Tag: at&t

AT&T, T-Mobile, August, etc.

The big tech/business story of the week is the AT&T/T-Mobile deal: AT&T wants to buy T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom, and Telekom wants to sell, given the $39 billion price tag. One of the things I mean by “big” is “lots of coverage.”

If I had to pick two pieces of required reading, the first would be Om’s account of who loses in this deal. “It’s hard to find winners, apart from AT&T and T-Mobile shareholders.” I can’t see that consumers will win from a deal that reduces the number of mobile phone competitors in the USA to two (or three, if you’re Sprint, or a lawyer for AT&T).

The second piece of required reading was the agreement on my T-Mobile G1 phone, to see when the agreement expires. It expires in August this year. I expect the regulatory scrutiny to last beyond then. I’m not sure what I’ll do for a phone after August…

AT&T Profits, GigaCrunched

It would be a dull web if everyone agreed. But I’d have thought that GigaOm and TechCrunch could agree on whether the profits of a public corporation like AT&T went up or down.

To make things even more confusing, the link from Google Reader to the TechCrunch post actually took me to a CrunchGear post called iPhone iPhone iPhone! iPhone. iPhone. As my astute reader may have deduced, it’s about the iPhone. Apparently, as well as being a phone, music player, fashion accessory, etc., it’s a double-edged sword. AT&T saw profits drop as customer acquisitions rose.

GigaStacey, on the other hand, reports a slight boost in profits. She agrees, though on Q3 iPhone activations: there were 2.4M of them.