 12-24 months from bankruptcy and is losing subscribers, and does not have a true national network
The cable companies are just MVNOs riding off Verizon, so that is kind of limited in how much actual competitive pressure they're applying to the market
>Besides, it would have been scientifically impossible for Comcast to be a real competitor with Sprints limited spectrum allocation.
But, they could've done what they're doing now: use a limited amount of spectrum in areas where their customers are concentrated and offload the rest to their MVNO partner (Verizon)
Comcast and Charter both are buying up CBRS licenses and putting up both CBRS radios and outdoor strand mounted wifi hotspots in their wireline service territory. Since that's where 100% of their customers live, that will work to offload the bulk of the traffic they pay Verizon for. For the people who travel outside the service area, they'll just roam onto Verizon
For sure it's not the same as VZ, T, and TMUS having a national network that competes for every single wireless customer period, but it would probably be more effective than the zombie DISH out there that supposedly has a network covering 70% of the US population, but a vast majority of their customers are on their MVNO partners in T-Mobile and AT&T.
Has this ever worked in the past? I can't recall ever hearing of a merger being forcibly un-done. It seems like if you lie your way through the approval process and everyone's worst predictions come through, the worst that will happen is the US government will slap you with a monetary fine that amounts to less than 1% of your yearly profits.
I thought this was an excellent question. It's easy to argue that the merger shouldn't have been approved, but seems like the plaintiffs want a time machine. Perhaps they're just looking for some sort of financial settlement?
Has there ever been a similar suit against a large merger like this in the past, successful or not? I'm really curious how the legal system views these "please undo the past" requests.
Historically through divestiture or rescission (the later is effectively impossible to do with a publicly held corporation). Though the Clayton Act has only been infrequently applied in recent decades.
> I can't recall ever hearing of a merger being forcibly un-done.
That's pretty much what antitrust actions are. It's super rare and I can't imagine there's a case here against T-Mobile as both Verizon and AT&T are bigger.
A U.S. district court judge ruled in favor of the FTC in an antitrust case, ordering St. Luke's to undo its acquisition of the Saltzer Medical Group. The FTC and others alleged the acquisition violated antitrust regulations by lessening competition and potentially increasing healthcare costs. St. Luke's argued the acquisition was vital to achieve healthcare reform goals and maintain business viability. The judge disagreed, saying there are other ways to improve care without violating antitrust laws and risking increased costs.
The main thing in mind that it did do is cause massive fees and restrictions for businesses to send text messages. The idea is this is to reduce spam. However it has fees and effectively was like this:
Hey smb, we see you send notifications to your customers . It’s be a real shame if those messages stopped delivering to your customer . Good thing you can pay us a brand registration fee just $50 and oh for each type of message a recurring $10 fee.
It wasn’t a price hike to consumers directly but really was mob style shake down.
Yeah. Twilio's process was entirely focused on "campaigns", too, whereas we sent exclusively transactional ones. Very confusing, and we wound up removing our texting features entirely from our app.
The registration requiremenet may not be Twilio's doing, but there not being any significant guidance on what transactional senders should do for their particular set of processes is.
Glad to see someone else had that problem too - I spent hours reading through the Twilio documentation to try to figure out if transactional sms was allowed because all I kept seeing was campaign registration, campaign fees, and etc all about campaign sms. And if we had to pay the campaign monthly fees even if we sent transactional sms, not campaign.
I understand that it's not Twilio's fault, but they desperately need to hire some developer evangelists to write some documentation.
What if the user "initiates the thread" by taking an explicit action on a website? The carrier has no way of knowing that, so what should they do? Just block everything? Not workable.
Yeah, gotta consider multi-modal interactions... and also there's no good way to pre-validate ownership of a phone number.
So suppose Carol clicks "Contact Me Immediately Please" on a website and and enters her phone number... But--oops--there's a typo. Now Alice is going to get an "unsolicited" message even though literally everybody involved is operating in good faith.
Even if someone is maliciously pretending to be Alice, neither the website nor the phone-carrier has a better malice-detecting tool than simply sending it and seeing if the recipient replies "STOP".
> Even if someone is maliciously pretending to be Alice, neither the website nor the phone-carrier has a better malice-detecting tool than simply sending it and seeing if the recipient replies "STOP".
I sometimes wonder how many people use the STOP function. I'm more inclined to ignore it (if it's a one-off) or use the spam reporting feature than I am to reply "STOP" if I don't recognize the sender/campaign because of how jaded I've gotten from email. If you hit the "unsubscribe" link on a spam email, you only get more spam because you just confirmed the inbox is a) active, b) monitored, and c) is checked by someone willing to open and interact with spam messages.
By the time SMS spam became common, I just assumed things would play out the same, and have probably reported plenty of legitimate mistypes to Verizon as spam. It just doesn't feel like it's worth the risk to directly respond.
Considering how many times phones get hacked just by viewing a text message it's probably best to delete any texts from an unknown number unread. If you've got an iphone you're probably screwed the moment it hits your device, but at least you can try to avoid interacting with what might be a "specially crafted text message" as much as possible.
"phones get hacked just by viewing a text message.... iphone you're probably screwed the moment it hits your device"
IIRC, there was a ~recent (2023) iOS CVE that matched this description, and it got a TON of attention because it was such an anomaly. I'm not shilling for Apple, but want to understand your comment better.
Let's do that then. Seems like
it would be the best of all worlds. Click on "Sign up for text alerts" go through the OAuth flow and the user grants you the ability to text them (and importantly revoke that privilege) they never learn your number and you can send messages directly via API and avoid the Twilio overhead. The carrier(s) set up strict rules for what kinds of messages you can send and how often and violating them means your app id getting pulled.
God I wish we would just do this for email as well. Spam would just stop being an issue for 99% of cases.
The nature of the market makes it impossible to not have a cartel. The previous situation with a bunch of regional cellular providers building their own towers and establishing a patchwork of roaming agreements was clearly untenable due to customer demands for nationwide service and the enormous capital expense to build a 5G network.
> The main thing in mind that it did do is cause massive fees and restrictions for businesses to send text messages.
I am fully in favor of businesses incurring "massive fees and restrictions" for sending text messages.
The negligible cost of sending an email, resulting in the email SPAM problem, has indicated that doing otherwise will result in a massive flood of unwanted text messages for everyone.
The problem is that they used a wide brush and made it next to impossible to have a hobby project that uses text messaging. My projects send maybe 3-4 text messages a week - to me - to notify me of stuff.
Before you just pay $20 to Twilio and that's enough to send messages for years. Now you have to create a fake "business" entry with them, pay them monthly, etc... It's not a lot of money, but I just don't want to deal with yet another monthly bill.
I basically switched to using my employer's Twilio account for personal stuff. They don't mind with my volume.
The legislation [1] is already enough to deal with email SPAM and by extension SMS. The problem is that phone & email companies conveniently have no way of knowing who sent the spam so you can't go after them.
It's an authentication problem not a cost problem.
