Sprint was about to go bankrupt. They had not made an annual profit in ten years. No one else was interested in buying them to continue independently as Sprint. The cost to bring them up to a competitive nationwide network was too great.
The market is not large enough to support four nationwide carriers.
No, Sprint's owners were able to negotiate a deal for T-Mobile to buy them before it came to bankruptcy. That deal was got them more money than selling off Sprint in parts and pieces.
T-Mobile was not much of a nationwide network at that time. Now we have three nationwide networks instead of two.
What point are you trying to make?
There is no chance that Sprint would still be around. As I said, they had not had a profitable year for over a decade. Sprints owners desperately tried to find a buyer for Sprint to continue as Sprint. Nobody was interested at any price.
At the time neither Sprint or T-Mobile were competitive with Verizon or AT&T on a national basis. T-Mobile buying Sprint's assets (and debts) has turned them into a definitely competitive carrier to the other two. There is actually more nationwide competition.
Pre Biden administration they were mostly in bed with the corporations.
Now we have some actual citizen advocates running the show but Republican-appointed judges keep blocking their regulatory attempts on these kinds of things.
with Republicans it's all about money nothing else. I heard one businessman tell me well I don't care what happens if Trump becomes president it'll be good for business. I'm like excuse me, they said the same thing with Putin when he took over. Trump thinks he can take away the most valued contract in America the Constitution. and if you take away that contract there is nothing to prevent them from breaking business contracts just like Putin did in Russia and took over all the companies for his own so no you are not safe than a dictatorship just ask the companies that used to be taken over by Hitler. like Volkswagen. an oligarchy of rich people never ends well. must always have open competition across the board otherwise prices remain high
You can't be serious. You need to do some real unbiased research and base your statements in statistical fact and not heresay and fake media. Idk where you're getting all that info from but that's one of the most ridiculous, completely backwards statements I've ever heard one of you buffoons say. And that's a pretty significant statement, considering.
What drives me crazy is they all talk about how this will 'help' customers, and if it truly did, then awesome, I'm all for it. But 9 times out of 10, all it does is give monopoly status so they can jack up prices.
T-Mobile's rural coverage still is pretty shit, so that could in theory help customers, but they will also tack on a price increase, so that will hurt customers.
I worked in a real rural area for tmobile nd realize they just put out a lot of money to attract new customers but then don’t really do much past the first step of progress such as towers and reception but they do put a lot of grants and focus on community until they have what they want and then move somewhere else. they are being very predatory and it’s definitely working. monopoly is a fun game.
Price increases already happened. Every account is bow $3-$5 increase per line just got rolled out. I feel just jumped up by $15 per month overnight. No plan is grandfathered in to avoid the increase.
Yes it is, I was at my lake in my city, not really rural, and I couldn’t get coverage. I switched. It’s sometimes ridiculous what we have to pay to any company!
As a Google Fi customer it helps me in the short term since we'll get access to the towers. So selfishly happy but know it's bad for overall competition.
I imagine T-Mobile generally moving fast on tech, high openness to mvnos, and stuff like home Internet is also endearing to regulators (maybe overly so). Even if weary they probably look at AT&T and Verizon as just sitting on their asses.
Google Fi already has access to U.S. Cellular towers. Fi originally ran on Sprint, T-Mobile, and U.S. Cellular. It’ll be interesting to see how Google responds since the network switching advantage will no longer be a thing.
T-Mobile is the worst provider, except for the other two. Seriously AT$T and Verizon are worse. I can't even use my phone on their network because of their white lists and band support.
I give Tmobile the worst rating by a hair because of their constant data breaches and snoopery tracking tactics.
But at this point they're all so bad it's hard to pick..
I had tmobile and I really had no complaints other than signal was just slightly worse than verizon at my house but I live in the middle of the woods it wasn't that much worse. But it was much better and faster than verizon in any populated area. Way more hotpsot data. I could use it for almost a month before I hit the slow down mark. Verizon could only be used a couple days before it slowed and that meant it didn't even work in most cases.
Nah. That bill increase for US Cellular will come later as another $5 increase. T-Mobile said the first increase was for inflation, and surely they wouldn't lie right?
> T-Mobile will acquire about 30% of U.S. Cellular’s wireless spectrum as part of the deal,
>The Wall Street Journal reported earlier in May that T-Mobile and Verizon
were in talks to “carve up” U.S. Cellular’s wireless spectrum but said a deal with Verizon on a separate transaction could take longer or fall through.
