Verizon Communications Inc and AT&T Inc, the two largest U.S. mobile phone companies, grabbed the lion’s share of a $19.12 billion auction of airwaves being vacated by television broadcasters.
Verizon and AT&T won more than $16 billion of licenses – airwaves they plan to use to enhance existing voice and data services, as well as underpin a new wave of wireless technologies…
“It means that the two big guys just got much bigger,” said Rebecca Arbogast, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus.
I’m not certain what Google intended with their legal and political maneuvers before the auction. Is anyone surprised at the outcome?
No surprises here. I give it 10 years or less before Verizon and AT&T are the only 2 players left on the board.
Is anyone surprised at the outcome?
Surprised? No. Saddened? Yes.
19 billion? Where does that money go? If it goes into the general fund, it’s already been spent, a thousand times over.
I think it will shake out to these two monsters, and the rest of the smaller players merging into a third remaining company in a few years. You would hope that the regulators wouldn’t let these 2 buy any more of the smaller players.
Don
In reply to #1 I have worked for AT&T(Cingular right before the change and for about a week after) and my wife currently works for Sprint. I have also spoken to reps at Tmobile, and they all use the same systems. Not only for accessing cell info but everything. From what I can tell the coustomer service manuals are even exactly the same just they just have the names of the company changed.
A friend who worked at AT&T with me and recently went over to Tmoible even claims that the slides in some of the presentations were the same.
I dunno if that is a sign that there is something going on there or what but my gut says they are all really just the same company in the end.
Open access; it was a nice dream while it lasted.
#4 If you are saying Tmobile, Sprint and AT&T or even any 2 are the same company it should be to pretty easy to find out from their SEC & FCC filings.
These are all public companies. They can’t keep that sort of thing secret.
I really suspected Google would be a much bigger player. I was hoping for Google to jump in and stir things up a bit. This is a market that needs way more competition. Now we’ll all just have to stay bent over so the wireless companies can continue to give us the shaft….and we’ll take it because we’re good little consumers.