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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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(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.