AT&T to buy Dish Network's mobile spectrum

[MTS2000des]

So, the idea of Dish Network being a viable 4th carrier just went down the toilet. AT&T acquiring Dish' spectrum for their fledgling Boost Mobile brand. AT&T says it's not going to buy Boost's customer base yet, but we all know what is down the road just like T-Mobile did with Metro PCS. It's going to be come a 100 percent AT&T MVNO and that lap dance tease of having a 4th US carrier again are going away. While this is good for AT&T as this enhances their spectrum portfolio and means more capacity and with 20MHz of N71, better rural/distant coverage, it also means less competition and of course AT&T is going to have to recover the costs of such acquisition. This means bills go up as usual, end users fund it.

DISH is Selling Spectrum to AT&T | Cord Cutters News

Today EchoStar, the parent company of DISH Network, has agreed to sell a substantial portion of its wireless spectrum licenses to AT&T in a deal valued at approximately $23 billion. Announced on the same day, this all-cash transaction, subject to adjustments, marks a strategic pivot for both...

cordcuttersnews.com

 

[kc2asb]

Wasn't increasing competition the whole point of breaking up the Bell system in the early 80's? Now we are sliding back to an era of less competiton and fewer choices for the consumer. Of course, this is all fine and dandy in D.C. these days.

The public/consumers always seem to be the last consideration. We saw this when they loosened the ownership rules for media outlets back in the 90's. It resulted in a handful of companies controlling over 80% of media outlets. It ushered in the era of every radio station sounding the same.

 

[mmckenna]

Dish never had their act together.

They tried to sneak on to one of our sites back about 5 years ago. And by 'sneak', I mean bypass all the leasing, technical and approval requirements.

We stopped that.

Then they popped up about a year ago, wanted to follow the rules to get on one of my sites, and acted like they wanted to follow the rules. But they didn't, and just sort of dematerialized and the whole proposal fell apart.

Wasn't hard to see where this was going. MVNO land is where they belong. Competition would have been nice, but they were never really a true player.

 

[gmclam]

Rather than break up the big phone company by regions, I'd like to see them broken up so that "the last mile" is a not-for-profit business. Whether a twisted pair, fiber or something else; that "last mile" would be managed by a single company nationwide. This way you don't have every cable(TV) company, phone provider or ISP all digging up the streets/etc. and managing parallel signal paths.

AT&T doesn't want to be in the wire phone business, and would rather shut it all down rather than sell or make separate. The reason the costs have gone up on wired circuits is because they don't treat it with the care the original Bell System did. The reason people are leaving the wired phone business has more to do with cost (pricing) than other factors. In a real emergency smart people know the (cell) towers will be overwhelmed and you're better off with the POTS connection.

This new company (a split of what exists) would be funded by customers who use the signals (which is anyone with a residence). Part of your bill for cable, phone, Internet pays for the infrastructure. It would continue the same and only the ACTUAL cost would be passed through to the citizen.

The motions and purchases they've been making show where they are heading. And many people have no choice (and don't have cell service either).

 

[kc2asb]

Rather than break up the big phone company by regions, I'd like to see them broken up so that "the last mile" is a not-for-profit business. Whether a twisted pair, fiber or something else; that "last mile" would be managed by a single company nationwide. This way you don't have every cable(TV) company, phone provider or ISP all digging up the streets/etc. and managing parallel signal paths.

This is a great idea.

AT&T doesn't want to be in the wire phone business, and would rather shut it all down rather than sell or make separate. The reason the costs have gone up on wired circuits is because they don't treat it with the care the original Bell System did. The reason people are leaving the wired phone business has more to do with cost (pricing) than other factors. In a real emergency smart people know the (cell) towers will be overwhelmed and you're better off with the POTS connection.

I agree. I wish we still had POTS.

When we had FIOS installed, they cut the copper phone line and brought in their fiber optic lines. When Hurricane Sandy hit, we lost power and the FIOS landline went out once the battery drained. There was still one old copper line coming into the house, which unfortunately was no longer used. However, I plugged in a phone and it still had power. It's a shame this old, reliable infrastructure is being allowed to decay and is disappearing.

