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Comment by burnte | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, AT&T has been losing subscribers for a while, and Verizon has finally started experiencing some net losses as well, while TMobile gained enough to surpass Sprint as the number three carrier. TMobile has shaken up the market with being transparent with phone pricing and payments, eliminating contracts, pushing new plans and aggressive pricing. Sprint suffered from that (and their own horrible service) and then AT&T and Verizon got nervous and started competing too. It's still an oligopoly but I think it IS legitimately arguable that it's more competitive than it was 6 years ago.

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I recall Janet Yellen mentioning in a speech earlier this year that shrinking cell phone bills were applying noticeable deflationary pressure on the economy. After I read her remarks I logged in to Verizon and poked around - I was grandfathered in on some older (more expensive) plan, and in about 2 minutes had switched to a better plan for about $500 less per year.

There's a graph out there showing the contributors to CPI and you'll see wireless plans as one of the two negative contributors to inflation.

My impression was most of the cell towers were owned by either AT&T or Verizon - how can TMobile and others be competitive? I had assumed they were buying to use the networks of the existing 2? I know I'm uninformed, I'm asking for more info on territory.

I believe a lot of the carriers lease their towers from companies like crown castle.

http://www.crowncastle.com/

Cricket Wireless uses AT&Ts network but capped. They are owned by AT&T now so it doesnt make much difference.

T-Mobile and Sprint are independent networks. Other smaller carriers, known as MVNOs (eg. MetroPCS, Cricket, Google Fi, etc), do rent the networks of the major 4 carriers, but T-Mobile and Sprint do not, which is part of why their coverage is a little worse in less populated areas. I'm not sure if T-Mobile can roam on AT&T towers (since they're both GSM, but are probably using different bands for 3G). I do know that when I'm in Yosemite with T-Mobile I don't get any reception, but I've heard that Verizon and possibly AT&T do.

T-Mobile does have roaming agreements with regional carriers such as Union Wireless, so in spots where they don't have coverage, there is occasionally roaming coverage as well, but they have basically every major metropolitan area covered.

My T-Mobile phone roams to AT&T towers, but with no data connection. Fancier plans may not have this limitation.

Side note for those who don't know the term, MVNO stands for Mobile Virtual Netwok Operator.

As mentioned, TMo and Sprint also own/lease towers. The big 4 are all real full network operators. They all have roaming agreements with other smaller carriers in areas they don't serve, but TMo and Sprint are not MVNOs, however they both OWN MVNOs.

Carriers can own towers but more commonly Sites and towers are leased to the Carriers who install their equipment.

This is especially true in urban areas where land is at a premium and it's easier to put some transceivers on another structure like a building or water tower.

At Stanford, the strongest towers (on the hill) are/were AT&T (via Cingular). There are/were whole buildings with zero Verizon coverage.

Source: an enterprise Cingular sales rep whom later worked for Motion Computing.

There also used to be a spot on I-80 between SF and Sacramento where AT&T phones routinely dropped calls.

that's like saying snails are fast by comparing them to a tree.

the wireless industry has large "natural" barriers to entry (like capital costs) on top of some regulatory and legal ones, which makes it tend toward oligopoly/monopoly. the government has done nothing to create a free and open market here. we shouldn't be patting them on their back, however lightly, for forking over shovel-fulls of cash to their cronies in the industry.

No, it's like saying the snail got significantly faster over the past several years. I granted that gov't hasn't done much to foster change, I simply pointed out that the original article isn't really wrong.

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