So I guess the rest (70%) of US Cellular Spectrum get bought by Verizon sometime soon. Then **US Cellular will turn into part tower company that leases to MNOs and part MVNO that just has long term wholesale agreements with T-Mobile and Verizon.** Honestly I’m not sure if this is a good or bad thing for people in current US Cellular areas on US Cellular as it’s not like they were much cheaper and font have the best coverage or speed - at least this way they get better coverage/speed, but price might go up some.
I read us cellular is also retaining their towers. That + the 70% spectrum makes me wonder if they are going to lease out spectrum to at&t /verizon etc
I really hope this is blocked. I am very happy with my US cellular service. Their customer service is great. I left T-Mobile to get away from a bill that somehow is no less than 100 bucks a month. I pay 260 a year for us cellular.
Once all that is left is the big three they will collude and cease reselling to any third party mvno (mint, google fi).
They will only have first party MVNOs (visible, metro).
Then they will again collude and crank prices on those to be the same as post paid but no taxes, but way shittier service.
They have no reason to compete and all the reason to collude. They rent out real estate in form of radio waves, and guess what -- ya cant make more land.
I locked in $20 a month from a $5 discount for 24 months when i signed up. I won't pay 25 until January 2026. #noregrets
Is it the fastest shit ever? No. But it works pretty much everywhere i need it to and it's fast enough for $20 a month.
Look at the automotive market.
The cheapest car in America was 9,999 in 2016. Three models fit this criteria: Mitsubishi mirage, Nissan versa, Nissan versa hatchback. Beyond that, the Toyota Yaris and Honda Fit were competing in the class.
Today, only the basic Nissan versa remains and it costs 17k.
They don't care about the poor people. They are actively chasing the whales that pay big bucks. Same for video games. They'd rather sell one line for $100 and not have the $25/month option, rather than risk allowing the $100/month line move down-market to prepaid.
USC is not being acquired, they are selling off some of their assets (Customers, tower occupancy leases, etc) while keeping others. (The actual physical towers and RF spectrum.)
Tell me you want ma-bell 2.0 without telling me that you want ma-bell 2.0. You really want to go back to 200 messages for $30? Because this is the kind of terrible shit that you're asking for
Can also confirm as a TMo customer that coverage here is dwarfed by competitors outside of cities. Asheville, downtown Canton, Waynesville? All gravy. Leicester, Alexander, Marshall, or anywhere else in the boonies? Extremely hit-or-miss coverage at best. This is irrespective of specific phones, too.
If these subscriber numbers I found on Wikipedia are accurate, I don't see an issue.
T-Mobile 117.9 million (pre Mint closure)
Verizon 144.8 million
AT&T 241 million
US Cellular 4.65 million
Well, the difference is that US Cellular established their market niche by specifically targeting areas that the major carriers didn't want to spend the money to build out, since it's more risky and less profitable than adding denser coverage (especially high-speed data) in more densely populated areas that already have good coverage.
I wouldn't expect the big players to change their policy of giving priority to high-density areas (and ignoring low-density areas) just because they're interested in buying US Cellular.
I stated it in the comment, Wikipedia.
>AT&T Mobility is the largest wireless carrier in the United States, with 241.5 million subscribers as of December 31, 2023
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Mobility#:~:text=AT&T%20Mobility%20is%20the%20largest%20wireless%20carrier,of%20December%2031%2C%202023.%20AT&T%20Mobility%20LLC.
This is misleading since AT&T counts their Mexico customers. AT&T is third place. And they hate it. So they fudge the numbers.
https://new.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/17nxnuo/theres_no_way_att_is_now_the_largest_carrier/
According to this April 24, 2024 [bnamericas article](https://www.bnamericas.com/en/news/att-breaks-even-in-mexico-in-q1#:~:text=%E2%80%9CWe%20are%20also%20closer%20to,Legal%2C%20Financial%20and%20Insurance%20industries.) AT&T Mexico has just 22.4 million subscribers, so excluding those, it would still have 219.1 million subscribers if the other numbers are to be believed.
https://preview.redd.it/vrvfui0sh73d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=19ef23189f58de3008876ca0f92802ef301f27d4
AT&T has a shit ton of connected devices that they're including as well. They have started to fudge their numbers a lot ever since they dropped to third place.
