AT&T May Try to Acquire Leap Wireless > Terrible idea

Terrible idea

It's all smoke and mirrors of course. As with the Tmob attempt, this is about reducing competition not buying up spectrum.

No it's not. The concept that T-Mo compete with AT&T is BS. The concept that Leap or Metro competes with AT&T is 10 times as ludicrous. It's a desperate attempt to get what little spectrum they can.

They should just buy capacity from Clearwire at this point, they have a ridiculous amount of spectrum, as even Verizon doesn't have the ability to put up a 20x20 channel of LTE that would yield speeds of over 100mbps. Verizon caps out at 73mbps. It would actually work pretty well, as AT&T has the 700mhz in many markets to fill in the gaps for Clearwire, the coverage to still have coverage in east middle of nowhere unlike Sprint, and Clearwire has the capacity that AT&T needs in the metro markets.

Hate to break it to you, but yes, T-mo does compete with AT&T. They are a national carrier. They have 33.7MM customers to AT&T's 108.3MM, or a ratio of 3:1. That's still a competitor.

reply to BiggA
TMO, Sprint, and Metro just need to team up. or TMO and Metro. But Sprint is going to need someone that can bring in the cash they need without having huge right offs like they do for people not paying high bills and bailing.

Prepaid carriers NEVER see the overages, etc they cut you off and are done with it.

I could see TMO and Metro or TMO and Leap, but hopefully Leap/Cricket would NOT take over managing the company and leave TMO in charge. Leap/Cricket is horrible in terms of customer service and devices. - plus their a CDMA network that heavily relies on Sprint.

Sprint has a lot of write-offs because they have low security deposits for customers with bad credit. I've heard to the tune of $125 to $250 at most. Other carriers charge deposits up to $400 (Verizon) and $800 (AT&T). Also I've heard of customers getting approved for post pay accounts (with no deposit) though various carriers despite having bad credit. They're probably looking more for unpaid utilities and phone bills as opposed to foreclosures or bad credit card accounts as customers will pay for necessities such as rent, utilities, and phone before they pay their credit cards. Not to mention the numerous foreclosures in this country.

They should just cut customers off before their bill gets too high, that way it will mitigate the risk of unpaid bills.
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All of my CPE (including my EMTA) is customer owned. The only Comcast owned equipment in my house is the CableCards in the two TiVO boxes I own.

reply to Rambo76098
In at&t's eyes, if you only have 10K customers, you're a competitor.

reply to 25139889
Sprint, Metro, T-Mobile, anyone else, they aren't going to be effective together, as their coverage will still suck, unless they pump a crapload of capital into building out on Sprint's SMR spectrum.

The only big risk for the carriers is phone subsidies, everything else is lost potential revenue, not actual money. The phone is the hard thing to get back and re-monetize, who cares about the usage?

AT&T doesn't view them as competitors, they just see the spectrum, and they are getting really desperate, since they $*%&ed up in the 700mhz auctions, and as a result, don't have a good selection of nationwide LTE spectrum, and they also aren't moving as aggresively toward LTE because they don't have to, so they are under a spectrum crunch on the HSPA+ side of things.

The challenge now is that they are not competitive with Verizon in the LTE area, and they can't be, because they don't have the spectrum to be. And they aren't even trying. They could at least build out a blanket of HSPA+ 84 on the CLR and PCS bands with MIMO across the country, but no, a lot of their network is still EDGE. At least you can get online, but the quality of that service isn't that great.

reply to IowaCowboy
Sprint has the Account Spending Limit but anytime that goes "below" the amount you're set at you're good to go. It doesn't even have to be a payment. Their system is set to allow a NSF check to be processed and can be up to 7 times before service is fully disconnected for failure to pay and cash payment is processed or credit card.

So yes; you can easily rack up a HUGE bill with Sprint very quickly. And most people can get service with major carriers by using LetsTalk.com and WireFly.com

Yeah, but for on-network usage, it's all just lost revenue opportunity, not an actual loss.