According to the official T-mobile FAQ of the merger , they don't offer the iphone, and they offer "Cutting edge devices, like the galaxy s 4g" lol
Ahh ****! The one company I want nothing to do with has bought out my company. Damn it, I wonder if I am going to lose my $70 /mo unlimited voice/text/data plan?? I will never find anything similar to that ever again
thanks for the tip. i'll give it a shot tonight. i looked into the evo... but the BS $10 a month charge for 4G (which I don't want/use) makes the phone bill too much to stomach. now I just need to find a way to make my vibrant's battery last a lot longer.
Sprint's decided on LTE a long time ago, back when Verizon and ATT announced they were going LTE. Clearwire was a hedged bet, thus the reason why Sprint didn't roll it out under their own name. Since Sprints inception, they have been notorious about jumping the gun on future technologies and making bad decisions. You might call EVO a success, but I imagine it was quite expensive to invest in WiMax just for a couple of phones. WiMax failed for the same reason IDEN failed; Nobody else followed. You can have all the spectrum you want, but if you don't have them money to roll it out, its useless. Most of Sprints spectrum is non preferred. Nobody wants that 1900mhz and 2100mhz. The kicker is that Sprint used to own quite a bit of 850, but chose to sell it all off. In turn, they purchased quite a bit of 1900mhz, and built that "Sprint PCS, built from the ground up". When the 2100mhz went up for auction a couple years back, Verizon passed on it all and waited on the 700mhz, in which it bought up an entire block. I try not to be a Verizon fanboy, but that company knows what they are doing.
I just go to whoever has the lowest prices. Couldn't care less what 3G, 4G, LTE, etc is running the data. Verizon may have the best service, but they are just as bad as AT&T in regards to pricing and plans. Sprint it is (and yes I'm aware of the rumors regarding the buyout from Verizon).
Well, the good news is nothing will change for 12 months. The feds can squash the deal, but I'm not counting on it. Guess I'll hop to Sprint in a year.
I have CM7 on my HD2. Works great, and I love the free tethering. If Verizon is too expensive, check to see if the company you work for gets an employee discount. When I switch in May, I'll get a 20% discount from Verizon which makes it a lot more affordable. http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/employee/emaildomainauthentication.jsp
Oh man dont get me mistaken, I love Verizon. Theyre mmy provider. Yeah good point on the LTE and yes I know they've had their mind set on LTE due to hesse's commenrs but what I'm saying is I don't know if that's going to be wholesale deal like clearwire. And yes, sprint has jumped the gun for years. Gary foresee anyone? Responsible for the huge churn rate after tthe failed iDEN integration. Sprint even sold off its Latin American Nextel brand and let thwm kekeep the name. Their frequency isn't that good, but its still worth money. In fact T-Mobile wanted some of that crappy spectrum. Sprint lost its brand name really bad after the cingular merger and after sprint Telecom became embarq-century link. Horrible customer setvice rep in the past also affected them. Yes, Verizon has been cutting edge ever since they released 3g way back in 03. Adam always handled VZW well and their innovation is mainly due to its large subscriber base. You remember he failed MCI worldcom and sprint merger? That might have changed the industry completely at the time. PM me if you have time.
Well that's what they wanted everybody to think. The thing is Sprint already hedged their bets on the WiMAX thing with Clear and had a fallback plan in place. The latest trend in the wireless industry is SDR (software-defined radio). One of my company's business units makes wireless baseband chipsets, and I have a friend in their marketing org who tells me how much demand there is for SDR. The advantage there is that unlike before when a particular baseband module was manufactured for a specific radio technology (GSM, EDGE, UMTS etc.), these chips are programmable to support any particular tech or frequency band, or even multiple modes. Sprint signed deals with Alcatel/Lucent and Sony Ericsson months ago to begin work on upgrading their towers to SDR multimode chipsets that would pave the way for CDMA 1xAdvanced (think faster EvDO with simultaneous surf/talk), WiMAX and/or LTE from the same towers while simultaneously reducing the number of towers they had to maintain. At the same time they're doing major backhaul upgrades to improve overall bandwidth (which apparently is partly responsible for some of the 3G choking customers are seeing lately). From everything I've heard they're going solo on this - it's not dependent on any cross-deal with LightSquared or other companies. There is still some short-term pain for Sprint due to the fact that the WiMAX experiment did not pan out, but once they are done with their Network Vision project and the plan to phase out iDEN to free up 800MHz spectrum for LTE, they will be in position to reap big time dividends. They probably will still get into the LTE market before AT&T does, I think.
All T-Mobile subscribers with “3G” phones will need to replace those to keep their wireless broadband service working. http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2011/03/21/att-says-t-mobile-3g-phones-will-need-to-be-replaced/
FCC opens floor for public comment on AT&T / T-Mobile deal via Engadget http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/ecfs/upload/display?z=wzxiv "...Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me."
Take with a grain of salt, but thought I'd share. I spoke with some T-Mobile business sales guys, who were in the area to pitch local businesses about switching to T-Mobile. They stopped by where I work (small office which currently has AT&T for all employees) and I spoke with them about the merger, etc and how it wouldn't make sense to switch since we'd end up with AT&T in 12 months anyhow. What the guy told me was that T-Mobile is currently telling all its sales staff to operate as if T-Mobile hasn't been sold and is still operating as it's own independent company. The inhouse rumors at T-Mobile corporate are that the merger won't go through because of not just FCC stepping in with concerns, but Sprint and Verizon working hard to stop it as well. He felt that it was more likely T-Mobile would continue to operate on its own after 12 mos and that other companies (Sprint, Verizon, etc) would have a better shot at buying it down the road. .......................or he was just trying to sell me the phones, make his money, and keep moving. Just thought I'd share for rumors sake.
Rumors are just rumors, but I've had doubts about this merger from the beginning. If allowed to happen, there is no way the FCC can deny Verizon the right to buy Sprint. No sane person can argue these events are not anti-competitive. None of the drivel spouted by AT&T makes sense in benefiting consumers. For several reasons, it makes no sense at all for Verizon to buy T-Mobile. The only remaining alternative would be T-Mobile + Sprint. If there has to be a merger of the four national mobile phone companies, that is it.
The official line for companies when these things happen is that they aren't supposed to be operating as if the merger/splits have taken place. Its just standard operating procedure. Although I did see that the FCC has set up a public comments page about the impending merger.