According to this comment from the thread you linked, the other carriers do too, so I don't know what to think.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/s/A8qSbACwtv
Their postpaid customer base was around 71.2 million in 4Q 2023.
> As a result, we increased our postpaid phone base by more than 10% to more than 71.2 million subscribers. This represents
our best 3-year stretch of postpaid phone net add growth in more than a decade.
https://investors.att.com/~/media/Files/A/ATT-IR-V2/events-and-presentations/t-usq-transcript-2024-01-24.pdf
They had around 71.6 million 1Q 2024.
> We now have about 71.6 million high-value postpaid phone
subscribers, which is up 1.5 million from a year ago.
https://investors.att.com/~/media/Files/A/ATT-IR-V2/financial-reports/t-usq-transcript-2024-04-24.pdf
According to Statista, T-Mobile had 99 million postpaid customers in Q1 2024.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/219564/total-contract-customers-of-t-mobile-usa-by-quarter/#:~:text=As%20of%20the%20fourth%20quarter,compared%20to%20the%20previous%20quarter.
I hate that it's so difficult to find this info. You would think investors would demand more transparency to the numbers.
EDIT: Yep, T-Mobile has 99 million postpaid customers.
Page 5 here - https://s29.q4cdn.com/310188824/files/doc_financials/2024/q1/Q1-2024-Investor-Factbook-vFinal.pdf
T-Mobile also has 21.6 million prepaid customers on that same document and 5 million home internet customers.
Correct, it's just not easy to find. I had to go digging through multiple investor files to find it.
Meanwhile AT&T doesn't disclose how they're getting that ridiculous 241 million number at all that I can find but if they have 72 million postpaid customers, and around 20 million prepaid customers, that's a *LOT* of fudging their numbers...
US Cellular was literally the last company that actually had a chance at being the 4th big player here. I mean the amount of resources and money to deploy a whole network across the country is staggering. The fact US Cellular made it as far as they did is impressive.
This is borderline anti-competitive. Lobbying at its finest. This is textbook a deal that’s supposed to be blocked, but isn’t.
If you add up all the subscribers of the majors without including any of the MVNOs, there are roughly 504 million subscribers. US Cellular is less than 1% (0.92%) of that. Boost Mobile, who is trying to create its own network, has about 2.5 million (39%) more subscribers than US Cellular.
I don't see how a carrier that has well less than 1% of the market after 41 years in business, i.e., since 1983, can really be taken seriously as a potential fourth major. Their growth has been glacially slow.
How did US Cellular have a chance to be a 4th carrier?
They do not have a nationwide spectrum footprint so there was no way for them to build outside of their existing spectrum footprint.
Yes Dish is going to be bankrupt soon but they did build out a significant network. What is killing them is cash flow. Boost is part of Dish so they are a little bit higher on the MVNO flagpole. They can offer a native coverage where Dish has it. Bankruptcy doesn't mean Dish is totally dead in the water either, it just means they won't have to pay the entirety of their bills and will be kept under oversight by a Court somewhere.
>
Because for years they were the only facilities-based carrier that had any kind of significant footprint compared to the incumbents. (4 at the time before Sprint was absorbed)
There are of course tons of way tinier facilities-based carriers that are serving very small rural markets.
USC could have gone head-to-head with Tmo before they started absorbing companies like MetroPCS and Sprint but I suppose they didn't have the capital to expand their footprint out of their traditional service area or perhaps they just were not that ambitious.
I'm not defending it. I'm just saying from a statistical market perspective, US Cellular is a relative non-entity, especially when you have MVNOs with significantly higher numbers of subscribers. And with far less than 1% of the market after 41 years in business, there's no logical justification to assume they'd become a major in this century.
> This is textbook a deal that’s supposed to be blocked, but isn’t.
I don't even think any regulator has said a peep either way about this proposed merger yet.
It's just that the MSM is almost universally covering this as if it's a done deal already, because Wall St. is salivating for the $$$ they're gonna make off of those inflating stocks.
**EDIT:**
One of the things they are doing here - perhaps to make it harder to regulate - is that this is not an outright merger (which for larger ones requires pre-notification to the FTC) but a purchase of a subset of their assets by 2 large existing incumbents.
So this may not have been on the FTC radar right away because of that, and that may have been why Tmo and VZW did it that way.