> The main thing in mind that it did do is cause massive fees and restrictions for businesses to send text messages. The idea is this is to reduce spam. However it has fees
This is The Campaign Registry.
Every inch of it is a confusing mess. It mandates setup and subscription fees. Last I checked, registration usually took 4-10 days but can be much longer.
The way the regulation reads, every business that uses A2P 10DLC (software-sent text) needs to be registered and pay recurring fees.
The purported intent is to determine which mass mailed texts are allowed. In theory, all others would be flagged or blackholed.
The way the regulation is written however, it captures every software-sent text. This includes situations like a tech support session where a technician texts a diagram to a customer. The regs don't differentiate between this and actual mass mailing.
The really cool part about this is The Campaign Registry who manages 10dlc registrations... is now owned by Tata Communications. A company based in India.
Not totally sure this is eventually going to survive a Twiqbal appellate review, and even then it's hard for me to buy the judge's "first step" harm analysis here. I'd love to see the bar for private antitrust suits loosened up, but the fact pattern (Sprint was not a particularly stable company at time of purchase, and no one's alleging any kind of price-fixing, collusion, or monopoly of essential facilities) and legal framework in this case don't feel like a great opportunity to do so.
In general, I'm skeptical that we should punish a company, especially one that isn't the largest player in the market, based on (pretextual IMO) actions taken (or not taken) by its competitors. I don't think the merger should have been approved, but once that bell is rung I think the standard for judicial intervention needs to be very high, and I don't think bare market forces apply.
There is a better case against the airlines since like you said, Sprint was clearly about to go bust had the merger not happened, and there still would’ve been three cell phone companies.
I am not an expert in airlines, and I am sure there are COVID effects, but it seems like the other domestic airlines have bounced back quicker since they are showing profits.
But more importantly, I remember Jetblue wanting to provide a better than average flying experience when the airline started, so I presume the only reason they would want to merge with Spirit, a company who does the exact opposite, is because they are facing financial headwinds.
Jetblue and Spirit both have a strategy of lowering costs by only running one aircraft type, the Airbus A320 family, which means that their pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, only need training on one type of aircraft and can be flexibly deployed, they only maintain one set of spare parts, etc.
The Airbus order backlog is several years long. If you need planes earlier than that, your only recourse is to buy someone else's planes.
At this point it is the bread and butter of a low cost carrier. JBLU originally started as one. Legacy carriers are more likely to get different types of planes for different missions, and pit the duopolists against each other to secure better pricing.
JetBlue also has pretty limited landing slots on the west coast, and missed out on purchasing Virgin Atlantic to Alaska a few years ago, which would have allowed them to diversify more outside the eastern US.
Spirit isn't a perfect match (different market segments), but otherwise they use the same model of aircraft and have some operational efficiencies. I'd hazard a guess Spirit's branding and low cost model will be tossed out in favor of JetBlue's operating model, and that segment of the market will be left to Frontier.
Spirit is a fine airline if you fly and travel lightly(belongings in book bag)!
Per my ten flights this year with them (out of BWI, Miami, Vegas & Reno) it's a Pay less and get out the airport quickest experience. Their planes i flown on are new planes with seats that are a bit less comfortable. Their refund policy is awful ..just don't cancel.
Theres tons of negative press about them and I bet a lot of it is stirred up by fake news marketing via their competitors. TikTok has lots of influencers / social media professionals trashing them with their fake news marketing videos (like a few such tikTok(ers) have millions of followers).
If JetBlue buys them no more cheap good flights and that cuts out a lot people who can afford to fly with them now and that's crap..flying/traveling should be affordable for many not just middle to upper class!
Spirit is very hit or miss depending on the route. I flew from Orlando to Pensacola and back three times in two weeks earlier this year and was delayed an average of 3 hours every single flight. The reported cause of the delay was "aircraft maintenance" although in two cases the aircraft had been at the airport overnight. The pilot explained to us during announcements that sometimes they skip longer maintenance when planes are there overnight.
Otherwise, I've had okay experiences with Spirit prior to this year but I won't be flying with them again since it is shorter to drive than suffer their constant delays.
> Sprint was clearly about to go bust had the merger not happened, and there still would’ve been three cell phone companies.
Or alternatively, Sprint's shareholders would have been wiped out, and its creditors could have continued operating it after taking a loss on their loans, preserving competition in the cellular service market.
My source is that they reported they were set to be cash flow positive (meaning profitable outside of servicing debt) in 2019:
There's not three: do not forget Dish. They bought a ton of spectrum prior, and got Boost, spectrum, and partnership with TMo after the merger.
Despite a brutal earnings call yesterday, they are expanding network aggressively. They have the bankroll to ramp up, unlike Sprint who was circling the drain. I think ultimately there will be 4 healthy competitors, not 3.
> I don't think the merger should have been approved, but once that bell is rung I think the standard for judicial intervention needs to be very high
Why? What particular harm are you worried about here? If there's harm to market participants then why should the players be immune? Why is a merger approval so inviolate?
> and I don't think bare market forces apply.
Why _wouldn't_ they? What forces _would_ you invoke to achieve justice? Or are you saying that because it's too inconvenient, we have to ignore the harms?
Market's don't exist for the benefit of companies. They exist for the benefit of citizens who both participate in them as consumers and as laborers. We wrote a lot of anti monopoly law for very good reasons, if shareholders are inconvenienced by having to unwind bad deals that shouldn't have been approved in the first place, I see no reason to afford them greater protection or deference than the fundamental participants of that market.
You may want markets to exist for the benefit of citizens as labor and consumers only. But that's not an agreed upon position. If there is no benefit for humans as investors, markets won't exist. Companies are legal fictions created for humans as investors to pool their capital today and turn it into more capital for tomorrow.
We are talking about the modern world here, the comment was about companies and their role in a society where companies exist.. in a thread about a merger between two telcos. Comments should be read in context.
So, sure, not literally every market would disappear without investors. But the overwhelming majority of current GPD would not exist without capital. It's quite hard to name a single current business that would exist without any investors in the world. Does your business require a computer? An office? A store front? A phone? Running water? Electricity? Investors, investors, investors, investors, investors. There are various stakeholders in any business - workers, customers, capital providers, suppliers, folks who feel externalities, and so on. The idea that companies are there just for the workers and the customers is misunderstanding the complexity of the modern world. It isn't the same place it was 10,000 years ago.
And... it appears there is confusion about what a limited partnership is... Many limited partnerships exist so they can raise money from investors who want nothing more than a return on their capital. Here is a decent intro on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_partnership
.. An enormous amount of current law is written to make the aggregation of capital possible and an attractive proposition. Society generally understands how important it is to make investment attractive.
If the outcomes were shown to be worse across the board, sure, it would be worth sacrificing predictability for better outcomes. But if we set the precedent of rolling back merger approvals after the fact, I see good reason to believe that the effects on the market would be worse overall than if we just let this bad outcome be a single bad outcome.
If we want mergers to be undoable, that needs to be clear at the time of approval. We could probably fix this going forward to strike a better balance between predictability and other outcomes, but we have to make the contingencies known in advance, not pull rugs three years later.
