Any thoughts on the AT&T-Mobile deal?

Their still running the T-Mobli ad that says they are faster and better than AT&T Funny.

Only a matter of time. Less choice means they can charge more.

The way this deal is structured, T-Mobile USA "wins" regardless of the outcome. If the deal is not approved (not likely), T-Mobile skates away with $3 billion AT&T's money for its trouble and additional spectrum. So making fun of AT&T (or not) means nothing to T-Mobile at this point.

I would like to see the deal go down in flames but that is as likely as the Earth not spinning on its axis any time soon.

When two UK mobile networks merged, they shed a lot staff but also many cell phone sites. So now many people have worse coverage.

Sprint's only hope is US Cellular. The FCC & DOJ Antitrust/monopoly division will not pass on Verizon hooking up with Sprint.

I have AT&T and around here most of the towers are overloaded. Internet speeds often suck bad. It is not the coverage area per se but the capacity of the towers that need improving. It pisses me off that with all the profit that AT&T has been making over the years that they continue to drag their heels on adding capacity to their existing towers. Adding capacity would solve most of their problems. It does not require more towers being built.
They make it sound like buying T-mobile is going to solve their problems but in reality I think all it will do is give them an excuse (how ever contrived) to raise prices and we will still have the terrible service we have now.

There's more than 1 issue with throughput speeds from a cell tower. The first is the number of users in any given 120 degree sector of the tower. The second is the size of the connection from the tower to the access point. With only a fixed amount of data available in any given sector of the tower, the number of users and what they are doing is the biggest variable. Streaming video is the biggest culprit.

I am a long time T-Mobile customer on a no longer existent family plan. I'm hoping I can keep it, otherwise I will be switching providers if they wont allow me to keep the plan.

I honestly do hope this does NOT go through for the following reasons:

1) "AT&T" nowadays is NOT the old Ma Bell, but is rather a Voltron of Fail comprised primarily of PacBell and Bellsouth (the latter also runs the Cellphone Company Formerly Known As Cingular, which is now branded as AT&T Wireless) and Southwestern Bell post-Bellsouth-borging.

In other words, the company presently known as "AT&T" is, for all intents and purposes, PacBell and Bellsouth in Deathstar Dressup.

2) I pretty much vowed never to have anything to do with anything related to Bellsouth ever again after approximately five years of hell stretching across two separate addresses in which Bellsouth screwed up in any way it could. Things got so bad, in fact, that at one point I had SIX simultaneous complaints with my state public service commission regarding various service failures, billing failures, "make the stuff work" failures, etc.

Yes, I got so frustrated I use the cable company for my phone service now...and interestingly, I have had not one bit of the fail I had with Bellsouth.

3) If I want something that will do international GSM service, I'm screwed--T-Mobile, far and away, had the best deals on this, especially as far as smartphones are concerned.

(Yes, yes, I know, things will be going to LTE. That's a few years off, though, and there's a non-negligible chance I'll need to go overseas for the wedding of some friends of mine. Hence why I care about international access )

The problem will be, you may have no where to go. None of us will have any alternatives.

There are a few different providers in the US... ATT and T Monster are just two.

The small guys can't compete. If the AT&T/TMobile merger goes through, the combination of Verizon and AT&T after the merger will have approximately 80% of the US market, with Sprint at about 12%, and everybody else bringing up the rear.

That's not competitive.

Ma Bell has be coming back together for years, this is just the next to the last step. When it inevitably coalesces, we'll all get raped again in charges and poorly implemented tech till we spend millions to break it up...again. Maybe someone in the FCC or Justice will step up and stop the train wreak before it happens..again? Yeah, right!

... if you want to use a GSM phone you're pretty much stuck with either ATT or T-MO. If the deal goes through, ATT is the only GSM choice. That doesn't sound good at all.

There could be small GSM providers that I've never heard of.

They are mostly all together again now. It was a 25 year plan. The justice department made them divest the baby bells, then they bought each other over the years. It's all undone now.

In fact with cellphones and DSL it's now much more of a monopoly than it was then.

You will never get me to believe this wasn't planned all along. It worked out even better than they planned, however.

Now they can screw us on wireless and internet too! Even on pay tv service.

The biggest mistake AT&T (the old Ma Bell, not the current company masquerading as AT&T) made was when they were given the choice to either keep local service or long distance service was going with long distance. Their management believed that long distance was the future and that there was no money to be made in local services. How wrong they were. Long distance became a commodity product and they never recovered.

What would have been an idea solution would have been to separate the lines from the service providers much like highways are a public entity. Anybody who wanted to provide service would be free to pay for the right to access the network and sign up subscribers. Sadly we wound up with the mess we have now and I seriously doubt we will ever see a breakup like back in 1984. Frankly I was rather unhappy with the breakup at the time. I was in college and it had been so easy to go down the street to the AT&T PhoneCenter store. I could sign up for service, get my phone and phonebook and be up and running by the next day. After the breakup, I had to buy a phone, go downtown to New England Telephone's office to sign up and I never did get a phonebook.

AT&T Starts Capping Broadband

Might affect map updates, some maps are over 2GB now.
http://www.clickorlando.com/money/27759984/detail.html

AT&T charge you data plan whenever you put your sim card to a smartphone. T-Mobile don't. For sure AT&T will increase the price on T-Mobile subscribe after this and adapt their "data plans" on smart phone.

I'll switch to Boost mobile.

this merger is bad for the consumers on all level...