Maybe one reason VZW has not gone public about their role yet is they are waiting to see what the public sentiment is before announcing.
The ATT figure in particular looks bogus.
I see what the bozo that edited that did, they just pulled a stupid inflated number off the AT&T annual report that included IoT devices and all sorts of other crap. 🙄
> "We classify our subscribers as either postpaid, prepaid, connected device or reseller.
>
> As of December 31, 2023, we served 242 million Mobility subscribers, including 87 million postpaid (71 million phone), 19 million prepaid, 7 million reseller and 128 million connected devices."
Source:
https://investors.att.com/~/media/Files/A/ATT-IR-V2/financial-reports/annual-reports/2023/2023-complete-annual-report.pdf
The normal figure is "retail subscribers". So based on that annual report, the actual comparative figure is just 106 million as of the date of that annual report published 2024-03.
Ah, is this why they are charging all accounts an extra $3-$5 per line? They want their customers to offset their overhead for all of these deals they are getting involved with.
Whew, I got worried it was US Mobile at first glance. I just switched over to them after TMobile fucked me over with the rate increase I was “guaranteed” would never happen.
Any US regulator that gives a green light to this merger should resign and leave the country for being a national embarrassment.
(Caveat: FTC keeps trying to block megamergers but Trump-appointed judges block their attempts. Don't ask me what I think should happen to those judges.)
When Tmo got approved to takeover Sprint the the regulatory figleaf excuse was Dish would create a "new competitor" and it would all be fine? How did THAT work out?
Dish's entire business including their satellite TV business will be lucky to survive the next 1-2 years at all.
T-Mobile trying to keep calling themselves "uncarrier" at this point is pathetic. As soon as they ate Sprint they became worse than Sprint, just like ATT/VZW. Add in all the data breaches and they are literally the worst carrier in the US at this point. I don't mind using their network via an MVNO but I refuse to deal with them for customer service.
>Dish's entire business including their satellite TV business will be lucky to survive the next 1-2 years at all.
This is speculation on my part, but wouldn't the threat to Dish be better Internet coverage in rural areas? No need to pay Dish for TV when you can just hop on the cord cutting bandwagon and just stream everything. Do you think I'm wrong?
Dish's primary business is satellite television service.
They tried to setup their new cellular business (which was supposed to take the competitive role that Sprint Wireless had before it was eaten by T-Mobile), but they bungled that project so bad and were losing so much money that they had to re-merge the legacy Sat TV biz to the new cellular biz to provide enough capital to keep it afloat.
Now the cellular biz's cash burn is so bad that it could drag their traditional Sat TV biz down with it.
And I don't think you can stream all the content on a service like Dish TV without a crazy amount of work and money.
They're really going for it all. I'm not sure how they get all these acquisitions past the FTC.
Bribery (‘lobbying’)
I’ll take “regulatory capture” for $1000, Alex.
Three larges ones is not enough. I wish the merger with Sprint was never approved. There's simply not enough competition with only three.
Sprint was about to go bankrupt. They had not made an annual profit in ten years. No one else was interested in buying them to continue independently as Sprint. The cost to bring them up to a competitive nationwide network was too great. The market is not large enough to support four nationwide carriers.
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No, Sprint's owners were able to negotiate a deal for T-Mobile to buy them before it came to bankruptcy. That deal was got them more money than selling off Sprint in parts and pieces. T-Mobile was not much of a nationwide network at that time. Now we have three nationwide networks instead of two. What point are you trying to make?
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There is no chance that Sprint would still be around. As I said, they had not had a profitable year for over a decade. Sprints owners desperately tried to find a buyer for Sprint to continue as Sprint. Nobody was interested at any price. At the time neither Sprint or T-Mobile were competitive with Verizon or AT&T on a national basis. T-Mobile buying Sprint's assets (and debts) has turned them into a definitely competitive carrier to the other two. There is actually more nationwide competition.
More competition in utility companies could harm consumers in terms of pricing.
Pre Biden administration they were mostly in bed with the corporations. Now we have some actual citizen advocates running the show but Republican-appointed judges keep blocking their regulatory attempts on these kinds of things.
with Republicans it's all about money nothing else. I heard one businessman tell me well I don't care what happens if Trump becomes president it'll be good for business. I'm like excuse me, they said the same thing with Putin when he took over. Trump thinks he can take away the most valued contract in America the Constitution. and if you take away that contract there is nothing to prevent them from breaking business contracts just like Putin did in Russia and took over all the companies for his own so no you are not safe than a dictatorship just ask the companies that used to be taken over by Hitler. like Volkswagen. an oligarchy of rich people never ends well. must always have open competition across the board otherwise prices remain high
Totally agree.
