So AT&T intends to buy T-Mobile USA off of Deutsche Telekom. This is the final straw in the complete Third World-ification of American cellular. Getting rid of T-Mobile eliminates the lowest-cost carrier, the most unlock-friendly carrier, the only carrier that actually charges you less if you’re not taking a subsidized phone, and replaces it with a single GSM carrier for the entire country and all the monopoly effect that goes with it.
The reason Europe is so far ahead of the US is that they settled on GSM early and enforced it. As a result, there’s separation between carrier and equipment, prepaid is a very reasonable option, you don’t pay to RECEIVE calls and texts, and you can pick up the iPhone on five different carriers in the UK alone. Hell, you HAVE five carriers, and a sheep in the middle of the Cotswolds has five bars. There’s none of this nonsense about charging $20 extra a month for the privilege of turning on tethering, nor a six-month wait for MMS to work, because there’s an actual COMPETITIVE MARKETPLACE.
Which the US doesn’t have. And hasn’t since Cingular ate the original AT&T Wireless. When there are only two national carriers with multiband coverage (850 Mhz and 1900 Mhz) and they use incompatible standards (GSM and CDMA), you have all the negative effect of monopoly while perpetuating the illusion of consumer choice. Sure, there’s Sprint still sticking it out with their one 1900 Mhz coverage band and CDMA hardware, but for all intents and purposes, national cellular service has been reduced to the two worst carriers in America. (And don’t start on Verizon’s network; their coverage was predicated on keeping analog up for YEARS and is technologically inferior in terms of data speed and voice/data use, at least until LTE is deployed widely.)
In fact, once LTE is more widely deployed, you might – MIGHT – have a competitive environment. But not for the foreseeable future. You can buy your nice new iPad 2, but if you get one for AT&T, you’ll have to sell it to buy the Verizon one if you decide you want the other carrier. In fact, with Verizon and Sprint both on CDMA, you can pretty much count on always having to buy a new phone when you change carriers from now on. Which is just the way they like it. Enhanced lock-in, more than ever, and you can expect ever-increasing carrier control on things like Android add-ons (hint: there’s a reason the Google prototype phones were only available on T-Mobile, and you can forget about OS upgrades if the carrier doesn’t want you to have them and you don’t want to hack your own handset).
I deeply resent the way modern America makes me sound like a fucking bong-watered granola shaver hippie, but it’s long past time for somebody to hit Corporate America in the ballsack with a two-by-four. We don’t have a free market, we don’t even have a regulated market, we have a series of monopoly and monopsony effects. AT&T or Verizon. Comcast or AT&T. DirecTV or Dish. XM or Siri–never mind. Third. World. Country. Remember when you could get DSL from somebody other than the phone company and had three different GSM carriers to pick from nationally? And when was the last time one of these awesome mergers and great business deals actually resulted in more capacity or a lower bill? Anyone? I’ll wait…
I believe the term of art with the kids these days is “FML.”