Are there any allegations of unlawful behavior here? If so, sure, let's make sure there are consequences! But those consequences should be consistent for any company engaging in said behaviors, regardless of whether they were recently merged.
Yeah what’s what a lawsuit means, that someone is alleging unlawful behavior.
It’s a lawsuit, litigated by lawyers, in a court of law. You may see a three letter word reappearing if you look closely.
Every court case starts with a document that lists the actions of the defendant while citing the specific laws (statute or tort) alleged to have been violated.
As a general rule laws are enforced after the fact by a harmed party asking courts to provide a remedy. In the case of criminal law the party is the people, represented by the state, in the case of civil law it’s often a private individual, group, or organization.
This is the normal way laws are applied. People break them and then someone takes them to court to unwind the damage and seek redress.
The consequences are consistent. If they engage in an illegal merger and someone sues them they'll be subject to the remedy of that court.
It's really not that complicated. That's how civil and business law is typically enforced.
Your premise is that when a business deal is "approved" it's all set. But that's not really how things generally work, your premise is dubious. The real way things work is people do things and then if they cause unlawful harm they end up getting sued, sometimes by the justice department sometimes by a class action sometimes by someone else.
Did prices go up adjusted for inflation? I don’t think they did.
The original iPhone plan didn’t even have unlimited minutes (450 + 5000 night and weekend) and only came with 200 texts, for $60 in 2008 dollars ($90 today).
The current T-Mobile “essentials” plan is $60 with no taxes/fees besides sales tax, and it comes with unlimited voice/text with 50GB of data before throttling.
I don’t have a history of every single plan ever, but I don’t think T-Mobile ever offered an “unlimited everything” plan for less than $50 or so, pre or post-merger.
If you include T-Mobile subsidies like Mint Mobile, there’s an argument to be made that prices have dropped dramatically.
The other truth is that Sprint was always cheaper because it was by far the least reliable and desirable carrier. Sprint had the lowest prices and the lowest nationwide subscriber count because their product was inferior.
Instead of two great carriers (AT&T/Verizon), one okay carrier (T-Mobile), and one god-awful carrier (Sprint), now we have three great carriers where you are likely to be able to reliably choose any three regardless of where you live. That wasn’t really the case pre-merger.
And of course, there’s a great argument for the fact that Sprint would have probably gone bankrupt and been liquidated without its merger.
> The other truth is that Sprint was always cheaper because it was by far the least reliable and desirable carrier.
It depends on where in the country you were (or were traveling overseas). Google-fi was originally built on Sprint infrastructure and (IIRC) used the same overseas billing system.
Traveling overseas with them was fantastic and inexpensive.
> If you include T-Mobile subsidies like Mint Mobile, there’s an argument to be made that prices have dropped dramatically.
My costs per month (same plans, same everything), are now $485. The only thing that has changed is the "fees" I pay monthly. So yeah, costs have gone up to consumers, even for us who didn't change anything and were forced to switch to T-Mobile.
I have had ATT's highest unlimited plan (even the new ones) since mid 2008, and my costs have increased maybe 20% since 2008. But now I also get unlimited phone usage in almost the entire Western hemisphere now, whereas before, even Canada and Mexico cost extra.
For 6 lines, I paid $276 back in 2017, and it is $310 now, so in ~6 years, the price went up 12%. And some of that was increased taxes.
You’re doing something wrong if that’s your monthly. T-Mobile’s Magenta plan is $230 for 5 lines for the completely unlimited version. You can go down to $180 and still get 100GB before throttling.
Perhaps you’re on an old plan and need to change to a new one, or maybe you’re including device payments or insurance in your figure?
If you are only looking at the plans, I’m paying $180 for just 4 lines. The rest is all fees and device payments that are all ending soon, at which point it will go down by $~80 a month. The “fees and taxes” section is royally killing me on my bill and makes up for the bulk of the bill, actually. That isn’t reflected on any advertised price.
using mintmobile here and it's reasonably priced, albeit service is so-so, but it's slightly better than tracfone which is part of verizon now, its service is such a waste of time I had to switch.
Why should I care about this merge, will it raise my price because of the merge? yes I'm a prepaid phone user.
As part of the merger, TMO added very cheap plans called "connect" from $10 to $35/mo with no contract, 5G, and the data limit grows annually. They did this to put regulators at ease about pricing.
new to mint mobile, for 5GB-data and unlimited call/text at $15 a month, no contract needed, I'm OK with that and it's actually cheaper than verizon's prepaid.
I'm not convinced that splitting up any of these wireless companies will better the end consumer. Spectrum is already in short supply, splitting up the already finite resource even more will lead to less bandwidth overall. There also is the capital cost of erecting more towers, more antennas for each of these companies.
It's not as simple as "lets split them up and it will all get better".
I'm a consumer that wants 5G. There are many rural consumers that make use of 5G based internet.
And the 5G you are speaking of is mmwave. Mid-band 5G is perfectly useable and a significant improvement over LTE. Verizon and T-Mobile push over 1Gb/s over mid-band 5G at the same reach LTE provides and much less latency. mmwave you can get up to 4Gb/s (at short distances). Even more so when Verizon moves rolls out SA 5G in place of the current NSA 5G.
Speak for yourself, I want 5G. Also, I think you're conflating 5G as a whole with the variations like low-band, mid-band, and mmWave. 5G allows carriers to have more customers in a more compact area and give speed benefits. Have you never had just random drops out in a big city or a big concert with 4G? It's enraging. 5G helps fix that problem. 5G can also help people in rural areas that have no access to high-speed internet services, something T-Mobile has been pretty good at pushing.
5G is awesome. Finally decently reliable, low latency, fast, and cheap wireless home internet is available on 5G carriers.
A family member of mine uses T-Mo's contract-free 5G home internet. Latency low enough for video calls enabling WFH and playing online games. Speeds in the hundreds of megabits even during peak hours. $50/mo no contract.
I can take my cheap laptop around, pair it to my phone, and get the same internet pretty much anywhere in town. I can do cloud gaming or work anywhere I get cell service. I pay $15/mo no contract. It's awesome.
How do "the people" make informed decisions on how to maintain/improve the infrastructure?
When you say "the people", you really mean the government. Out of curiosity, how does your customer experience with your cell provider compare to that of the DMV, IRS or any other government agency you may have had the pleasure of interacting with?
The solution to insufficient competition should not be to remove all competition (which would be the case with government ownership).
I have absolutely no idea what these guys are all talking about. 15 years ago, when I was considering buying a cell phone in high school, I was looking at $40/mo for calls and texts, no data, and all sorts of crazy roaming things. Now I pay $25/mo, get subsidized smart phones, price includes fees and taxes, 50GB of data across the 4 participants in my plan, weird random freebees, etc. etc. And I'm way less price-conscious now than I was then. This lawsuit complains about something that bears no relation to reality, AFAICT.
Sounds like AT&T and Verizon people should go to T-Mobile if their service is so expensive.