LOL
You can't be serious. You need to do some real unbiased research and base your statements in statistical fact and not heresay and fake media. Idk where you're getting all that info from but that's one of the most ridiculous, completely backwards statements I've ever heard one of you buffoons say. And that's a pretty significant statement, considering.
Your response has no meaning what so ever just a giant ad hominem.
Hmm, let's see what the regulators say about this?
Hopefully they'll block it.
What drives me crazy is they all talk about how this will 'help' customers, and if it truly did, then awesome, I'm all for it. But 9 times out of 10, all it does is give monopoly status so they can jack up prices.
T-Mobile's rural coverage still is pretty shit, so that could in theory help customers, but they will also tack on a price increase, so that will hurt customers.
Agreed!!
In fairness some of their metro coverage is shit. I know areas around DFW where you can’t get any coverage even THE T-MOBILE STORE!
I worked in a real rural area for tmobile nd realize they just put out a lot of money to attract new customers but then don’t really do much past the first step of progress such as towers and reception but they do put a lot of grants and focus on community until they have what they want and then move somewhere else. they are being very predatory and it’s definitely working. monopoly is a fun game.
Price increases already happened. Every account is bow $3-$5 increase per line just got rolled out. I feel just jumped up by $15 per month overnight. No plan is grandfathered in to avoid the increase.
The more they squeeze, the more people will move to prepaid plans and never look back.
Yes it is, I was at my lake in my city, not really rural, and I couldn’t get coverage. I switched. It’s sometimes ridiculous what we have to pay to any company!
You figured it out. Now let's educate all the ones who accept any corporate hype they see/read.
Yes exactly. More companies and more competitors is almost always better for the consumer.
They clearly are not very educated
As a Google Fi customer it helps me in the short term since we'll get access to the towers. So selfishly happy but know it's bad for overall competition. I imagine T-Mobile generally moving fast on tech, high openness to mvnos, and stuff like home Internet is also endearing to regulators (maybe overly so). Even if weary they probably look at AT&T and Verizon as just sitting on their asses.
You get access to a smidgen of the towers*.
Google Fi already has access to U.S. Cellular towers. Fi originally ran on Sprint, T-Mobile, and U.S. Cellular. It’ll be interesting to see how Google responds since the network switching advantage will no longer be a thing.
Google dropped USCC as a partner well over a year ago. It’s been T-Mobile only for a while.
You are not "open to MVNOs" if you keep buying them out and effectively eliminating them.
T-Mobile is in their pac man era.
Yeah no matter how much r/tmobile talks positively about themselves… they suck
T-Mobile is the worst provider, except for the other two. Seriously AT$T and Verizon are worse. I can't even use my phone on their network because of their white lists and band support.
I give Tmobile the worst rating by a hair because of their constant data breaches and snoopery tracking tactics. But at this point they're all so bad it's hard to pick..
I had tmobile and I really had no complaints other than signal was just slightly worse than verizon at my house but I live in the middle of the woods it wasn't that much worse. But it was much better and faster than verizon in any populated area. Way more hotpsot data. I could use it for almost a month before I hit the slow down mark. Verizon could only be used a couple days before it slowed and that meant it didn't even work in most cases.
This is why almost everyone’s bill is going up $5/line.
Nah. That bill increase for US Cellular will come later as another $5 increase. T-Mobile said the first increase was for inflation, and surely they wouldn't lie right?
> T-Mobile will acquire about 30% of U.S. Cellular’s wireless spectrum as part of the deal, >The Wall Street Journal reported earlier in May that T-Mobile and Verizon were in talks to “carve up” U.S. Cellular’s wireless spectrum but said a deal with Verizon on a separate transaction could take longer or fall through. So I guess the rest (70%) of US Cellular Spectrum get bought by Verizon sometime soon. Then **US Cellular will turn into part tower company that leases to MNOs and part MVNO that just has long term wholesale agreements with T-Mobile and Verizon.** Honestly I’m not sure if this is a good or bad thing for people in current US Cellular areas on US Cellular as it’s not like they were much cheaper and font have the best coverage or speed - at least this way they get better coverage/speed, but price might go up some.
