What will happen if the AT&T-Mobile merger succeeds
Let’s look at this from the eyes of the T-Mobile customer:
1. At first, there’ll be no difference
You’ll keep your plan, your service will remain the same, you might even talk to the same reps for customer service. The only thing that might change is the carrier string on your phone. You know, the one that says what network you’re on.
2. You might get better service
As T-Mobile rolls into AT&T, you’ll start getting better service, but only on EDGE because the 3G bands are incompatible. This might be beneficial if you’re sticking it out with an older, EDGE-only T-Mo phone. Otherwise, not so much.
3. But then, you’ll be stuck on 2G EDGE
Because AT&T will start pulling back T-Mo’s 3G to redeploy it into 4G, or bullshit 4G. Those of you with T-Mo 3G/HSPA+ phones are now hosed.
4. Or AT&T might just sit on all that spectrum
And service will start getting worse, and worse, and worse, and any temporary benefits from rolling T-Mo’s spectrum into AT&T’s is now lost. You’re now mulling cancelling your contract.
5: Sticking with AT&T
You decide that you’ll keep your cheap plan and stick it out with AT&T, and suffer their subpar customer service and cell service. You still have unlimited data, right?
Before too long, AT&T will figure out a way to fuck you out of your unlimited, grandfathered plan, and will force you to move to their crappy tiered plans. They could accuse you of tethering and “automatically select the plan that’s right for you”, or just stop honoring plans through upgrades, making you switch up plans if you wish to replace or upgrade your phone.
Scenario: YOU LOSE
6. Switching to Sprint
You, like many other T-Mobile customers, decide to switch to sprint because Verizon is just as limited, and their customer service is pure evil. So everyone goes to Sprint and picks up Evo 3D’s.
Of course, Sprint can’t keep up with this, so they will either have to throttle or introduce tiered data. If Sprint can’t turn it around in this fashion, their network becomes just as bad, if not worse, than AT&T.
As a last ditch effort, Sprint might just decide to take the fukitol and sell themselves to Verizon.
Scenario: YOU LOSE and there are only two major US carriers.