This new company (a split of what exists) would be funded by customers who use the signals (which is anyone with a residence). Part of your bill for cable, phone, Internet pays for the infrastructure. It would continue the same and only the ACTUAL cost would be passed through to the citizen.

This makes sense and is exactly how it should be, which means it will be strongly lobbied against and never happen.

 

[MTS2000des]

Wasn't increasing competition the whole point of breaking up the Bell system in the early 80's? Now we are sliding back to an era of less competiton and fewer choices for the consumer. Of course, this is all fine and dandy in D.C. these days.

The public/consumers always seem to be the last consideration. We saw this when they loosened the ownership rules for media outlets back in the 90's. It resulted in a handful of companies controlling over 80% of media outlets. It ushered in the era of every radio station sounding the same.

The entire reason the Bell system was divested was to get AT&T out of the highly regulated entity it was. The "monopoly" argument Judge Green made was all smoke and mirrors. At the end of the day, we essentially have the Bell system back together: with AT&T and Verizon being the two dominating forces, and T-Mo being the third wheel. I can see T-Mo buying Verizon. Verizon has become the weakest carrier spectrum wise but has strong brand loyalty and lots of wireline territory, something T-Mo doesn't. In today's culture of conglomeration without any regulation, what we will see in the next few years are two carriers just as it was 40 years ago.

Prices will continue to rise, along with their other anti-competitive actions. Any competition from MVNOs is a joke: consumers give up something (like brick and mortar support, prioritized data, etc) to deal with an MVNO and at the end of the day, the money still goes two the big two or three wireless cartels. Only a small number of players will own the spectrum and the infrastructure that rides on it and they want to keep it that way. AT&T spent 22 BILLION dollars on this acquisition. Only a fool would believe that this isn't going to negatively impact consumers.

 

[mmckenna]

Rather than break up the big phone company by regions, I'd like to see them broken up so that "the last mile" is a not-for-profit business. Whether a twisted pair, fiber or something else; that "last mile" would be managed by a single company nationwide. This way you don't have every cable(TV) company, phone provider or ISP all digging up the streets/etc. and managing parallel signal paths.

Couple things I've learned over the last 30 years in Telecommunications:

A lot of people have some weird brand loyalty thing going on. Any suggestion that they change their carrier/provider will be met with something just this side of pure violence. Several of us here at work have agency provided cell phones. A year or so ago we looked at contract pricing and were going to move users off AT&T to FirstNet.
-YES- I know, same thing. But you'd have thought we were going to sacrifice their first born child or something.

If you change anything and the service ever gets interrupted, you'll have to hear about "carrier xyz -NEVER- had an outage".


Go to parts of eastern Europe and they've bypassed the last mile thing all together. Many areas are wireless only. No need to build out plant in sparsely populated or disadvantaged areas, just pop up a new tower and everyone is happy.


With pretty much everything going IP, the need for separate carriers is pretty much moot. It needs to switch to one IP provider. That's it.

Some areas have gone to municipal systems to support this. But there are those that will throw a hissy fit over that, too.

AT&T doesn't want to be in the wire phone business, and would rather shut it all down rather than sell or make separate. The reason the costs have gone up on wired circuits is because they don't treat it with the care the original Bell System did. The reason people are leaving the wired phone business has more to do with cost (pricing) than other factors. In a real emergency smart people know the (cell) towers will be overwhelmed and you're better off with the POTS connection.

I used to hire AT&T guys as fast as I could find them. Most of them wanted out and were looking for something new. I was happy to get them since they had serious expertise that was hard to find from anywhere else.
Problem was, all their knowledge left. Finding a good outside plant guy at any wireline carrier is getting hard. They don't want to hire experienced guys, and the good ones have all retired or left. The AT&T's of the world have lost control of their cable plants and can't maintain them anymore.

And POTS ain't POTS anymore. It's IP up to your street. It's packet switched across the rest of the network. As much as I love POTS, we've had to move away from it since it's just not a real service anymore up until that last mile. The same routers that support IP are handling phone traffic. I've got 3 PRI circuits left on my system, and two of those are slated for disconnect in the next two months. Everything is SIP trunking now

This new company (a split of what exists) would be funded by customers who use the signals (which is anyone with a residence). Part of your bill for cable, phone, Internet pays for the infrastructure. It would continue the same and only the ACTUAL cost would be passed through to the citizen.