That's how T-Mobile got into the US market in the first place - by buying and merging with (failing) network operators a dozen times over and fixing their operations. It's literally their thing.
I would argue T-Mobile didn't necessarily fix the acquired companies' operations. They still use ancient systems built in PowerBuilder to run their customer maintenance and billing. (Disclaimer: used to work in tech support at T-Mobile.)
Fair point, but they must have fixed something, given that in most years they're at least breaking even when the companies they acquired were leaking money.
1. Companies say they won't raise rates, or that rates will go down
2. People believe them
Every year, employees expect raises -- at least a cost of living adjustment, and every year senior management gets huge bonuses and such.
Prices for parts and labor for repairs and upgrades will increase, if only because these costs are additive -- things will break, new tech will need supporting, etc...
The real question, IMO, is at what frequency do costs rise and by how much? Sure, I'd like to limit the amount of big money transfers to execs, but that's not really possible.
No one believes them. The court just uncritically accepts cockamamie arguments from "expert economists" without any input from the public at all, typically.
Attorneys for T-Mobile called the lawsuit “unprecedented,” and said the plaintiffs’ damages were “speculative.”
“If plaintiffs are unhappy with Verizon and AT&T, there is a remedy available in the highly competitive market that wireless consumers enjoy today — they should switch to T-Mobile, not sue it,” attorneys for T-Mobile told the court.
An argument could be made here for removing all vertical integration in communication services. Whoever owns the infrastructure shouldn’t also provide the service.
They can wholesale out the infrastructure to service providers who then have a lower barrier to entry and increases competition.
T-Mobile already has many wholesale providers like Mint Mobile that offer much lower rates than Tmobile directly.
>Whoever owns the infrastructure shouldn’t also provide the service.
How does it benefit people to have another entity with all of its costs in the chain literally just collecting rent?
Tmobile/Verizon/ATT all use different brands like Mint for price segmentation, selling the spectrum at different prices to different populations. And they prioritize traffic based on how important the client is (typically related to how much they pay):
T-Mo only recently bought Mint. They were separate for quite a while. There are still Mobile Virtual Network Operators out there that aren't owned by the big three, but a lot of the more popular ones were gobbled up by the companies operating the networks of those MVNOs.
>An argument could be made here for removing all vertical integration in communication services. Whoever owns the infrastructure shouldn’t also provide the service.
This doesn't make sense as a universal maxim. It does make sense in certain contexts such as government-funded monopolies (the former Bell System) or government-funded expansion efforts (RDOF and BEAD expansion being funded by the United States and separately by the several states)
And it also doesn't make sense at certain technological levels. Old telephone lines were a point-to-point set of wires from your house to some central point. Allowing competitors into that central point and using the single set of wires that were dedicated to you, the consumer was very clean and easy to do
Unbundling shared media like coaxial lines or radio networks where all of the traffic is intermingled--at what point do you differentiate between the different providers? What are the different providers actually....providing?
It's like the deregulated natural gas market in Georgia. The monopoly no longer serves customers directly, but they still own all the pipes in the ground. The 'marketers' buy gas and sell it to us, the consumers, but it's all put into the pipelines at the same place by the old monopoly. It's all just a financial shell game with provider A essentially redeeming so many cubic feet of gas into the system. It's fungible and there's effectively no differentiation between the providers, who all have exactly the same pricing, exactly the same contracts, exactly the same policies. Except now you have half a dozen CEOs, and HR departments, and IT departments, and billing systems all adding costs--costs that are now unregulated since it's "competitive"
> An argument could be made here for removing all vertical integration in communication services. Whoever owns the infrastructure shouldn’t also provide the service.
What market forces would then incentivize infrastructure upgrades? To do this and still incentivize upgrades you'd need political mandates.
> They can wholesale out the infrastructure to service providers who then have a lower barrier to entry and increases competition.
This is what was forced* on T-Mobile/Telekom back at home in Germany. They own a lot of basic infrastructure that is a natural monopoly and where having multiple companies built that out redundantly would be utter nonsense. The government makes Telekom rent it out at prices decided on by the Federal Network Agency.
They still get to be a normal service provider as well though.
* Technically it started out as a government company and is still owned to 32% by the country.
> But Verizon and AT&T customers are also pissed, and are part of a new lawsuit against T-Mobile arguing that the merger raised prices for everybody due to the reduction in overall wireless market competition.
But did it reduce competition compared to where we'd be if there had not been a merger?
Sprint was on the way out. They were likely to go bankrupt and have their assets sold off to AT&T or Verizon. The result would be 3 national carries (just like we got with the merger) but with T-Mobile a distant third.
With the merger, T-Mobile got Sprint's spectrum and became much more viable to many more people as an alternative to Verizon and AT&T. T-Mobile is now the #2 carrier, a little bit ahead of AT&T.
If Sprint had gone bankrupt you would have had the same effect- the assets including licenses sold to Tmobile. That said, I don't think Sprint would have gone bankrupt but it def was underinvesting.
If T-Mobile isn't allowed to buy Sprint then AT&T and Verizon shouldn't be allowed to buy their spectrum. There are any number of companies that would pay money for a cellular network and spectrum allocation, and those companies might have continued to operate a fourth carrier.
For example, Sprint's assets could have been sold to Google (which already operates an MVNO), or Comcast, Cisco, Amazon, Samsung, etc. These are all companies that could afford to buy it, and doing so would complement their existing business, but they don't already operate a major wireless carrier and so wouldn't reduce competition.
Starting up a mobile carrier is insanely capital expensive. We're seeing this here in Germany with 1&1 as a fourth provider - they got the licenses in 2019, but still have no network of their own up and running, mostly due to issues getting Rakuten OpenRAN deployed, and even the network they're planning will take years and years to get full coverage across Germany (they're planning on a roaming agreement with Vodafone for the meantime).
Getting a fourth carrier established from scratch would be a serious financial challenge even for companies like Google and Apple.
Going from 4 large competitors to 3 has obviously hurt completion and led to higher prices. Americans tend to pay a lot more for their cell service- especially single lines than other countries.
There are mitigating factors such as T-mobile becoming a much more potent competitor with the mid-band spectrum they got from Spectrum.
The FCC hoped that Dish would step in to emerge as that 4th have not materialized. We need Dish or someone else to emerge as a major competitor.
That said, I don't think reversing the merger is a viable option at this point. We really need a 4th national competitor to merge. Dish has potential but so far it's not made a dent.
I'm a long-time T-Mobile customer, and I believe, 100%, they're worse since the merger and it's probably at least in some measure related. The merger definitely didn't help me. Once I needed to make a change to my plan (and therefore could no longer remain grandfathered into my old plan) I was paying more for service that has not been as good.
We've also got AT&T in our house, and it's far worse, even after the degradation of T-Mobile.
I think if the premise behind this lawsuit is that the consolidation did the damage, though, the plaintiffs have quite a row to hoe. Sprint was circling the drain prior to the merger. Can they argue that Sprint just going away and having their assets (like spectrum licenses) sold off to satisfy creditors after they went bankrupt was healthier for competition? That seems highly speculative.
