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AT&T Buys T-Mobile (And Why It

ari-free said:
wimax has poor building penetration. I can't even consider Sprint until they switch.
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LTE has horrible interference with anything with power running through it about 3% degradation.
LTE sends the data and forgets it, so instead of making sure your download is 100% perfect, it just assumes it is. If you lose your signal or the data gets corrupted, lte does not even know. That song may have parts corrupted, but since you can not redown load it and you dont have a service that makes sure it was not corrupted, your lost.

The best part about this is, wimax only has about 3% average degradation with buildings, as low as 1% and as high as 18%. Which is the same degradation as lte and power lines or you tv, when it is turned on.

But wimax works at 2.5ghz spectrum which means that the data corruption is very little. For places with poor coverage you can stack as many repeaters as you want in almost any size foot print. LTE works at the 700mhz which means data corruption can get pretty bad. At 700mhz you can not stack any more towers in the same foot print. In fact you have to have about 1 tower per 3 miles. Which means that if you got horrible reception, it is not going to be easily fixable.

But only wimax as a system for making sure the data that is being transmitted is 100% uncorrupted. LTE just can't tell.

I have done this in a lab, if I give wimax a data song, and start to degrade the signal, wimax will stop, back up, find the uncorrupted part, start the down load, byte for byte. Sure it slows it down but will make sure the data is 100% uncorrupted. But lte will just ignore it. It will down load the same corrupted data.

So the same average degradation with one major difference. You can have lte.
 
TheBrit said:
For what it's worth, T-Mobile UK has merged with Orange UK in a venture called Everything Everywhere jointly owned by France Telecom (Orange owner) and Deutsche Telecom (T-Mobile owner)

All we have noticed so far is better coverage. In the first instance this has been provided by Orange and T-Mobile users being able to roam onto each other's networks. Further down the line will be full integration into a single, very comprehensive, network.

This could actually turn out to be a good thing for USA customers. Just sayin'.
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At least for me, I know coverage will be better as long as At&t doesn't screw up the transition. But to me that's not the issue, the issue is pricing, plans, lower data caps, prepaid, and etc. I don't know all the details of the the UK merger, but was there a big difference in pricing and other things between the two? That's the major difference I see with At&t and T-Mobile, which is why I don't want to go to At&t if the merge happens. Yes, my plan can be grandfathered in, but if I get caught tethering, then they will most likely force me to change my plans or something.
 
It's a sad day. I've enjoyed using T-Mo for years. Even though its coverage is not ideal, it's been good enough, and the customer service is top notch.

AT&T is a ruthless corporate raider that renamed itself from SBC; its wireless division used to be Cingular. It has nothing to do with the old AT&T except in name.

AT&T could grow without wasting $40 billion. All they have to do is provide good customer service and relax some of their restrictive policies (tethering, data pricing) and they'd immediately jump to #1. The fact that they have to buy another company to keep up with Verizon even though they've had the iPhone monopoly for five years tells you something about their incompetence.

Business schools teach that the most successful mergers are the ones where the acquired company is preserved as a wholly owned subsidiary with its own management intact. The least successful mergers are the ones where they literally tear up the acquired company, fire thousands of employees, and absorb its assets into the mother company.

AT&T is planning to gut T-Mobile and lay off thousands. Thus, they are following the failure model. Looks like I'll be shopping around for a Sprint or Verizon phone in a year or two. Sad.
 
RiverOfIce said:
LTE has horrible interference with anything with power running through it about 3% degradation.
LTE sends the data and forgets it, so instead of making sure your download is 100% perfect, it just assumes it is. If you lose your signal or the data gets corrupted, lte does not even know. That song may have parts corrupted, but since you can not redown load it and you dont have a service that makes sure it was not corrupted, your lost.

The best part about this is, wimax only has about 3% average degradation with buildings, as low as 1% and as high as 18%. Which is the same degradation as lte and power lines or you tv, when it is turned on.

But wimax works at 2.5ghz spectrum which means that the data corruption is very little. For places with poor coverage you can stack as many repeaters as you want in almost any size foot print. LTE works at the 700mhz which means data corruption can get pretty bad. At 700mhz you can not stack any more towers in the same foot print. In fact you have to have about 1 tower per 3 miles. Which means that if you got horrible reception, it is not going to be easily fixable.

But only wimax as a system for making sure the data that is being transmitted is 100% uncorrupted. LTE just can't tell.

I have done this in a lab, if I give wimax a data song, and start to degrade the signal, wimax will stop, back up, find the uncorrupted part, start the down load, byte for byte. Sure it slows it down but will make sure the data is 100% uncorrupted. But lte will just ignore it. It will down load the same corrupted data.

