“Verizon Communications chief executive Lowell McAdam has gone on record in suggesting that the company’s biggest rival, AT&T, should be allowed to complete its proposed $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile USA,” Zach Epstein reports for BGR.
“‘That match had to occur,’ McAdam said at an investor conference on Wednesday, warning that the government has no choice but to allow such mergers unless it can focus on getting telcos the increased spectrum they need to operate,” Epstein reports. “He continued, ‘We need to be very thoughtful on what the impacts would be to the overall industry if this is a way to regulate the industry without actually passing regulation.'”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
It’s only those retards in the DOJ and the retards in the White House, in particular that community organizer, that Black Jesus, who couldn’t organize a piss up in a brewery, that have a vested interest in destroying businesses. The DOJ should appoint Apotheker as CEO and Whitman as Chairwoman if they’re that intent on destroying businesses. Damned idiots.
Good God man, bitter much? Those white sheets must really chafe.
Yes, because anyone who disagrees with Obama is a racist– by definition!
No. I’m an independent and I disagree with Obama on a lot of things. Disagreeing is very different than BLN’s racist screed. I call ’em like I see ’em.
Dude wrote “Black Jesus”! How is that not racist?!
Disagreeing with President Obama does not make any person a racist. Calling or agreeing with people that say Obama has a deep seated hatred of white people or he is not a US citizen or compare Obama with Hitler and the Nazis is not disagreeing, just plain hatred. Racism and bigotry is nothing but hatred.
Obama hands out billions of dollars in corprate wellfare and has a vested interest in destroying business?
That boy must be really, really confused.
Now, I bet you’re a Christian.
Sprint and Verizon ae CDMA. GSM are T-Mobile and ATT.
Seems obvious on the technical side. Plus, getting those towers up by ATT would take forever. Too much government regulations (locat, state, fed) ,and legal blocking by various groups to quickly fill gaps that customers state as a problem. If left alone and on it own, will T-Mobile be able to keep up or provide more since it is on some odd ball frequencies.
Time will decide if the system chooses three or for carriers.
Well yeah… if there are only two major companies competing it makes it a lot easier to set prices, right? Why wouldn’t they support the elimination of smaller companies? Seems to work well in Canada.
The three Majors are Sprint, AT&T and Verizon. AT&T acquiring T-Mobile doesn’t reduce the number of majors operating.
… and the only reason there are few carriers running anyway is the FCC auctioned off three monopolies on spectrum. So, its a government created problem.
T-Mobile wants to sell, AT&T wants to buy. Verizon dude is correct, this deal is inevitable. I’ve heard it argued that “T-Mobile is profitable, so does not need to be acquired.” Yet the latest results from RIM show profit too, but we know they are DCW. T-mo knows it is better to sell off now than to stick out year’s of decline. Why is the government allowed to force T-mo to stay in game it clearly wants to quit playing?
There would be many more competitors in the carrier business if the FCC hadn’t divided the spectrum into three and then auctioned off the “monopoly” to use it to only three entities per metropolitan area.
Millions of WiFi devices coexist with *microwave ovens* using spread spectrum technology. The FCC, if it really served the public interest, would let any carrier they want use spread spectrum over a much larger bandwidth area.
We’d instantly have more competition, lower prices, and a lot of innovative services that we don’t have now because they decided to create a trio poly.
Now that they have screwed things up, they’re going to pick and choose which mergers to allow? T-Mobile isn’t even one of the trio poly (they had to piece to gather their business by leasing from the big three).
And of course the clueless people aren’t even aware of *Why* there’s so few mobile carriers…..
Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.
I agree. We are tangled up in a knot due to mostly-well-meaning actions of ignorant people. They don’t know the ramifications of their actions the unintended consequences bite us 10-20 years later. I don’t know how we rectify the mess at this time without more FCC action, but their track record isn’t encouraging.
Way to go Mr. Verizon!! You’re absolutely right in siding with ATT on this one, and this is from an ATT customer who has not always been happy with ATT’s service.
JEJ
Isn’t it interesting how unusual it is to see a businessman siding with what’s basically morally correct (e.g.: freedom of association represented by this merger) and pro-business, and doing so publicly?
that’s a mark of how socialist the country has become.
And yet everyone runs to the government to solve any little problem they have. Think the telco business is overly regulated and affecting pricing/competition now? Just wait until Obamacare fully comes into effect, then try to get decent health care coverage at a reasonable price and visit a good doctor.
I obviously don’t know as many details about this Affordable Health Care for America Act (the official name of the new American health care plan) as you, bizlaw, but some data that I have seen since it was signed into law indicates that after years of decline, suddenly, 900,000 more Americans aged 18-25 now have health coverage (a significant increase), directly attributed to the mandates of the new law.
This health care plan is practically identical to the one implemented in Massachusetts some years ago. That one has shown to be a runaway success by every benchmark. It is so absurdly funny how all those who favoured that one, and kept explaining it away as the best thing ever, now struggle to hammer away at the AHCA (the “Obamacare”), only because it is not their OWN political party who brought it up, but the other guys, even though the actual plan is practically identical.
Americans politics had poisoned peoples mind so much so that nobody seems to be capable of independently thinking.
It is absurd to see here how American partisan politics tends to completely block or shut down parts of people’s brains.
In what world is merger of two huge telcos good for competition, jobs and the economy??? The first order of business at the newly dominant AT&T will be to chop off thousands of redundant jobs acquired from T-Mobile. The next order of business (coming some 90 seconds after the first one) would be to eliminate those attractive all-you-can-eat plans that T-Mobile is offering for $50. There is absolutely no upside to this.
Let us not forget; it is Deutsche Telekom who wishes to exit the US mobile market. Rather than spinning it off as an independent company (a complicated proposition in this crappy economy), they have found a buyer willing to pay massive amounts of money for it. Make no mistake, AT&T is paying top dollar for this in order to grab that pole position, so it would have better leverage against the only other American carrier that matters (Verizon). The resulting duopoly (Sprint is inconsequential and will soon be ripe for a Verizon takeover, if T-Mobile deal is allowed to go through) will quickly show us exactly how bad mobile service and pricing can get (for those who want to know right away, ask Canadians).
Americans have recently stopped using their own brains to do critical thinking; instead, they let the political party of their choice do all of their thinking for them. This is becoming absurd.
I agree entirely. What I fear though is that T-Mobile will simply go bankrupt anyways (especially without the iPhone) and we’ll wind up with the same doofus two-party telco system you are predicting.
I don’t see a way around this two-party-telco future, unless the government were to mandate a single telco protocol for 4G or something. That might allow smaller telcos to thrive.
T-Mobile has been quite profitable so far (that’s not the reason why DT wants to sell it). They found the way to sell their inferior devices at the right price and offer right service, so they were able to sustain a decent loyal following, small as it is. Nothing indicates that T-Mobile is going downhill.
Hmm, T-Mobile has done okay, but they have been slowly losing customers and that shouldn’t really happen with the exploding cell-phone market. From their last financial report.
T-Mobile lost a total of 50,000 customers during the second quarter of 2011. However, the second quarter loss is actually a step in the right direction when one considers that’s not as bad as the 93,000 customers T-Mobile lost during the same quarter of 2010 or the 99,000 customers T-Mobile lost during the first quarter of 2011. Total revenue dropped slightly to $5.1 billion from the $5.2 billion reported during the first quarter for 2011.
Yeah, the fewer competition the better for the consumer…
Yeah…