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Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Killed Wireless Price Competition in U.S.

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Re: Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Killed Wireless Price Competition in U.S.

#181

Post by icedchai »

endo_bunker wrote: post #172

This is full of central-planning nonsense. He wants lower prices, but is also mad when the company does layoffs. US consumers probably have some of the highest if not the highest demand for mobile data in the world, and the cost of living is already higher regardless, yet he acts shocked that American consumers pay more for mobile data. Not to mention the fact that I pay $15 for a very reasonable Mint mobile plan tha…

Yep, you can get cheap plans like that through T-Mobile MVNOs or even their own prepaid plan. I'm generally near wifi all the time. A couple gigs of data a month is fine for me.

Re: Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Killed Wireless Price Competition in U.S.

#183

Post by HumblyTossed »

aiauthoritydev wrote: post #169
HumblyTossed wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We the People should own infrastructure. Want to start a new shipping company to compete with UPS? You don't have to build roads, We the People provide those to you. So, do the same with wireless.

Nothing prevents you from working with liked minded individuals to create your own "infra". The phrase "we the people" sounds cool but in reality what you mean is "your money, my idea". Roads is a very common argument, but none of the roads are build by "we the people". Government takes your money by force irrespective of how you think it should be spent and then a completely unaccountable red tapy system that employ…

> Government takes your money by force

Oh good grief.

> We will have better roads, less traffic and more money in pocket with that model.

I call bullshit.

Re: Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Killed Wireless Price Competition in U.S.

#184

Post by HumblyTossed »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #139
HumblyTossed wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We the People should own infrastructure. Want to start a new shipping company to compete with UPS? You don't have to build roads, We the People provide those to you. So, do the same with wireless.

> We the People should own infrastructure Going 4 to 3 sucked, let’s go all the way to a state monopoly!

Right, because we only have one single shipping company using all the roads...

Re: Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Killed Wireless Price Competition in U.S.

#185

Post by joshstrange »

toast0 wrote: post #11

Post merger I went from a $25/month t-mobile plan to a $15/month t-mobile plan. Not entirely apples to apples, but close. My spouse went from $30/month to $25/month on Verizon for more data. And there's lots of options at https://prepaidcompare.net/

I wish there was an equivalent of https://prepaidcompare.net/ for IoT.

I had to scour a bunch of different providers and often call/email for pricing to put together a list of options in a spreadsheet. I needed cellular service for iPads but they are only used a handful of times a year (normally I finally settled on SimpleX [0] which has been working very well though I wish their API was a little nicer. I pay an upfront fee ($3) for each eSIM then, based on the plan I picked, I pay $0.04/MB and $0.25/device/mo. I wanted a lower per-device per-month fee for a higher per-MB fee. They have other plans where the MB cost is cheaper and you pay more per month. If I ever get to the point where I'm using the iPads more frequently then maybe it will be worth switching to one of those plans but as it is I pay [0] https://simplexwireless.com

Re: Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Killed Wireless Price Competition in U.S.

#186

Post by walterbell »

johnkpaul wrote: post #156
bt3 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data-only global eSims are super cheap. Having done a lot of international travel lately, this is undoubtedly the best way to go. Cheaper and better coverage too.

Where would you recommend someone find one of these? Do they expire, or could I get one to cover years worth of travel? Thanks!

Eskimo has a 2y global SIM, excluding a handful of countries, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40382377

Re: Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Killed Wireless Price Competition in U.S.

#187

Post by Benjammer »

Aloha wrote: post #148
Benjammer wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sprint's goose was most definitely cooked The reason their goose was cooked is because they previously were planning to acquire T Mobile, but SoftBank got back-channel info that it would never be approved by the anti-trust regulators. At the time they had Marcelo Claure running Sprint, basically a corporate "fixer" guy for SoftBank. So he ran the company into the dirt in order to make the merge feasible to regulator…

I don't think that materially really had anything to do with it. Sprint was dying - with extraordinarily high debt, in 2007, well before Softbank bought them, and indeed they lost money every year from 2008 forward - https://www.statista.com/statistics/481739/sprint-corporatio... The Merger with Nextel managed to kill what was great about Nextel, and what was good about Sprint, and they lost customers in droves (most…

>before Softbank bought Sprint, they didn't have the capital to upgrade their 2G/3G network to LTE, much less consider a merger with T-Mobile.

