At 31 Aug 2011 10:52:03 -0700 SMS wrote:

> But who knows, it may end up going through, with some modifications.
> The Cingular acquisition of AT&T Wireless was bigger, and it went
> through, but that did not reduce the number of national carriers by as
> big a percentage.

Not only that, but Cingular and old AT&T has far less overlap- there were
many markets where only one or the other operated, but not both, which
didn't reduce the number of competitors in those markets at all. T-Mo's
service area is practically a subset of AT&Ts, so the net effect on
competition is the loss of a competitor in every T-Mo market.

The merger makes no sense on any level other than the killing off of a
competitor and a short term alleviation of a spectrum crunch in key
markets for AT&T. AT&T already has plenty of unused spectrum at 700MHz
but buying T-Mo's existing network is quicker and easier than actually
building infrastructure.