I'm not sure what the solution is, and I don't think the merger was good, but I don't see that disallowing it would've improved this particular market.
The solution is to provide incentives to new entrants. Discounts on spectrum purchases or reserving certain bands for a separate auction only for new entrants. It’s done regularly in other countries where they’ve already figured out that 4 mobile phone providers seems to be the magic number.
"T-Mobile’s reddit forums are filled with employees saying the disruptive spirit of the company has been dead since the merger." This argument has less to do with the merger and more to do with AT&T's 3 Billion in cash T-Mo (Deutsche Telekom) received when AT&T failed to buy them is now gone. It's a little easier to be disruptive when you are spending someone else's money.
As a consumer, the new T-mobile has been great. I was finally able to switch away from Verizon, as their prices are cheaper, and the 5G network equally good.
People forget that Verizon and AT&T are the result of multiple mergers as well. Airtouch + Bell Atlantic Mobile + a bunch of little ones = Verizon
Cellular One + Southern Bell + a bunch of little ones = AT&T
The mistake was thinking to counter those two giant companies by making a 3rd giant company. Perhaps it would have been better to have not allowed the first two in the first place?
Just a thought to ponder.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadI am personally tired of the oligopolies in US. Bring in some competition. I thought the free market was a thing here ( or is it just lip service ) .
The only way it makes sense is if the wireless companies have other customers that are served by having orders of magnitude additional antennas everywhere.
And regardless of the arguments against the above, the cellular carriers were given billions and billions of taxpayer money, and tax breaks, and all manner of kid-glove court and legislative decisions in the past 30 years. Consumers are getting screwed from every side possible, more taxes, more fees, and more monthly service charges.
but at least the ads load blazing fast while i'm on the train, i guess.
Moving to 5G with more antennas also allows for more efficient spectrum use in most cases. Spectrum is extremely expensive, and a limiting factor in some areas.
I mean, I want 5G when I go travel without needing to pay extra, and that happens right now. I don't want to pay roaming charges just because I fly to Detroit or a small town in Missouri.
And history has shown that smaller carriers aren't going to provide that kind of service.
If you've got a plan that specifically limits you to 5G if you want to avoid roaming charges, then that's between you and your (likely oligopolistic) carrier.
The big reason to push 5G is surveillance. You could always be tracked to within half a mile or so with cell phone towers, but with 5G the cell towers alone can track you within a specific building. mmWave 5G provides location information with sub-meter precision. Telecom companies sell our location data, and with 5G that location data becomes much much more valuable.
It's like the difference between 2.4Ghz wifi, and 5/6 Ghz wifi. The 6Ghz spectrum has less penetration than 5ghz which has less than 2.4ghz. But you're still going to be running Wifi 6 on 2.4ghz instead of Wifi 4 because it still has improvements at those frequencies. In that same way, new towers are going to be 5G. The only drawback of running 5G instead of 4G on the same frequency is device compatibility.
AT&T runs 4G and 5G on bands 2. And are shutting down 4G on band 5 to deploy 5G instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Mobility#Radio_frequenc...
Free market has always been lip service in the US.
I used the Apple Business Chat feature for support for a shipping issue I had recently with Everlane and it was actually amazing. It had its own verified icon, so I knew it wasn't a scam, I could answer when I was able, and they were able to respond as they were able (though, I did find it quite timely, even when I wasn't) and not at all did I have to call someone, or talk talk to a chatbot (as far as I could tell anyway). It was a seamless experience and it got my issue resolved.
I personally like this model of customer support. No reason this can't extend to SMS
That would be honest wins for the US telecom market, and drive lots of competition, while preserving some common sense / fair access to shared infrastructure for all.
What really needs to be done is the monopolistic elements of cell phone service like spectrum, tower, and backhaul provided at cost by a neutral (state owned) entity and the retail services built on top of reselling that.
The barrier to entry on a ground up cell network is almost impossible to surmount without billions in capital but an MVNO that can work on the same cost basis and network as the national chains?
Edit to add: If your towers are as congested as they seem, the carriers should be aware, and the problem is likely a lack of available tower sites; either because of geographical considerations, site owners don't want towers, or local regulators don't want towers. Additional networks won't really help with that either.
TBH, this happens a lot in large stable industries.
The commercial mobile phone network was invented in the 80's. Comparing market behaviors during the industry's infancy to the behaviors of established industries is wrong. The market took some time to figure out best practices, for consumers and industry health.
20's years ago roaming fees and texting fees where expensive, but then corporations figured out unlimited packages were more profitable. We pay a set price now for texting for the month, but it still costs the carriers money for each text we send. The carriers just hope that the power texters balance with the infrequent texters allowing them to turn a profit. The same with calling.
I don't know if regional networks could compete with national networks. I just want to reinforce that market practices at the industry's infancy aren't the same as they are now.
* Verizon Wireless: 143.3 million (Q2 2023)
* T-Mobile US: 116.7 million (Q2 2023)
* AT&T Mobility: 105.2M million (Q2 2023)
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_network_operato...
By stock market cap:
* TMUS: $170.51B
* VZ: $150.84B
* T: $113.22B
(of course, VZ and T both have significant businesses outside of wireless so this isn't a super great comparison)
Hard to argue that you should break up either of Verizon or AT&T and not T-Mobile by literally any metric, unless you think wireless companies shouldn't also have terrestrial networks
Sure. Why? But let's pause for a moment and make any other systemic changes necessary not to end up here again so quickly.
I'm pretty sure that it has been the case in 99% of scenarios were consolidation always ended up in a shittier experience for the consumer and employees regardless of the promises the merging companies made.
But money talks at the end of the day.
Source: used to deal with permits for them in a metro area.
Ultimately they got some assets in the merger though
[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/id/100637184
Right now I am in small town south GA and getting 120/40 on cellular.
The universe enforced me being unreachable outside of work hours and I didn't mind that at all.
But yes, the nextel merger and the bad gamble with wiMax definitely sunk them long term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_purchase_of_T-Mobile...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merger_of_Sprint_Corporation...
>In December 2013, multiple reports indicated that Sprint Corporation and its parent company SoftBank were working towards a deal to acquire a majority stake in T-Mobile US for at least US$20 billion...On August 4, 2014, Bloomberg reported that Sprint had abandoned its bid to acquire T-Mobile, considering the unlikelihood that such a deal would be approved by the U.S. government and its regulators
I guess saying it got blocked is subtly inaccurate, though. They simply stopped because they weren't confident in getting through antitrust.
Why am I not surprised to see that name. Is there anything that SoftBank touched that's not a complete failure? What the fuck have they been doing besides burning Saudi oil sheik money?
But it's pretty difficult to prove any of this, because you don't know what would have happened if there wasn't a merger.
Yea.. but "not merging" isn't something that had to be approved by the DOJ. It's a false equivalence.
The whole reason to form the monopoly is to extract that money from the citizens. They have the money, the players merely want it.
