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youngatheart writes:
"When does merging two companies make for more marketplace competition? When they aren't big enough to compete with the other giants in the industry. At least that's the logic behind the argument that Sprint should be allowed to acquire T-Mobile. I'm wondering what this means for MetroPCS users like me now that we're T-Mobile users by the previous merger."
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Sprint: Purchase of T-Mobile Promotes Competition
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I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth.
-- Fry
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday March 11 2014, @05:23PM
Anyone have any real historical stats on telecom mergers affect on end user prices?
Not, "two railroads a century ago" or "My ivory tower economics professor claimed ..." or "A talking head was hired to say..." but actual historical data.
All I can think of is the legacy POTS landline provider where I live has been merger'd up three times since the breakup in the 80s... each time the customer price has tripled. My first POTS line in '91 was something like $5/month, and now that only old people have landlines, I've heard my uncle in law pays about $50/month, so I don't think a nine-tuple is all that unlikely over 20 years of endless mergers.
This "seems" to be the case with cable, although maybe not tripled each time. All those multimillion dollar bonuses and bank financing fees do add up, after all. My parents cable bill was about $25 and equivalent video only service now would set you back about $90 or so.
I don't think you can blame inflation for much of it, surely your median middle class income hasn't quadrupled or nine-tupled in 20 years.
(Score: 1) by damnbunni on Tuesday March 11 2014, @07:15PM
Odds are your uncle paying $50 a month has lots of services that weren't even offered when you got your POTS line in '91. (My POTS in '91 was about $15 and didn't even include unlimited local calls, much less long distance.)
AT&T will install a basic POTS line for $24/month with no fancy add-ins these days. My mom has one that's a bit less than that; she gets some sort of discount.
You can still get cable TV for under $30 a month in most places, if you ask for the 'basic cable' or 'digital basic' package, and it probably still has more channels than your parents got in the '80s.
There's still nothing worth watching on it, but THAT hasn't really changed in the last thirty years!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 11 2014, @07:53PM
The cheapest POTS line money can buy, with literally NOTHING extra, and bending over backwards to pick a long-distance carrier who doesn't themselves impose monthly minimums or baseline fees, is at least $30/month in South Florida from AT&T. And for that $30/month, they'll rake you over the coals at every possible opportunity, and charge extortionate amounts of money for semi-local calls (like Miami to Boca Raton). And adding U-verse's VOIP service to an existing TV+Internet plan isn't any cheaper. You'll get more features for your $30/month monthly charge from U-verse, but they're bound and determined that $30/month is going to be the least they'll charge anyone for anything.
I'd switch to an independent VoIP provider, but my experience with two prior to U-verse is that 7 times out of 10, if I picked up the phone at 9am to dial into a bridge for work or something, I got... no dialtone... and had to reboot the goddamn VoIP adapter to be able to use the phone again. Wait... it gets worse. The same thing still happens with U-verse. Not as often (maybe once in 3-4 months), but it's like the goddamn router says, "Hey, he hasn't used me in a few weeks, I think I'll just go into power-saving mode and shut myself down until he happens to notice eventually".
How did we get to this low point? 25 years ago, as Hurricane Andrew destroyed half of South Florida, people made long-distance calls from houses that were disintegrating around them, and came home to piles of rubble with "off-hook" noise coming from the phones. We had a phone network that was LITERALLY built to keep working if downtown Miami and Homestead Air Force Base were destroyed by nuclear bombs. BellSouth central offices were literally concrete bunkers. Now, even little tropical storms that are barely big enough to close public schools for a day takes down most of South Florida's residential phone and internet service for at least a few hours.
We need municipal fiber... buried, and provided with 48vDC@1A that's not dependent upon FPL for operation. Maybe even through a cookie to Comcast & AT&T, and tell them they can stop it in their service area by providing the same level of service (with 5-nines uptime, including the backup power) themselves... backed up by LOS agreements with teeth that will leave them bloody if they dare to neglect the network into failure.