http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-57332490-266/at-t-and-t-mobile-merger-madness-recap-faq/

Appears the AT&T and T-Mobile merger is about to die. Analyst give it about less than a 10% chance of succeeding at this point. And AT&T has to set aside $4 billion this quarter to pay late penalties to T-Mobile's owners for not completing the deal by Q1 2012 (which isn't possible now). AT&T could end up paying up to $7 billion in penalties if the deal falls apart, T-Mobile would get $3 billion of it.

Ironically the reason the deal might fall through, fear of less competition and a duopoly, will now probably happen anyway. DT wants to get rid of T-Mobile and T-Mobile has been pretty much unable to do much since the merger announcement in the spring. They missed out on the iPhone 4S and probably lost the Galaxy Nexus exclusivity too because of this. Not to mention people leaving because of the uncertainty.

I really hope T-Mobile survives all this. I've been with them for ever 10 years. And I've thought about leaving, but I now think it's my duty to stay with them to save the country from Verizon/AT&T.

I would like to see T-Mobile survive as well. They have a big call center near where i live and pay their employees pretty well. A friend's son works there, and is doing very well. If the merger went through the Center would probably have been closed.

 

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http://www.net10.com/

This has been my answer to all of it. I pay $15 a month, have a phone that costs $20, no obligations and I can't get a $47,000 bill for roaming / data on "accident". I get rollover minutes, so I think I'm at about 1500 minutes at this point.

I was fed up with paying ~$70 a month with a contract and all of these ridiculous fees and gotchas.

Some people live on their Facebook or Twitter app on their phones, or just need to be able to play music or games on it. Thats fine, they can pay the premium. I'm done with that though.

According to PC mag (also read it on WSJ, cant find the link now) they have called off the deal.http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2397009,00.asp The Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday said it will allow AT&T to withdraw its T-Mobile acquisition application from the commission.The FCC will also release a 109-page staff report of its findings; a copy of that data should be available on the commission's Web site today.

 

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This is a good thing I think. I've been with T-Mobile a long time and the last thing I wanted (or my clients) was for them to get sucked into ATT, heh.

 

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If anything, we need more cell providers. Whatever happens, I hope T-Mobile stays and even grows.

 

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http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-57345260-266/at-t-abandons-bid-for-t-mobile/

AT&T has withdrawn it's bid of T-Mobile. It's over. T-Mobile survives. At least for a little while longer.

We ended up signing a new 2 year contract with tmobile this past weekend after I kept saying we wouldn't. They were dying to keep us as customers. On the web, they were giving their HTC Radar phones away for free (retail 400$ or so I think?) but the deal was web only. Spoke to a csr who had his supervisor in the background talkign with us as well. They said they'd go ahead and match that price on the web of 'free' as well as wave the 80$ for activation and gave us a 20$ monthly discount for the life of the contract (24 months). So we got the phones x2 @ $800, $80 activation waived, and $480 reduced over the length of the 2 year contract. $1360 in costs before you count taxes, and our plan we have now with 2 data packages is cheaper than the plan we had WITH OUT data packages.

Tmobile just continues to wow us in regards to their customer service and desire to keep their clients happy. Their call quality is hit n miss sometimes but I've said it many times before I'll trade it any day of the week when I have to deal with Verizon's customer service.

So supposedly UPS delivered the phone package to us this past Tuesday, at the same time several other packages were delivered. This phone package was not there though it said it was delivered. Called Tmobile and started the ticket on their end. Long story short, Tmobile customer service was beyond phenominal as always. Got transferred up to a higher tier account manager who helped sort things quite quickly, got in touch with the loyalty department and she got me an extra 5$ off my monthly bill on top of the 10$ I was already discounted, without any suggestion on my part which I thought was amazing. Then she put the phones on 2 day shipping(I think it was) at no charge.

2-3 years ago we went through something similar with Verizon. The customer service there was absolutely terrible, offensive, and unprofessional.. I made sure to emphasize how impressed with Tmobiles customer service I have been through out our time with them and how equally happy I was with the 2 rep's I'd talked to before the account manager. She was going to forward all that to her department head and make sure it got to the young lady and gentleman that helped me prior to getting to her.

edit: quite glad Tmobile won't be losing out on their jobs.

I have to agree after reading your posts.

 

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