So the same average degradation with one major difference. You can have lte.
Click to expand...

If something follows the OSI model, the physical layer should just send the packet on, and not care if it was received.

Reception guarantee happens at the application layer, not the physical layer. It's up to the application layer to ask for a retry, not the layers under it.
 
PSkeptic said:
If something follows the OSI model, the physical layer should just send the packet on, and not care if it was received.

Reception guarantee happens at the application layer, not the physical layer. It's up to the application layer to ask for a retry, not the layers under it.
Click to expand...
But if the application does not know or care if the signal is degraded, for example, hulu, youtube, or netflix, which can't real time data check, your movie/video turns to crap quickly. Since, there is no way to currently make sure, with lte, that quick stream or live stream video is not corrupt. Wimax can and will sense garbage data and for live stream or quick stream, slow down the data until the garabge is removed. Even though common apps like itunes checks for data, the network like lte will not adjust to fix the data corruption.

So if you are in your house and you try to download the movie from Amazon and the network corrupts the data and forces you to start over. Once you start over, the network will just corrupt the data again. And again. And again.

Wimax will not only ask for the garbage packets to be replaced, but it will adjust itself to makes sure that further packets are not corrupted.

Which is why I pointed this out. Even though apps should check if downloads are 100% uncorrupted. If the network just keeps sending corrupted files, it is pointless to have a program tell you that they are corrupted, because that does not fix the problem of HOW they are being corrupted in the first place.
 
pool_shark said:
I said it's great for AT&T and T-mobile customers. AT&T customers get more coverage, T-mobile customers don't get dumped because T-mobile went out of business. If it isn't approved, T-mobile will most like go out of business soon along with all of their employees being out of work.
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The problem with that is, there won't be any T-Mobile customers. AT&T wants T-Mobile for their spectrum and nothing more. I doubt they even care much about the customers, especially since their offerings can't even remotely touch what T-Mobile has.

AT&T is going to force T-Mobile customers into their way of thinking. This is a really bad deal for TMo customers since they tend to be very loyal. We're talking customers that have been with the company for 10-12 years with the SAME plan. With the 1700 MHz band being dismantled for LTE, TMo customers are forced to either sign a new contract (something none of them would want to have anything to do with) or purchase unlocked phones (something that not everyone like me would be willing to do).

This also doesn't say anything on whether AT&T will even allow their new customers (or in this case "refugees") to keep their existing plans. They'd certainly lose money on customers with unlimited data or promo plans like the one that I have. More than likely, AT&T would be willing to take the loss just for the ability to build their LTE network, something that they are already behind on considering Verizon is already beat them to the punch.

What we have here is two ways of thinking, the American way and the European way. T-Mobile was based out of the European way of thinking offering low cost plans that none of the other competitors could touch while AT&T shows just how bad our system is here. T-Mobile could have tweaked their plans a bit, raising the cost just a little and became profitable without growing, but they stuck to their guns to the end. Unfortunately, with complete saturation in the USA, the only real way to gain a large amount of customers is to buy the competition.

If this acquisition does take place (which is still very speculative right now), the FCC and DoJ need to enforce very strict terms on it similar to the NBC/Comcast deal. Offering very good deals on new contract phones, no arbitrary cancelling of grandfathered plans, options to buy phones at full price or unlocked, etc. Otherwise this deal stinks like shit.

Even if it does get those terms, the playing field will never be the same. Chances are, if the big two grow too much, we're going to see a repeat of the break-up of Ma Bell. All this just so Deutsche Telekom could get out of debt (partially).
 
Nope, don't like shiny new things. New things are not always better. We have a 94 Infiniti that beats the new models in MPG and everything else. Even my Tacoma does better highway and it's a truck! Our daughter's older Tercel passed them. (They are 4 cyl, stick - we don't own automatics)
If I want a shiny new thing, I'll buy an unlocked European phone, and my choice, not the carrier's. I've got one user on my plan who is voice only. He's using an old Nokia 6086. He'll keep using it until it breaks. If voice signal doesn't change, he can have the old BB Pearl Flip. I'm assuming that only data will be going LTE, and they will have to accommodate voice only customers with some kind of plan.
I can turn on my Galaxy 3 in the house and use my own wifi for data with no SIM in it at all. I can make a Skype to Skype call.
Not everyone falls for marketing hype.
 
Android2Addict said:
This deal is very bad for consumers. I hope the feds oppose it.
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I'd like to not see this go through, but I'm betting it will. There will certainly be some restrictions that might help in the short run, but in the long run, this is very bad for the consumer.

It's only a matter of time before Verizon buys Sprint and if this goes through, no way they can block that merger and we'll be left with only 2 choices, and higher prices/fewer services/slower technology adoption.
 