So, no.. apparently the money does not talk at the end of the day. Corruption clearly does.
DISH is about 12-24 months from bankruptcy and is losing subscribers, and does not have a true national network
The cable companies are just MVNOs riding off Verizon, so that is kind of limited in how much actual competitive pressure they're applying to the market
“Comcast - bringing all of the customer service you relied on as your cable provider into your pocket”.
Besides, it would have been scientifically impossible for Comcast to be a real competitor with Sprints limited spectrum allocation.
But, they could've done what they're doing now: use a limited amount of spectrum in areas where their customers are concentrated and offload the rest to their MVNO partner (Verizon)
Comcast and Charter both are buying up CBRS licenses and putting up both CBRS radios and outdoor strand mounted wifi hotspots in their wireline service territory. Since that's where 100% of their customers live, that will work to offload the bulk of the traffic they pay Verizon for. For the people who travel outside the service area, they'll just roam onto Verizon
For sure it's not the same as VZ, T, and TMUS having a national network that competes for every single wireless customer period, but it would probably be more effective than the zombie DISH out there that supposedly has a network covering 70% of the US population, but a vast majority of their customers are on their MVNO partners in T-Mobile and AT&T.
Back in the day, T-Mobile’s access was poor in buildings because the only frequencies they had access to didn’t work well through walls.
https://forums.androidcentral.com/threads/how-well-does-tmob...
Has there ever been a similar suit against a large merger like this in the past, successful or not? I'm really curious how the legal system views these "please undo the past" requests.
https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
That's pretty much what antitrust actions are. It's super rare and I can't imagine there's a case here against T-Mobile as both Verizon and AT&T are bigger.
https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/hospital-doctor-m...
Claude summary:
A U.S. district court judge ruled in favor of the FTC in an antitrust case, ordering St. Luke's to undo its acquisition of the Saltzer Medical Group. The FTC and others alleged the acquisition violated antitrust regulations by lessening competition and potentially increasing healthcare costs. St. Luke's argued the acquisition was vital to achieve healthcare reform goals and maintain business viability. The judge disagreed, saying there are other ways to improve care without violating antitrust laws and risking increased costs.
Here is an FTC press release detailing how the un-doing of the merger was carried out: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2017/05/...
> the district court granted Steves and Sons' request to unwind the merger and plans to hold an auction for the merged assets after this appeal.
Background of the case: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/fourth-circuit-affirms-...
Hey smb, we see you send notifications to your customers . It’s be a real shame if those messages stopped delivering to your customer . Good thing you can pay us a brand registration fee just $50 and oh for each type of message a recurring $10 fee.
It wasn’t a price hike to consumers directly but really was mob style shake down.
I understand that it's not Twilio's fault, but they desperately need to hire some developer evangelists to write some documentation.
> All Twilio messaging is considered A2P in the US and Canada.
So suppose Carol clicks "Contact Me Immediately Please" on a website and and enters her phone number... But--oops--there's a typo. Now Alice is going to get an "unsolicited" message even though literally everybody involved is operating in good faith.
Even if someone is maliciously pretending to be Alice, neither the website nor the phone-carrier has a better malice-detecting tool than simply sending it and seeing if the recipient replies "STOP".
I sometimes wonder how many people use the STOP function. I'm more inclined to ignore it (if it's a one-off) or use the spam reporting feature than I am to reply "STOP" if I don't recognize the sender/campaign because of how jaded I've gotten from email. If you hit the "unsubscribe" link on a spam email, you only get more spam because you just confirmed the inbox is a) active, b) monitored, and c) is checked by someone willing to open and interact with spam messages.
By the time SMS spam became common, I just assumed things would play out the same, and have probably reported plenty of legitimate mistypes to Verizon as spam. It just doesn't feel like it's worth the risk to directly respond.
2016 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/22/stagefrig...
2018 https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvakb3/inside-nso-group-spyw...
2019 https://www.wired.com/story/imessage-interactionless-hacks-g...
2020 https://macsecurity.net/view/458-imessage-zero-click-exploit...
2021 https://www.wired.com/story/apple-imessage-zero-click-hacks/
2023 https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2023/06/02/warning-...
IIRC, there was a ~recent (2023) iOS CVE that matched this description, and it got a TON of attention because it was such an anomaly. I'm not shilling for Apple, but want to understand your comment better.
2016 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/22/stagefrig...
2018 https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvakb3/inside-nso-group-spyw...
2019 https://www.wired.com/story/imessage-interactionless-hacks-g...
2020 https://macsecurity.net/view/458-imessage-zero-click-exploit...
2021 https://www.wired.com/story/apple-imessage-zero-click-hacks/
2023 https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2023/06/02/warning-...
Let's do that then. Seems like it would be the best of all worlds. Click on "Sign up for text alerts" go through the OAuth flow and the user grants you the ability to text them (and importantly revoke that privilege) they never learn your number and you can send messages directly via API and avoid the Twilio overhead. The carrier(s) set up strict rules for what kinds of messages you can send and how often and violating them means your app id getting pulled.
God I wish we would just do this for email as well. Spam would just stop being an issue for 99% of cases.
They certainly haven’t gotten rid of spam messages, but they still block a lot of fully compliant text messages
Unfortunately, they could probably keep raising prices and companies would have no choice but to pay up
That’s because the wireless companies banded together and formed a cartel
I am fully in favor of businesses incurring "massive fees and restrictions" for sending text messages.
The negligible cost of sending an email, resulting in the email SPAM problem, has indicated that doing otherwise will result in a massive flood of unwanted text messages for everyone.
Before you just pay $20 to Twilio and that's enough to send messages for years. Now you have to create a fake "business" entry with them, pay them monthly, etc... It's not a lot of money, but I just don't want to deal with yet another monthly bill.
I basically switched to using my employer's Twilio account for personal stuff. They don't mind with my volume.
It's an authentication problem not a cost problem.
[1]: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act...
This is The Campaign Registry.
Every inch of it is a confusing mess. It mandates setup and subscription fees. Last I checked, registration usually took 4-10 days but can be much longer.
The way the regulation reads, every business that uses A2P 10DLC (software-sent text) needs to be registered and pay recurring fees.
The purported intent is to determine which mass mailed texts are allowed. In theory, all others would be flagged or blackholed.
The way the regulation is written however, it captures every software-sent text. This includes situations like a tech support session where a technician texts a diagram to a customer. The regs don't differentiate between this and actual mass mailing.
In general, I'm skeptical that we should punish a company, especially one that isn't the largest player in the market, based on (pretextual IMO) actions taken (or not taken) by its competitors. I don't think the merger should have been approved, but once that bell is rung I think the standard for judicial intervention needs to be very high, and I don't think bare market forces apply.
IIRC the deal is more about the fact that they share a common aircraft type, and Airbus’ order backlog is measured in years.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/JBLU/jetblue-airwa...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SAVE/spirit-airlin...
I am not an expert in airlines, and I am sure there are COVID effects, but it seems like the other domestic airlines have bounced back quicker since they are showing profits.