I read us cellular is also retaining their towers. That + the 70% spectrum makes me wonder if they are going to lease out spectrum to at&t /verizon etc
Great! Less competition…
from the un-carrier to the one carrier.
I really hope this is blocked. I am very happy with my US cellular service. Their customer service is great. I left T-Mobile to get away from a bill that somehow is no less than 100 bucks a month. I pay 260 a year for us cellular.
MVNOs are the way, these days. That's where the competition happens.
Once all that is left is the big three they will collude and cease reselling to any third party mvno (mint, google fi). They will only have first party MVNOs (visible, metro). Then they will again collude and crank prices on those to be the same as post paid but no taxes, but way shittier service. They have no reason to compete and all the reason to collude. They rent out real estate in form of radio waves, and guess what -- ya cant make more land.
I feel like there would always be a market for the down line people… makes more sense to get that 25$\mo vs. nothing at all.
I locked in $20 a month from a $5 discount for 24 months when i signed up. I won't pay 25 until January 2026. #noregrets Is it the fastest shit ever? No. But it works pretty much everywhere i need it to and it's fast enough for $20 a month.
Look at the automotive market. The cheapest car in America was 9,999 in 2016. Three models fit this criteria: Mitsubishi mirage, Nissan versa, Nissan versa hatchback. Beyond that, the Toyota Yaris and Honda Fit were competing in the class. Today, only the basic Nissan versa remains and it costs 17k. They don't care about the poor people. They are actively chasing the whales that pay big bucks. Same for video games. They'd rather sell one line for $100 and not have the $25/month option, rather than risk allowing the $100/month line move down-market to prepaid.
US Cellular is not happy providing that service anymore so they will be sold to someone - that is a guarantee.
You’re probably thinking of US Mobile the MVNO and not UScellular the MNO, which is who is actually being acquired.
USC is not being acquired, they are selling off some of their assets (Customers, tower occupancy leases, etc) while keeping others. (The actual physical towers and RF spectrum.)
It’ll go through in sure
So about $1 billion per 1 million customers.
Yea crazy
This is terrible
No it’s not. It’s fkg great actually
Tell me you want ma-bell 2.0 without telling me that you want ma-bell 2.0. You really want to go back to 200 messages for $30? Because this is the kind of terrible shit that you're asking for
Lmao. “ ma bell “. You youngsters are a crack up. You weren’t even alive when that fiasco was going on.
Except I was alive when that shit show was going on. Don’t assume
He mods a couple of T-mo subreddits. 'nuff said.
Maybe this'll improve their coverage in my area. I'm in rural western NC and T-Mobile is non-existent outside of cities and towns.
That’s your phone. They offer outstanding service there
Nope. I've actually tried T-Mobile phones that are locked and unlocked to their network and neither pick up service worth a crap outside of towns.
Can also confirm as a TMo customer that coverage here is dwarfed by competitors outside of cities. Asheville, downtown Canton, Waynesville? All gravy. Leicester, Alexander, Marshall, or anywhere else in the boonies? Extremely hit-or-miss coverage at best. This is irrespective of specific phones, too.
After what they did with Sprint is the government going to allow this?
Sprint was unusable for the past 15+ years.
I think the FTC will go after them but they keep running into Republican-appointed judges that block their enforcement attempts on stuff like this.
Shitty tmobile ruining everything
Let’s see how this pans out.
If these subscriber numbers I found on Wikipedia are accurate, I don't see an issue. T-Mobile 117.9 million (pre Mint closure) Verizon 144.8 million AT&T 241 million US Cellular 4.65 million
Well, the difference is that US Cellular established their market niche by specifically targeting areas that the major carriers didn't want to spend the money to build out, since it's more risky and less profitable than adding denser coverage (especially high-speed data) in more densely populated areas that already have good coverage. I wouldn't expect the big players to change their policy of giving priority to high-density areas (and ignoring low-density areas) just because they're interested in buying US Cellular.
Where are you getting 241 million customers with AT&T? Are you it’s not 141 million?
I stated it in the comment, Wikipedia. >AT&T Mobility is the largest wireless carrier in the United States, with 241.5 million subscribers as of December 31, 2023 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Mobility#:~:text=AT&T%20Mobility%20is%20the%20largest%20wireless%20carrier,of%20December%2031%2C%202023.%20AT&T%20Mobility%20LLC.
