Leaked AT&T Letter Demolishes Case For T-Mobile Merger

Re:Leaked AT&T Letter Demolishes Case For T-Mobile Merger by gvb on Saturday August 13, 2011 @07:52AM (#2880798)

The coverage improvements would take years to build out their existing infrastructure with new base stations (erect new towers or lease space on existing towers, purchase and install equipment). By buying TMO, they would get an instantaneous coverage increase and instantaneous capability increase.

There has to be a substantial cost of opportunity if it takes them (e.g.) 5 years to build the infrastructure themselves. There also is the risk that ATT could not achieve the full coverage because it has gotten increasingly difficult to get zoning permissions to build unsightly cell towers.

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Re:Leaked AT&T Letter Demolishes Case For T-Mobile Merger by kwantam on Saturday August 13, 2011 @09:47AM (#2880944)

    > By buying TMO, they would get an instantaneous 
    > coverage increase and instantaneous capability 
    > increase.

Not really. Most of the coverage AT&T is lacking and proposed to build out to expand from 8x% to 9x% coverage is in rural areas where T-Mobile's network is even weaker than AT&T's. In other words, there are very few places where T-Mobile has coverage and AT&T doesn't already; most of the new coverage they'd get in this deal is redundant.

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Re:Leaked AT&T Letter Demolishes Case For T-Mobile Merger by fpgeek on Saturday August 13, 2011 @11:21AM (#2881102)

Beyond that, we're primarily talking about LTE coverage. That would require significant additional investment even if you added T-Mobile's (GSM/UMTS/HSPA+) infrastructure to the mix.

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