Who Wins If Iliad Buys T-Mobile?

In a surprise move this week, French mobile carrier Iliad made an unexpected bid to purchase T-Mobile, the fourth largest mobile carrier in the US. Iliad will offer around $30 Billion for T-Mobile, close to the bid from rival Sprint, but without the government scrutiny Sprint faces from regulators.

The Iliad bid may have been unexpected, but it’s not likely to be unwelcome. U.S. regulators will see a potential deal that changes the ownership of T-Mobile without affecting the makeup of the domestic mobile market.

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Not Sprint.

wra18th said:

Not Sprint.

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with how shitty Sprint has been getting recently I would say everyone else does though.

It depends on what your goal is ... AT&T and Verizon are so much larger than either of their smaller competitors that they have a much more competitive economy of scale ... a combined Sprint/T-Mobile would make for 1 strong competitor rather than 2 weak ones ... since you can't legally shrink AT&T and Verizon, the best way to offer competition to them is to add another larger carrier (which a combined Sprint/T-Mobile would be) ... however, if the goal is to keep AT&T and Verizon as the dominant carriers then by all means make sure that you keep the other carriers smaller by preventing them from merging

No matter who wins... we lose!

MrD1234 said:

No matter who wins... we lose!

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Not necessarily ... a healthy parent company tends to make for a healthier company ... the best purchaser would be Google (not sure why they aren't interested) ... having Google enter the mobile market would really shake things up

kbrickley said:

It depends on what your goal is ... AT&T and Verizon are so much larger than either of their smaller competitors that they have a much more competitive economy of scale ... a combined Sprint/T-Mobile would make for 1 strong competitor rather than 2 weak ones ... since you can't legally shrink AT&T and Verizon, the best way to offer competition to them is to add another larger carrier (which a combined Sprint/T-Mobile would be) ... however, if the goal is to keep AT&T and Verizon as the dominant carriers then by all means make sure that you keep the other carriers smaller by preventing them from merging

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But if you watch what Sprint does in the background it is their own fault they are not the size of AT&T and Verizon. They already bought out Nextel. and instead of converting the Nextel towers to sprint towers to improve service, they did that for about a year then just tore them down and took the customers. they then went through and start to remove sprint towers also. So areas that used to have good sprint and good Nextel service, now have no service or bad service. I would see the same happen here, they buy the company just to buy the customers and scrap everything else. Sprint sold off its landlines, sold off their telecom parts and services business, they have put themselves into the position they are in.

Get somebody that will actually care about good service to buy them both and have them take on the other two.

I have to agree that Sprint just plain sucks. AT least around here. I do have republic wireless that uses Sprint for cell coverage and while it's "ok" it's definitely not up there with Verizon or even US cellular. Calls often won't dial, after you hit the send key etc... Voice quality is pretty piss poor. For $10 a month it's allowable, but I tried to get Sprint for unlimited data and I couldn't get data hardly anywhere, and where I could it was only fair, not good 4g ie 2-4mb/sec, and their 3g is un usable around here, which isn't congested at all. More rural if anything so maybe we are neglected in that regard, but the other carriers have decent coverage, Verizon being the best. I bought 2 unlimited Verizon data plans at great cost to myself and now with Verizon playing their shenanigans with the "throttling" of unlimited data plans they plan to institute I may be out of luck there too . It just slays me that these carriers pay so little for data but charge out the A$$ for their data "blocks" it's beyond crazy. Everywhere we turn in the US now someone is in your pocket for that last nickel they can scrape from you. Probably the same in other countries, but I'm getting sick of it here, grinding on the hamster wheel(working) and seeing the many "poor" people having nicer things and the squeeze from the top as well, companies screwing us etc...

kbrickley said:

It depends on what your goal is ... AT&T and Verizon are so much larger than either of their smaller competitors that they have a much more competitive economy of scale ... a combined Sprint/T-Mobile would make for 1 strong competitor rather than 2 weak ones ... since you can't legally shrink AT&T and Verizon, the best way to offer competition to them is to add another larger carrier (which a combined Sprint/T-Mobile would be) ... however, if the goal is to keep AT&T and Verizon as the dominant carriers then by all means make sure that you keep the other carriers smaller by preventing them from merging

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A lot of anti-trust implications for Google becoming a carrier, the same would apply to Apple and Microsoft. I doubt any of those three would ever be allowed to become carriers and I don't think it would be a good thing if they did.