I think both of us can be right at the same time though. Just because they had problems before the SoftBank acquisition as well doesn't necessarily make what I'm saying unreasonable. There was still sentiment in 2013 when SB closed the deal that regulators would not have approved of Sprint acquiring T Mobile [0], despite the struggles going on at Sprint at the time (that you describe). Sprint was definitely putting together a bid to acquire T Mobile, WSJ reported on it [1].

As you yourself said, Sprint was _dying_ at the time of the SB acquisition, but as far as large firms go, they were far from bankrupt yet. SoftBank simply twisted the dagger and then presented the corpse to congress instead of the dying patient.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/4/5376824/fcc-chief-reported...

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303293604579256...

Re: Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Killed Wireless Price Competition in U.S.

#188

Post by Benjammer »

cherioo wrote: post #131
Benjammer wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sprint's goose was most definitely cooked The reason their goose was cooked is because they previously were planning to acquire T Mobile, but SoftBank got back-channel info that it would never be approved by the anti-trust regulators. At the time they had Marcelo Claure running Sprint, basically a corporate "fixer" guy for SoftBank. So he ran the company into the dirt in order to make the merge feasible to regulator…

How is ruining and destroying the value of Sprint, that SoftBank owns, possibly good for SoftBank? What is SoftBank to gain here from enriching TMobile?

They want to spend whatever billions it costs to consolidate the industry and then reap the monopolized profits down the road.

Re: Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Killed Wireless Price Competition in U.S.

#189

Post by kbolino »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #128
aiauthoritydev wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best way to resolve these issues is never "force the bad guys to do good things" but rather destroy the walls which enable their rent seeking. Regulators can work to make it extremely simple for new techs in this space to come up so there is real competition for ATT etc.

We the People should own infrastructure. Want to start a new shipping company to compete with UPS? You don't have to build roads, We the People provide those to you. So, do the same with wireless.

There is no "We the People". There is a government, or really layers of government, composed largely of politicians and bureaucrats. Whether those people running the cellular network is good or not ought to be assessed on what actually exists or is reasonably possible, not appeals to vague abstractions.

Re: Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Killed Wireless Price Competition in U.S.

#190

Post by hylaride »

ElevenLathe wrote: post #162
hylaride wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming anybody else would have wanted to acquire a debt-laden company with an enormous infrastructure deficit as they mismanaged the move to 4/5g. Sprint essentially was only valuable to a company with a better LTE/5G network already in existence that users could me moved to and then Sprint's old spectrum repurposed. Anyone else would have been left with many tens of billions in network upgrade costs.

If the merger was blocked and no one else wanted to buy it whole, then their assets would get sold off and the proceeds divied up by creditors (and if anything was left after that, to shareholders), same as any other company. Why is this an unthinkable scenario? There would have been some market-clearing price for the Sprint brand name and CDMA network (possibly separately, or even the network itself parted out) and…

The sprint shareholders already took a bath going from over $80/share in 2000 to $5. Hard bankruptcy and selling off its network would have been disruptive to their remaining customers, more complex/expensive to unwind (causing more of the money to go lawyers), and would still result in 1 less major carrier, resulting in essentially the same thing. The results would have most likely been most Sprint customers eventually being part of the other carriers anyways. If there was a market clearing price for sprint, a private equity firm would have snapped it up - that didn't happen because there was too much debt to go on as its own entity.

Could things have been done differently? Sure. A condition of the merger could have been guaranteeing MVNO access or selling off a portion of the spectrum (maybe that happened).

But T-Mobile, combined with Sprint, went from being a distant competitor in subscriber numbers competitive. If sprint was "sold off" separately, T-mobile would most likely eventually run out of steam and end up like Sprint. They just wouldn't have the number of subscribers to amortize costs down the way AT&T and Verizon could.

Keeping struggling, small players going somehow would likely of only delayed the inevitable.

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