Let’s talk about T-Mobile again…
So the AT&T takeover is blocked, right? No. The US Department of Justice has requested that the takeover be blocked, citing the Sherman Antitrust Act and related provisions of US law. While it is possible that the courts will block the takeover, it is by no means certain.
So AT&T will fight the decision in court? Almost certainly. They agreed to pay $3 billion in cash to T-Mobile’s current owners, Deutsche Telekom, if the deal didn’t go through.
Got a reply from Senator John Cornyn of Texas. He cited federal anti-trust laws, and that he supported their enforcement. So I’m thinking that means he thinks the merger should go ahead, on the grounds that the federal government will watch over AT&T’s behavior afterwards so it’s OK.
The FCC have announced the docket numbers for their consideration of the AT&T takeover of T-Mobile:
Interested parties must file petitions to deny no later than May 31, 2011. Persons and entities that file petitions to deny become parties to the proceeding. They may participate fully in the proceeding, including seeking access to any confidential information that may be filed under a protective order, seeking reconsideration of decisions, and filing appeals of a final decision to the courts.
I got a generic “We received your letter” letter from the Department of Justice antitrust division.
(Well, that’s more acknowledgement than I ever got from writing to Kay Bailey Hutchison about net neutrality.)
In mid November, our contract with AT&T (formerly Cingular) expired. We switched to T-Mobile and got BlackBerry Curve phones.
I was a BlackBerry skeptic for a long time. I didn’t think I wanted a phone with a full QWERTY keyboard. This changed when we looked at the phones available. It turned out that the Curve was only marginally wider than the average phone, perhaps a centimeter or so. It’s otherwise comparable to mid-range phones in size.
When I moved to the USA, one of the first things I did was get a cell phone. I was going to be living in a big city, rothko was working in a different part of town, we needed to coordinate things–it seemed to make sense. We went to Omnipoint, got a couple of phones, everything was good.
A few years later, Omnipoint were purchased by Voicestream. We got a phone upgrade.