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States are looking to jam T-Mobile and Sprint’s proposed $26.5B merger
- em3rgent0rdr 7y ago"The lawsuitm" typo
- wrong_variable 7y agoThe problems facing the US in competing with China are structural. No Amount of mergers between giant monopolies is gong to fix structural problems. On a cynical level, it maybe that "China" is used as an excuse to push through a merger for profits, but lets assume some innocence. The execs. realize how costly 5G is going to be, and the only way they know to borrow that amount of money is increasing their underlying capital assets. The problem is that Huawei became successful in 5G through massive government investment, currency arbitrage ( supported by the US ), cheaper land, cheaper engineer, ... Just a side note, have a look at how Huawei operates. They build a giant 60,000 engineer city for their employees ! Is the US ready to create a giant 60,000 engineer city to compete in 5g ? where engineers are paid a fat salary with low rent ? ( in PPP terms ) 5G maybe the reason why the US has to finally confront the structural reasons why they have become so uncompetitive in electronic hardware in relation to East Asia.
- soup10 7y agoLet's not forget that our government is mostly run by people with law degrees while china has a large amount of technocrats. Making it much harder to get state-scale large engineering and software projects going in the U.S..
- dnautics 7y agoThere was a time when the us was led by a technocrat. His name was Herbert Hoover.
- skinnymuch 7y agoWe have had a leader being a technocrat/rich businessman only once before in US history. That was Herbert Hoover. Now Trump. Neither have done anything amazing for business and/or innovation.
- soup10 7y agoyea trump has no idea how a computer works...
- hhmartin 7y agoThe list of Trump's attempted businesses is hilariously sad (except the Fraud which is just sad). Don't even get me started on his Snazzle Snacks pyramid scheme.
- selimthegrim 7y agoOr Trump: The Game
- mehrdadn 7y agoA little confused how China has "succeeded" in 5G to begin with. Has 5G already been deployed in China? Are 5G phones out over there? Is it actually what it was claimed to be in the past few years? In what way has it been already successful?
- panny 7y agohttp://archive.is/pVwbM http://archive.is/pVwbM
- mehrdadn 7y ago> The NSA’s ‘Tailored Access Operations’ unit broke into Huawei’s corporate servers and by 2010 was reading corporate emails and examining the source code in Huawei’s products.“We currently have good access and so much data that we don’t know what to do with it,” boasted one NSA briefing. Slides also disclosed that the NSA intended to plant its own backdoors in Huawei firmware. In 2014 the New York Times, Time and Reuters revealed that the NSA had infiltrated Huawei headquarters, monitored all of its executives and gone through the company’s entire data infrastructure. Well this is quite the eye opener. Thanks for sharing. Can I ask what the original website is though? Why is it down?
- adventured 7y agoI'm not sure what you're talking about. Why would anybody need to build a city of 60,000 engineers to compete in 5G? Europe's leading 5G makers are not doing that so that they can compete with Huawei, because it's obviously entirely unnecessary. The US doesn't need to change anything to compete with China. It has been successfully out-competing China in nearly every field for decades, save for low value manufacturing. China poses no greater competitive threat in the middle and upper tiers of economic competition than Western Europe does (presently far less in fact). The US also didn't need to entirely alter itself to compete with Western Europe. > the US has to finally confront the structural reasons why they have become so uncompetitive in electronic hardware in relation to East Asia No it doesn't need to do that at all. The US leads the world by a large margin when it comes to the semiconductor industry - the most important components of electronics today. Manufacturing electronic hardware is a low value economic segment, which is why it's outsourced. It can be pushed from China to a dozen other countries instead (see Foxconn's statement that they're prepared to move Apple's manufacturing out of China any time, that's how weak China's value proposition really is). Samsung - the world's leading phone maker - has already done that, moving a lot of their phone manufacturing to Vietnam.
- michaelvoz 7y agoAgreed. There’s a reason the most educated and capable Chinese move the the US and become Americans. America’s cultural and technological dominance comes from its flexibility borne from a willingness to take in hard working immigrants from anywhere. America is exceptional in that it is a country of immigrants.
- theturtletalks 7y agoYep it’s called brain drain. Many people come to the US to pursue school with intentions to go back home and make things better there, but just fall into life and work and never look back.
