| reply to en102
Re: Rural subs getting the shaft (again) by AT&T? said by en102:I think if ANYTHING, it will be Comcast + Clear/Sprint as one company. I posted on this sometime ago, and I concur on Comcast eventually taking over Sprint and Clearwire. Wireless is too important to Comcast for it to be MVNO'd long term, it needs to be brought in-house.
Sprint clearly has problems in the short term, but there are some clear advantages to a tie up in the long term. It allows both to better compete against AT&T and Verizon, and provide more competition in the market to the big 2 carriers on both the wired and wireless side.
For Sprint/Clearwire:
A return to fixed lines
Local access fiber (at cost fiber backhaul from towers)
Residential / Small-Medium Business
Financial resources
For Comcast:
National Wireless Network (~50 million customers)
Big Enterprise / Government customers (a who's who list of big, high value customers)
SprintLink Tier 1 backbone (at cost bandwidth, although bandwidth is cheap)
Global Presence
On the wired side, now that the cable ownership cap has been struck down again, Comcast will eventually be able to merge/acquire Time Warner Cable (TWC) among other cablecos.
As long as strong merger conditions are required and strictly enforced by the FCC, competition should actually increase. For example:
TV:
Reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) pricing on Comcast-owned networks (G4, VS, etc.)
Reasonable carriage of other networks
Internet:
Permanent elimination of data transfer cap
Agreeing to Network Neutrality principles
More liberal/open internet peering policy (already the largest ISP)
No lobbying against muni's
Those are just simple examples off the top of my head, there would need to be more and more detailed ones than that obviously. But the point is: a bigger Comcast could be a good thing.
T-Mobile + NTT DoCoMo as a new wireless.
I've been thinking about something like this as well. While T-Mobile USA is still going through healthy growth, it's still in a distant 4th place. AT&T and VZW are deeply entrenched, holding about 60% of the wireless market. That's a very difficult nut to crack.
DT/T-Mobile should consider selling a minority stake in T-Mobile USA to another foreign operator(s). Potential candidates include FT/Orange, Telefonica/O2, TeliaSonera, NTT DoCoMo, etc., maybe even Vodafone (despite it owning ~40% of VZW; although I think VZ would like to get Vodafone in the long term).
The potential billions raised from that could be used to fund a more rapid national build out, buy more spectrum, buy more regional GSM operators, etc. |
