> Yeah, regarding the merger I’d rather have T-Mobile as a larger and stronger competitor against AT&T and Verizon.
Counterargument: T-Mobile has been bleeding users hard off AT&T (the only US carrier to be declining in all sectors). Churn is low and postpaid adds are the highest in the industry. They have proven they do not require a merger to be successful.
T-Mobile has shown that they can be an effective mobile competitor to AT&T. However, it's unclear how long that can last. With 5G, home broadband and entertainment is likely to come into play in a huge way.
Let's fast-forward 3-10 years to a 5G world where we ditch cable companies and get pay-TV, home broadband, and mobile from a single company. AT&T and Verizon have deep millimeter-wave spectrum holdings. T-Mobile is likely trying to acquire more, but they're at a large deficit that might make 5G much harder for them. Likewise, Verizon and AT&T both have established pay-TV businesses they can leverage toward a 5G home broadband and 5G pay-TV future. Heck, AT&T bought Time Warner knowing how important this would be. T-Mobile knows this is going to be important and is making investments, but they're smaller with a smaller customer base.
T-Mobile's size and lack of ownership gives them little power in negotiations with direct competitors. Comcast will drive a hard bargain for their content as T-Mobile looks to replace their wired connections. AT&T has little reason to offer a good deal to their direct competitor. Even independents have little reason to offer a good deal because T-Mobile's smaller customer base leaves them in a weaker negotiating position.
Likewise, AT&T and Verizon have a lot of revenue to invest in a big home broadband play compared to T-Mobile. They also have large customer bases to up-sell home broadband to. AT&T has already shown that bundling can be a big deal. If AT&T starts offering home internet as a $30-add-on for their mobile plans, that creates a lot of lock-in. Not only could that make it hard for T-Mobile to break into the industry, but it could even kill off T-Mobile's mobile growth and start customers flowing back to AT&T for an attractive bundle.
Again, AT&T has the millimeter-wave spectrum, the content ownership, the fiber network and internet backbone, the large customer base to up-sell, lots of TV experience, local installation technicians from DirecTV, etc. What does T-Mobile have to compete with this? Well, better management and maybe a more trusted brand. Given AT&T's content ownership, they could really provide a compelling bundle that might be hard to compete with for a smaller carrier. Verizon is large enough that they have enough power and they already have most of the other advantages AT&T has.
So, yes, T-Mobile has been doing well. Will they continue to do well? Are we at a point where the industry is changing to not-just-mobile? Have we created a great competitor for what consumers are looking for between 2013 and 2022, but aren't looking to what consumers will demand past 2022?
Heck, Cingular and AT&T Wireless merged and spent a huge amount of time and effort creating a reliable 2G voice network...just to see the industry shift off of voice. I think T-Mobile has done amazing things, but it's definitely possible that industry shifts over the next 5-10 years will provide new challenges for T-Mobile. Do we have a great competitor for the next couple years, but a duopoly as the industry shifts after that? T-Mobile has "proven they do not require a merger to be successful" in mobile wireless. That might not be enough going forward.
> AT&T has almost twice as many customers as T-Mobile.
Your point being? T-Mobile has been gaining customers from them for years now. They've had something like 23 or 24 consecutive quarters with over 1M net subscriber adds. No other carrier has been able to match that pace.
For damn good reason too. Going from a family bill of $300 on ATT to half that on TMobile is a no brainer. Especially for the people who’s spend the majority of their time at home on WiFi!
As a US resident temporarily living in Europe, that’s still crazy. A SIM-only plan that costs $75/mo in the US on T-Mobile is about $20/mo or less in the EU.
I wish they’d stop going for “greater value” and instead just offer lower prices.
It’s not an effective way to compete in the US, where most subscribers live outside city limits and coverage is king. (That’s why Verizon is #1 even though it’s the most expensive.) To put things into perspective, the Munich metro area is about the same population as DC’s, but twelve times as dense. Wiring up the urban areas hits almost all your potential subscribers in Munich. (Last time I went, the area between the airport and the city was countryside and had no LTE. The fastest growing part of the DC Metro area is an exurb close to the airport, an hour outside the city.) T-Mo has struggled with LTE coverage outside the cities. At the same time it’s expensive to build cell towers all through the suburbs and exurbs. So the winning play is not necessarily doubling down on the cities and pushing down cost. Americans are willing to pay for coverage (and on the flip side, will punish you in the market for not pursuing coverage).
What’s the Data cap? I bought a Vodafone sim in Europe and it was €20 for 1GB. There were people outside complaining they turned their phone on and hit the data cap within a couple minutes. The 1GB barely lasted a day using google maps to find my way around and that was after I turned off a lot of apps like email and such.
You're doing something very wrong. I spent 9 days in Scotland and used less than 8GB of data from a Vodafone SIM I picked up for a similar price. My phone was in hotspot mode then entire time sharing the data with 3 others phones and a couple tablets.
Also if you're using Google Maps then I strongly consider you cache offline map data as it will dramatically reduce your data consumption as it's updated via Wifi automatically.
* It occurs to me that you might have been using Satellite view. Don't that's a huge waste of data. The traditional maps view is vector data (i.e. tiny) where as satellite photography consumes a lot of data.
There were people outside complaining they turned their phone on and hit the data cap within a couple minutes.
Not one of them wondered what the hell their phone is doing to continuously max out the modem's bandwidth until the data runs out? Regardless, I don't use the work WiFi, stream music a lot of the day, and it still takes a week or two to burn 1GB. IOW, something doesn't sound quite right, like they shorted you on the data?
Counterargument: T-Mobile has been bleeding users hard off AT&T (the only US carrier to be declining in all sectors). Churn is low and postpaid adds are the highest in the industry. They have proven they do not require a merger to be successful.