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This deal should be blocked unless they're forced to divest spectrum to someone like Comcast or Charter. Comcast and Charter already have a partnership for wireless and are doing MVNOs, so they might be interested in it. Competition has been working well with 4 players in wireless, and prices have come down.

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There is no world in which the government should be able to force a private company to give something hugely valuable to, of all possible options, Comcast (one of the worst companies in America).

Mergers are costly to society because they concentrate power. The government should _absolutely_ prevent mergers that concentrate power, or otherwise redistribute that power.

I'd rather them just block these things like they did up until the early 2000s ... but it's not unreasonable for them to break up the government granted monopoly on spectrums if they do allow mergers.

One could argue that a stronger combined company could better take on AT&T and Verizon. It’s not simply “mergers are bad for customers”.

Yeah, this merger (for whatever reason) reminds me a lot of the US Air/American Airlines merger of a few years ago. On the one hand, going from 4 to 3 'major' players seems an obvious loss for consumers. On the other hand, unless these two combine, I don't really see either of them able to really challenge AT&T/Verizon long term, which means that a merger to create three large players is better for consumers than a series of events that ultimately ends with two major players - and that seems like a fairly realistic outcome in this space.

Totally agree that 3 big ones are better than 2 big and 2 small. I feel this gets lost in reporting.

The EU did a lot of analysis about this between member states.

It concluded that markets with 4 or more providers were far better served (price, quality, coverage, etc) than those with 3 (which effectively is what the US will have now).

The UK blocked the merger of 3 and O2 on these grounds, as it would leave only 3 providers.

Does sprint even count as a provider? The size of the players must matter? If you have 4 players and 3 are there in name only, surely that can't still be true?

Do you have some source for the EU analysis would love to read this in depth? Googling doesn't turn up anything related.

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-16-1705_en.htm is a starting point, but I can't find the EUs own source.

From the looks of it, Sprint will be bankrupt in a few years anyway, and then we'll still end up with 3 providers, but likely Verizon and AT&T (in addition to T-Mobile) will buy up parts of its carcass. I'd rather T-Mo gets it all, now, rather than have all three companies fight over the scraps, later.

Nice ideology. Reality is quite different. Companies in large mergers or with consolidated industries often have to make concessions to regulators to proceed with the merger.

Fwiw, I think the person you are replying to was concerned more about the fact that Comcast would benefit than that T-Mobile would be forced to make concessions.

Spectrum does not belong to private companies, it's a license granted by the government.

Sprint has been losing money for years. If T-mobile didn't buy them, either someone else would buy the spectrum and they would go out of business. I was very much against the AT&T/Tmobile merger and history shows the government was right for blocking it.

But expecting competition from the cable companies is a bridge too far. The cable companies are the most anti customer friendly companies in the United States.

I haven't kept up with the industry (5G roadmap / company health), but yeah - it's worth remembering the AT&T/T-mobile of 2011 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_purchase_of_T-Mobile... ) - back then it would've essentially made a monopoly out of GSM cellular usage. And back then cable competition didn't exist yet - xfinity wifi/mobile wasn't around then.

My assumption so far is that things are shifting such that LTE/5G are largely replacing CDMA, US govt would still prevent a GSM monopoly situation.

Cable companies are competing though - comcast started in 2014 'xfinity wifi' rollout via leased modem then got into mobile in 2017. If I'm reading https://www.xfinity.com/mobile/ correctly, it's cost-competitive ($45/mo unlimited compared to $70/mo on tmobile) - and works with the iphone myself and many US consumers already have.

I'm guessing verizon may already be doing something similar with fios modems.

> xfinity wifi/mobile wasn't around then. (snip) Cable companies are competing though

I don't see that happening. Xfinity Mobile is not a competitive product. It's just a Verizon MVNO. It can't seriously compete against Verizon, because it is Verizon.

Ah, good catch. Didn't realize they were using verizon as their mvno.

Everything other than the big 4 is a MVNO, basically.

The combined entity will have a similar amount of spectrum as Verizon and AT&T. Why should they divest?

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