DKYang said:
At least for me, I know coverage will be better as long as At&t doesn't screw up the transition. But to me that's not the issue, the issue is pricing, plans, lower data caps, prepaid, and etc. I don't know all the details of the the UK merger, but was there a big difference in pricing and other things between the two? That's the major difference I see with At&t and T-Mobile, which is why I don't want to go to At&t if the merge happens. Yes, my plan can be grandfathered in, but if I get caught tethering, then they will most likely force me to change my plans or something.
Click to expand...

The prices were and are broadly similar and nothing much has changed at the moment apart from being able to road to the other network.

Tethering...not a problem. I have it included in my plan on T-Mobile. Orange on the other hand not so but as far as I know they tend to look the other way as long as you are not doing it too much.

Business schools teach that the most successful mergers are the ones where the acquired company is preserved as a wholly owned subsidiary with its own management intact. The least successful mergers are the ones where they literally tear up the acquired company, fire thousands of employees, and absorb its assets into the mother company.
Click to expand...

This has not happened with Orange and T-Mobile in the UK yet but that's not to say it will not5 happen in the future.
 
The prices are not similar

Me on Tmo: Unlimited Everything $70

Me on ATT w/ Sort of Unlimited Everything: (2gig data) $122.97 ($53 dollars difference per month or $636 more per year...Why would I want to do that? WWWD??? (What would Warren Buffett Do?)

The above does not include an increased fee if you exceed their monthly limits on your data plan - $10 per gig over 2gigs
Their insurance has up to a $125 deductible before you are reimbursed. I have never paid a deductible on phone insurance before my claim could be serviced, in my life. So you pay $5 per month ad infinitum and then when you finally *need* the insurance, they charge you AN ADDITIONAL $125 dollars??? - Even if that fee goes to a third party, they could have chosen a better partner for the consumer.

Then there are the ever increasing and appearing "fees"...

IMHO, the *only* thing that ATT ever had going for it was a monopolistic hold on the iphone which it has recently lost. That explains their big influx of customers during that time period. It was the only way you could get an iphone. But the complaints were numerous and when Vzw got the iphone, ATT had to scramble because they were no longer the only pebble on Apple's beach. A simple search bears out the fact that their customers by and large were unhappy...but at that time, they had no choice. Things change. ATT methods remain the same.

And CHOICE is still the name of the game. Limited choice is a win for them and a "what else can I do" for the consumer. Not my idea of a fun time.
 
Ownership of one share of stock is sufficient to get you an admission ticket, provided you held it as of March 1. Proxy statement and annual report can be downloaded here:

Computershare Viewer

I don't know if it will be streamed, but if so it would be cool to see what happens. There is bound to be discussion of the proposed merger.
 
RiverOfIce said:
LTE has horrible interference with anything with power running through it about 3% degradation.
LTE sends the data and forgets it, so instead of making sure your download is 100% perfect, it just assumes it is. If you lose your signal or the data gets corrupted, lte does not even know. That song may have parts corrupted, but since you can not redown load it and you dont have a service that makes sure it was not corrupted, your lost.

The best part about this is, wimax only has about 3% average degradation with buildings, as low as 1% and as high as 18%. Which is the same degradation as lte and power lines or you tv, when it is turned on.

But wimax works at 2.5ghz spectrum which means that the data corruption is very little. For places with poor coverage you can stack as many repeaters as you want in almost any size foot print. LTE works at the 700mhz which means data corruption can get pretty bad. At 700mhz you can not stack any more towers in the same foot print. In fact you have to have about 1 tower per 3 miles. Which means that if you got horrible reception, it is not going to be easily fixable.

But only wimax as a system for making sure the data that is being transmitted is 100% uncorrupted. LTE just can't tell.

I have done this in a lab, if I give wimax a data song, and start to degrade the signal, wimax will stop, back up, find the uncorrupted part, start the down load, byte for byte. Sure it slows it down but will make sure the data is 100% uncorrupted. But lte will just ignore it. It will down load the same corrupted data.

So the same average degradation with one major difference. You can have lte.
Click to expand...

Would this explain the difference you found in your lab ? Note: this an article regarding LTE.
"This is a departure from the existing W-CDMA ARQ process, which does not use re-segmentation. When a block of data is packaged at the Radio Link Control (RLC) layer in W-CDMA, it is never re-segmented."

para 3, ln 1; LTE ARQ and Re-segmentation
 
I am curious if T-Mobile and/or AT&T corporate headquarters has pushed out new contracts since the proposed merger was announced. If so, reading the changes in the language would be interesting. Anyone here work for T-Mobile or AT&T?
 
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