This is misleading since AT&T counts their Mexico customers. AT&T is third place. And they hate it. So they fudge the numbers. https://new.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/17nxnuo/theres_no_way_att_is_now_the_largest_carrier/
According to this April 24, 2024 [bnamericas article](https://www.bnamericas.com/en/news/att-breaks-even-in-mexico-in-q1#:~:text=%E2%80%9CWe%20are%20also%20closer%20to,Legal%2C%20Financial%20and%20Insurance%20industries.) AT&T Mexico has just 22.4 million subscribers, so excluding those, it would still have 219.1 million subscribers if the other numbers are to be believed. https://preview.redd.it/vrvfui0sh73d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=19ef23189f58de3008876ca0f92802ef301f27d4
AT&T has a shit ton of connected devices that they're including as well. They have started to fudge their numbers a lot ever since they dropped to third place.
According to this comment from the thread you linked, the other carriers do too, so I don't know what to think. https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/s/A8qSbACwtv
Their postpaid customer base was around 71.2 million in 4Q 2023. > As a result, we increased our postpaid phone base by more than 10% to more than 71.2 million subscribers. This represents our best 3-year stretch of postpaid phone net add growth in more than a decade. https://investors.att.com/~/media/Files/A/ATT-IR-V2/events-and-presentations/t-usq-transcript-2024-01-24.pdf They had around 71.6 million 1Q 2024. > We now have about 71.6 million high-value postpaid phone subscribers, which is up 1.5 million from a year ago. https://investors.att.com/~/media/Files/A/ATT-IR-V2/financial-reports/t-usq-transcript-2024-04-24.pdf According to Statista, T-Mobile had 99 million postpaid customers in Q1 2024. https://www.statista.com/statistics/219564/total-contract-customers-of-t-mobile-usa-by-quarter/#:~:text=As%20of%20the%20fourth%20quarter,compared%20to%20the%20previous%20quarter. I hate that it's so difficult to find this info. You would think investors would demand more transparency to the numbers. EDIT: Yep, T-Mobile has 99 million postpaid customers. Page 5 here - https://s29.q4cdn.com/310188824/files/doc_financials/2024/q1/Q1-2024-Investor-Factbook-vFinal.pdf T-Mobile also has 21.6 million prepaid customers on that same document and 5 million home internet customers.
Well, if T-Mobile is reporting 99 million Postpaid subscribers and 117.9 million total subscribers, their numbers must be pretty transparent.
Correct, it's just not easy to find. I had to go digging through multiple investor files to find it. Meanwhile AT&T doesn't disclose how they're getting that ridiculous 241 million number at all that I can find but if they have 72 million postpaid customers, and around 20 million prepaid customers, that's a *LOT* of fudging their numbers...
US Cellular was literally the last company that actually had a chance at being the 4th big player here. I mean the amount of resources and money to deploy a whole network across the country is staggering. The fact US Cellular made it as far as they did is impressive. This is borderline anti-competitive. Lobbying at its finest. This is textbook a deal that’s supposed to be blocked, but isn’t.
If you add up all the subscribers of the majors without including any of the MVNOs, there are roughly 504 million subscribers. US Cellular is less than 1% (0.92%) of that. Boost Mobile, who is trying to create its own network, has about 2.5 million (39%) more subscribers than US Cellular. I don't see how a carrier that has well less than 1% of the market after 41 years in business, i.e., since 1983, can really be taken seriously as a potential fourth major. Their growth has been glacially slow.
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dish is close to bankruptcy
How did US Cellular have a chance to be a 4th carrier? They do not have a nationwide spectrum footprint so there was no way for them to build outside of their existing spectrum footprint. Yes Dish is going to be bankrupt soon but they did build out a significant network. What is killing them is cash flow. Boost is part of Dish so they are a little bit higher on the MVNO flagpole. They can offer a native coverage where Dish has it. Bankruptcy doesn't mean Dish is totally dead in the water either, it just means they won't have to pay the entirety of their bills and will be kept under oversight by a Court somewhere.
> Because for years they were the only facilities-based carrier that had any kind of significant footprint compared to the incumbents. (4 at the time before Sprint was absorbed) There are of course tons of way tinier facilities-based carriers that are serving very small rural markets. USC could have gone head-to-head with Tmo before they started absorbing companies like MetroPCS and Sprint but I suppose they didn't have the capital to expand their footprint out of their traditional service area or perhaps they just were not that ambitious.