But more importantly, I remember Jetblue wanting to provide a better than average flying experience when the airline started, so I presume the only reason they would want to merge with Spirit, a company who does the exact opposite, is because they are facing financial headwinds.
Jetblue and Spirit both have a strategy of lowering costs by only running one aircraft type, the Airbus A320 family, which means that their pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, only need training on one type of aircraft and can be flexibly deployed, they only maintain one set of spare parts, etc.
The Airbus order backlog is several years long. If you need planes earlier than that, your only recourse is to buy someone else's planes.
---
FWIW, Q2 2023, JBLU reported highest quarterly net profit: https://simpleflying.com/jetblue-record-quarterly-revenues-q...
At this point it is the bread and butter of a low cost carrier. JBLU originally started as one. Legacy carriers are more likely to get different types of planes for different missions, and pit the duopolists against each other to secure better pricing.
Still, the two aircraft fleet is a lot smaller than what you would see on a legacy carrier.
Spirit isn't a perfect match (different market segments), but otherwise they use the same model of aircraft and have some operational efficiencies. I'd hazard a guess Spirit's branding and low cost model will be tossed out in favor of JetBlue's operating model, and that segment of the market will be left to Frontier.
Per my ten flights this year with them (out of BWI, Miami, Vegas & Reno) it's a Pay less and get out the airport quickest experience. Their planes i flown on are new planes with seats that are a bit less comfortable. Their refund policy is awful ..just don't cancel.
Theres tons of negative press about them and I bet a lot of it is stirred up by fake news marketing via their competitors. TikTok has lots of influencers / social media professionals trashing them with their fake news marketing videos (like a few such tikTok(ers) have millions of followers).
If JetBlue buys them no more cheap good flights and that cuts out a lot people who can afford to fly with them now and that's crap..flying/traveling should be affordable for many not just middle to upper class!
What are some examples of this "fake news marketing" that you're claiming?
Otherwise, I've had okay experiences with Spirit prior to this year but I won't be flying with them again since it is shorter to drive than suffer their constant delays.
Or alternatively, Sprint's shareholders would have been wiped out, and its creditors could have continued operating it after taking a loss on their loans, preserving competition in the cellular service market.
My source is that they reported they were set to be cash flow positive (meaning profitable outside of servicing debt) in 2019:
https://seekingalpha.com/news/3413933-sprint-cfo-sees-t-mobi...
That still might have been untenable for their shareholders, but it is misleading to say the alternative was still three cellular service companies.
Despite a brutal earnings call yesterday, they are expanding network aggressively. They have the bankroll to ramp up, unlike Sprint who was circling the drain. I think ultimately there will be 4 healthy competitors, not 3.
Best of luck to them, some disruption would be nice. I would like at least one cell provider to not have dead zones in my area.
Why? What particular harm are you worried about here? If there's harm to market participants then why should the players be immune? Why is a merger approval so inviolate?
> and I don't think bare market forces apply.
Why _wouldn't_ they? What forces _would_ you invoke to achieve justice? Or are you saying that because it's too inconvenient, we have to ignore the harms?
Market's don't exist for the benefit of companies. They exist for the benefit of citizens who both participate in them as consumers and as laborers. We wrote a lot of anti monopoly law for very good reasons, if shareholders are inconvenienced by having to unwind bad deals that shouldn't have been approved in the first place, I see no reason to afford them greater protection or deference than the fundamental participants of that market.
This is so breathtakingly wrong, that 'Earth is flat' is more accurate.
Ten thousand years ago, before investors, central banks, before currency, before the concept of money, primitive people had Markets
Primordial market consists only of two peope - labourer and a customer. I trade my sheep for your fish.
Even in the modern day, many companies have no investors - for example limited partnerships.
The idea that markets would disappear without investment reads like an attempt by the pope to take credit for creating the world in 3 days.
So, sure, not literally every market would disappear without investors. But the overwhelming majority of current GPD would not exist without capital. It's quite hard to name a single current business that would exist without any investors in the world. Does your business require a computer? An office? A store front? A phone? Running water? Electricity? Investors, investors, investors, investors, investors. There are various stakeholders in any business - workers, customers, capital providers, suppliers, folks who feel externalities, and so on. The idea that companies are there just for the workers and the customers is misunderstanding the complexity of the modern world. It isn't the same place it was 10,000 years ago.
And... it appears there is confusion about what a limited partnership is... Many limited partnerships exist so they can raise money from investors who want nothing more than a return on their capital. Here is a decent intro on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_partnership .. An enormous amount of current law is written to make the aggregation of capital possible and an attractive proposition. Society generally understands how important it is to make investment attractive.
The very existence of these companies is a privilege, a state provided fiction. The people get to determine the scope of that privilege.
Corporations have no innate natural rights.
Because changing rulings is by itself a bad thing that harms economic predictability
If we want mergers to be undoable, that needs to be clear at the time of approval. We could probably fix this going forward to strike a better balance between predictability and other outcomes, but we have to make the contingencies known in advance, not pull rugs three years later.
What about the idea that unlawful things remain unlawful even if someone gets away with them for a little while.
That seems pretty logically consistent too.
It’s a lawsuit, litigated by lawyers, in a court of law. You may see a three letter word reappearing if you look closely.
Every court case starts with a document that lists the actions of the defendant while citing the specific laws (statute or tort) alleged to have been violated.
As a general rule laws are enforced after the fact by a harmed party asking courts to provide a remedy. In the case of criminal law the party is the people, represented by the state, in the case of civil law it’s often a private individual, group, or organization.
This is the normal way laws are applied. People break them and then someone takes them to court to unwind the damage and seek redress.
> But those consequences should be consistent for any company engaging in said behaviors, regardless of whether they were recently merged.
It's really not that complicated. That's how civil and business law is typically enforced.
Your premise is that when a business deal is "approved" it's all set. But that's not really how things generally work, your premise is dubious. The real way things work is people do things and then if they cause unlawful harm they end up getting sued, sometimes by the justice department sometimes by a class action sometimes by someone else.
The original iPhone plan didn’t even have unlimited minutes (450 + 5000 night and weekend) and only came with 200 texts, for $60 in 2008 dollars ($90 today).
The current T-Mobile “essentials” plan is $60 with no taxes/fees besides sales tax, and it comes with unlimited voice/text with 50GB of data before throttling.
I don’t have a history of every single plan ever, but I don’t think T-Mobile ever offered an “unlimited everything” plan for less than $50 or so, pre or post-merger.
If you include T-Mobile subsidies like Mint Mobile, there’s an argument to be made that prices have dropped dramatically.
The other truth is that Sprint was always cheaper because it was by far the least reliable and desirable carrier. Sprint had the lowest prices and the lowest nationwide subscriber count because their product was inferior.
Instead of two great carriers (AT&T/Verizon), one okay carrier (T-Mobile), and one god-awful carrier (Sprint), now we have three great carriers where you are likely to be able to reliably choose any three regardless of where you live. That wasn’t really the case pre-merger.