- wolco 7y agoOr just find the opportunities better/easy than trying the same back home.
- rashkov 7y agoWait, why are we in a race to get to 5G? Why are we in a competition with China over 5G? This is nothing but spin, and this kind of talk was probably originated by the telcos themselves, who benefit from this sort of high pressure tactic to cut regulation and receive major subsidies. Not my original idea, but it has been a great question to ask. https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2019/5/23/18637213/5g-race-us-leadership-china-fcc-lte https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2019/5/23/18637213/5g-...
- CriticalCathed 7y agoI left Sprint because I hated their guts. I went to T-Mobile.
- randyrand 7y agoATT & Verizon have impressive lobbies.
- pcurve 7y agoMy hunch is they would welcome the merger
- scarface74 7y agoThis makes no sense to me. There is no reasonable reality where Sprint becomes a healthy competitive force in the US as a standalone business.
- colinbartlett 7y agoInstead of approving this merger, is there another way the government could encourage competition? Perhaps break up the larger carriers or some how promote new upstart competition? Your statement sounds correct but I don’t exactly like the reality.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoManage the cell tower infrastructure and spectrum themselves through a non profit GSE (government sponsored entity) (think ISO grid operators for electric grids) and make every commercial provider an MVNO stakeholder. Similar to a municipality owning the last mile fiber to the house, and any provider can provide you service with a quick patch cable or VLAN change at the central office/colo facility. Running a nationwide cellular network is expensive and complicated AF. You have to provide a level playing field if you want to enable competition without needing hundreds of millions of dollars to start up.
- clairity 7y agowith 4G finally getting fast enough (along with the low latency promises of 5G), i think we're almost at the point where what you propose might make sense. before this, wireless tech/infrastructure just wasn't good enough, and needed continuing investment to improve. now that we're over the hump, a GSE can begin buying up the 4G infrastructure and leaving operations/service to the carriers. since there are 4 national and some regional carriers, you could even divvy the duplicative infrastructure up between state and federal GSEs, much like state and federal highways. then you'd have some semblance of competition that would keep the infrastructure from just crumbling away from political/bureaucratic neglect.
- JoshTriplett 7y ago
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoWhile I'm usually wary of giant corporate mergers like this, the fact that they are 3rd and 4th leads me to believe it would actually position them to better compete against Verizon and AT&T in a way that would be good for consumers.
- shmerl 7y agoLet them invest to compete, instead of merging. Merging will only make things worse.
- Dwolb 7y agoCompete how? Competition with the market leader will improve if this merger results in a more formidable opponent.
- shmerl 7y agoThey should become more formidable without merging.
- notSupplied 7y agoT-Mobile moght, Sprint won’t. They are a distressed company and no amount “shoulds” will change their trajectory. The question is whether T-Mobile deserves to grab all of Sprints customers in a “migrate by default” scheme, or their gonna have to fight for those customers when Sprint inevitably goes down.
- ViViDboarder 7y agoExactly. Sprint is tanking. Who else should be able to acquire it?
- notSupplied 7y agoATT nor Verizon would be able to acquire Sprint the company. But if the company goes down without being acquired by T-Mobile, let's say their customers would migrate to the remaining 3 carriers proportionally existing market shares. This outcome would be pretty great for AT&T and Verizon and strictly increase the market concentration. Approve or not approve, regulators are sometimes forced into a position of "picking winners" :-( Another thing that needs thinking through is what happens to Sprint's spectrum if the company goes under. What kind of rules will be placed on that auction? Would ATT and Verizon be likely winners of such an auction?
- fyoving 7y agoWhat's the thinking here? Stopping the merger of the two insignificant players would only shield the major players from real competition.
- fitzroy 7y agoAt this point I'm just rooting for them to get together. They're like star-crossed lovers: Romeo Corp and Juliet Inc.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rubyn00bie 7y agoThe real answer to this is to break up AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast while blocking the T-Mobile/Sprint merger. This will probably help net neutrality slightly since T-Mobile and Sprint gotta duke it out offering more network throughout to customers while AT&T and VZW compete over speed... the four sort of forcing each other to sort of almost make something which appears neutral (it’s not). Unless there are no gigantic telecoms or there’s way more government intervention in these markets (common carrier status anyone?) there will be no point in things like this against the bottom tier national providers.