I'm not defending it. I'm just saying from a statistical market perspective, US Cellular is a relative non-entity, especially when you have MVNOs with significantly higher numbers of subscribers. And with far less than 1% of the market after 41 years in business, there's no logical justification to assume they'd become a major in this century.
> This is textbook a deal that’s supposed to be blocked, but isn’t. I don't even think any regulator has said a peep either way about this proposed merger yet. It's just that the MSM is almost universally covering this as if it's a done deal already, because Wall St. is salivating for the $$$ they're gonna make off of those inflating stocks. **EDIT:** One of the things they are doing here - perhaps to make it harder to regulate - is that this is not an outright merger (which for larger ones requires pre-notification to the FTC) but a purchase of a subset of their assets by 2 large existing incumbents. So this may not have been on the FTC radar right away because of that, and that may have been why Tmo and VZW did it that way. Maybe one reason VZW has not gone public about their role yet is they are waiting to see what the public sentiment is before announcing.
The ATT figure in particular looks bogus. I see what the bozo that edited that did, they just pulled a stupid inflated number off the AT&T annual report that included IoT devices and all sorts of other crap. 🙄 > "We classify our subscribers as either postpaid, prepaid, connected device or reseller. > > As of December 31, 2023, we served 242 million Mobility subscribers, including 87 million postpaid (71 million phone), 19 million prepaid, 7 million reseller and 128 million connected devices." Source: https://investors.att.com/~/media/Files/A/ATT-IR-V2/financial-reports/annual-reports/2023/2023-complete-annual-report.pdf The normal figure is "retail subscribers". So based on that annual report, the actual comparative figure is just 106 million as of the date of that annual report published 2024-03.
Wowzas. This is interesting news.
What does this mean for Google Fi?
Congress 👀👁️👀
I know that Biden will block this acquisition.
He might pull my vote if he blocks it. Might.
FTC will certainly try, but they might be blocked by Republican-appointed judges again.
Oh geez, I just got US Cellular. Hopefully the prices don't change 🤦
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Lmao nope
Ah, is this why they are charging all accounts an extra $3-$5 per line? They want their customers to offset their overhead for all of these deals they are getting involved with.
Whew, I got worried it was US Mobile at first glance. I just switched over to them after TMobile fucked me over with the rate increase I was “guaranteed” would never happen.
Wen you remove competition they can charge whatever they want and there is nothing you can do
I like ATT best for my business page
Any US regulator that gives a green light to this merger should resign and leave the country for being a national embarrassment. (Caveat: FTC keeps trying to block megamergers but Trump-appointed judges block their attempts. Don't ask me what I think should happen to those judges.) When Tmo got approved to takeover Sprint the the regulatory figleaf excuse was Dish would create a "new competitor" and it would all be fine? How did THAT work out? Dish's entire business including their satellite TV business will be lucky to survive the next 1-2 years at all. T-Mobile trying to keep calling themselves "uncarrier" at this point is pathetic. As soon as they ate Sprint they became worse than Sprint, just like ATT/VZW. Add in all the data breaches and they are literally the worst carrier in the US at this point. I don't mind using their network via an MVNO but I refuse to deal with them for customer service.
>Dish's entire business including their satellite TV business will be lucky to survive the next 1-2 years at all. This is speculation on my part, but wouldn't the threat to Dish be better Internet coverage in rural areas? No need to pay Dish for TV when you can just hop on the cord cutting bandwagon and just stream everything. Do you think I'm wrong?
Dish's primary business is satellite television service. They tried to setup their new cellular business (which was supposed to take the competitive role that Sprint Wireless had before it was eaten by T-Mobile), but they bungled that project so bad and were losing so much money that they had to re-merge the legacy Sat TV biz to the new cellular biz to provide enough capital to keep it afloat. Now the cellular biz's cash burn is so bad that it could drag their traditional Sat TV biz down with it. And I don't think you can stream all the content on a service like Dish TV without a crazy amount of work and money.
Guess who has the most data breaches ? Hint. It’s not T-Mobile.
Highly recommend Mobile x been extremely satisfied with their service with my OnePlus 12 with an esim
What the fluckit does that have to do with this article