And of course, there’s a great argument for the fact that Sprint would have probably gone bankrupt and been liquidated without its merger.
Under Sprint, I was paying ~$300 per month.
> The other truth is that Sprint was always cheaper because it was by far the least reliable and desirable carrier.
It depends on where in the country you were (or were traveling overseas). Google-fi was originally built on Sprint infrastructure and (IIRC) used the same overseas billing system.
Traveling overseas with them was fantastic and inexpensive.
> If you include T-Mobile subsidies like Mint Mobile, there’s an argument to be made that prices have dropped dramatically.
My costs per month (same plans, same everything), are now $485. The only thing that has changed is the "fees" I pay monthly. So yeah, costs have gone up to consumers, even for us who didn't change anything and were forced to switch to T-Mobile.
For 6 lines, I paid $276 back in 2017, and it is $310 now, so in ~6 years, the price went up 12%. And some of that was increased taxes.
Perhaps you’re on an old plan and need to change to a new one, or maybe you’re including device payments or insurance in your figure?
Magenta is $160/month with taxes and fees included for 4 lines. Make sure you enroll in AutoPay for the discount.
Essentials should be $105 but it doesn’t include taxes and fees, so it doesn’t actually save a ton over Magenta but it’s still less.
Like I said, you need to switch plans.
Why should I care about this merge, will it raise my price because of the merge? yes I'm a prepaid phone user.
https://www.whistleout.com/CellPhones/Carriers/T-Mobile
It's not as simple as "lets split them up and it will all get better".
5G densities are for factory automation, self-driving cars, drones, sensors, superdense urban centers etc.
And the 5G you are speaking of is mmwave. Mid-band 5G is perfectly useable and a significant improvement over LTE. Verizon and T-Mobile push over 1Gb/s over mid-band 5G at the same reach LTE provides and much less latency. mmwave you can get up to 4Gb/s (at short distances). Even more so when Verizon moves rolls out SA 5G in place of the current NSA 5G.
A family member of mine uses T-Mo's contract-free 5G home internet. Latency low enough for video calls enabling WFH and playing online games. Speeds in the hundreds of megabits even during peak hours. $50/mo no contract.
I can take my cheap laptop around, pair it to my phone, and get the same internet pretty much anywhere in town. I can do cloud gaming or work anywhere I get cell service. I pay $15/mo no contract. It's awesome.
When you say "the people", you really mean the government. Out of curiosity, how does your customer experience with your cell provider compare to that of the DMV, IRS or any other government agency you may have had the pleasure of interacting with?
The solution to insufficient competition should not be to remove all competition (which would be the case with government ownership).
https://www.fcc.gov/about-auctions
Sounds like AT&T and Verizon people should go to T-Mobile if their service is so expensive.
If T-Mobile works in their area (or for those with specialty phones, with their phone).
Prices for parts and labor for repairs and upgrades will increase, if only because these costs are additive -- things will break, new tech will need supporting, etc...
The real question, IMO, is at what frequency do costs rise and by how much? Sure, I'd like to limit the amount of big money transfers to execs, but that's not really possible.
No one believes them. The court just uncritically accepts cockamamie arguments from "expert economists" without any input from the public at all, typically.
They can wholesale out the infrastructure to service providers who then have a lower barrier to entry and increases competition.
T-Mobile already has many wholesale providers like Mint Mobile that offer much lower rates than Tmobile directly.
>Whoever owns the infrastructure shouldn’t also provide the service.
How does it benefit people to have another entity with all of its costs in the chain literally just collecting rent?
Tmobile/Verizon/ATT all use different brands like Mint for price segmentation, selling the spectrum at different prices to different populations. And they prioritize traffic based on how important the client is (typically related to how much they pay):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QoS_Class_Identifier
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/tn4733/qci_leve...
This doesn't make sense as a universal maxim. It does make sense in certain contexts such as government-funded monopolies (the former Bell System) or government-funded expansion efforts (RDOF and BEAD expansion being funded by the United States and separately by the several states)
And it also doesn't make sense at certain technological levels. Old telephone lines were a point-to-point set of wires from your house to some central point. Allowing competitors into that central point and using the single set of wires that were dedicated to you, the consumer was very clean and easy to do
Unbundling shared media like coaxial lines or radio networks where all of the traffic is intermingled--at what point do you differentiate between the different providers? What are the different providers actually....providing?
It's like the deregulated natural gas market in Georgia. The monopoly no longer serves customers directly, but they still own all the pipes in the ground. The 'marketers' buy gas and sell it to us, the consumers, but it's all put into the pipelines at the same place by the old monopoly. It's all just a financial shell game with provider A essentially redeeming so many cubic feet of gas into the system. It's fungible and there's effectively no differentiation between the providers, who all have exactly the same pricing, exactly the same contracts, exactly the same policies. Except now you have half a dozen CEOs, and HR departments, and IT departments, and billing systems all adding costs--costs that are now unregulated since it's "competitive"
What market forces would then incentivize infrastructure upgrades? To do this and still incentivize upgrades you'd need political mandates.
This is what was forced* on T-Mobile/Telekom back at home in Germany. They own a lot of basic infrastructure that is a natural monopoly and where having multiple companies built that out redundantly would be utter nonsense. The government makes Telekom rent it out at prices decided on by the Federal Network Agency.
They still get to be a normal service provider as well though.
* Technically it started out as a government company and is still owned to 32% by the country.
But did it reduce competition compared to where we'd be if there had not been a merger?
Sprint was on the way out. They were likely to go bankrupt and have their assets sold off to AT&T or Verizon. The result would be 3 national carries (just like we got with the merger) but with T-Mobile a distant third.
With the merger, T-Mobile got Sprint's spectrum and became much more viable to many more people as an alternative to Verizon and AT&T. T-Mobile is now the #2 carrier, a little bit ahead of AT&T.
For example, Sprint's assets could have been sold to Google (which already operates an MVNO), or Comcast, Cisco, Amazon, Samsung, etc. These are all companies that could afford to buy it, and doing so would complement their existing business, but they don't already operate a major wireless carrier and so wouldn't reduce competition.
Getting a fourth carrier established from scratch would be a serious financial challenge even for companies like Google and Apple.
There are mitigating factors such as T-mobile becoming a much more potent competitor with the mid-band spectrum they got from Spectrum.
The FCC hoped that Dish would step in to emerge as that 4th have not materialized. We need Dish or someone else to emerge as a major competitor.
That said, I don't think reversing the merger is a viable option at this point. We really need a 4th national competitor to merge. Dish has potential but so far it's not made a dent.
We've also got AT&T in our house, and it's far worse, even after the degradation of T-Mobile.
I think if the premise behind this lawsuit is that the consolidation did the damage, though, the plaintiffs have quite a row to hoe. Sprint was circling the drain prior to the merger. Can they argue that Sprint just going away and having their assets (like spectrum licenses) sold off to satisfy creditors after they went bankrupt was healthier for competition? That seems highly speculative.
I'm not sure what the solution is, and I don't think the merger was good, but I don't see that disallowing it would've improved this particular market.