The motions and purchases they've been making show where they are heading. And many people have no choice (and don't have cell service either).

Yeah, I agree.

 

[MTS2000des]

The way wireless communications evolved in the EU was light years ahead of the USA. Mostly because the corporations don't get to call the shots: ETSI sets the standards and everyone must play or doesn't get a seat at the table. Here, the corporations call the shots, and the FCC and government pander to them.

Wireless in the EU/UK: started with analog ETCAS and a couple other formats, then ETSI started working on GSM "1G" way back in 1982 with standard ratified in 1987 and the first GSM networking going live in Finland in 1991. The GSM alliance drove the world to EDGE, then UMTS, then LTE and 5G. One standards group. Everyone plays well together.

Meanwhile in the good ol' USA we got:
IMTS then AMPS then narrow AMPS, then IS-95 and IS-136 (neither of which were compatible), oh then Motorola created iDEN and this company named Nextel later impersonated a cellphone company, then we had PCS spectrum opening up in the late 1990s- a couple of bold companies like OmniPoint and Western Wireless deployed GSM here on PCS1900, then later sucked up by VoiceStream AKA T-Mobile. Meanwhile, Verizon and Sprint pushed IS-95 while AT&T pushed IS-136 then jumped on the GSM bandwagon in 2004. All the networks were more disparate than some public safety trunking systems.

Ever since the US carriers woke up and realized that GSM/UMTS/LTE was the way to go, it's settled down. At least now one phone will work on any network- oh wait, the US cartels lock devices down, put custom ROMs and cripple devices that people pay 2 and now 3 year contracts of adhesion to own, all the while prices go up and up and up.

There are no clean hands in this industry. They operate pretty much in a relatively regulation and accountability free world. They used to get away with it for the past 2 decades citing that their services were not "essential" and people should just "use a landline" (and fixed internet) but oh wait, they want to do away with land lines and sell metered wireless internet to everyone.

 

[mmckenna]

I was in some pretty rural areas of Romania back in the early 2000's. Near a small town, very few roads were paved, border crossings where you'd get shaken down by the guards, and the local Roma population living next to the dump. Right in the middle of all that was the nicest, newest cellular tower I'd ever seen (and I work around this stuff). Everyone had cell phones.

It just worked. They skipped from wired telephone services left over from the Soviet era to cellular that was better than anything I'd experienced up to then.

My manager at the time had been with AT&T and was on their team that went in as soon as the iron curtain fell. He oversaw a lot of the buildout of that infrastructure. AT&T and all the others were able to work just fine in the heavily controlled environment where the government didn't take any crap.

Far different than here where the companies run things, and the general public gets the shaft.

 

[davidgcet]

Dish has never had a chance at being a real carrier. they played it up, but honestly they never intended to really build it out. my opinion is they just wanted to string it along a long as possible to get the biggest bid they could.

 

[gmclam]

I recognize that POTS is not POTS any more beyond the CO (Central Office). My biggest concern is having everything rely on "Cell Towers". There is not enough bandwidth for everyone to be on at once, then we've got everyone on the 'net, and in many cases first responders using the same system(s). I see the only thing 'reliable' is that direct connection to the CO. Yeah copper fails too.

One thing I don't like about VoIP home setups is that all your phone traffic is routed to some far-off location. One outage and tons of people are left w/o service. It's as bad or worse that having no cell slot to connect to. My solution to that is what I call "POTS over Fiber". Yeah sounds weird doesn't it? My phones would be connected to fiber, but only to the CO where it goes into the bell network like POTS does now. In other words, don't put my phone on the Internet.

I've had interactions with AT&T employees/contractors in the past couple of years. It is amazing how much they do not know. Just like most things, people who've kept the older technology working for the past century+ are gone or leaving. People taking their place are clueless and being led by the $$$ motivated companies.

 

[tweiss3]

They tried to sneak on to one of our sites back about 5 years ago. And by 'sneak', I mean bypass all the leasing, technical and approval requirements.

We stopped that.

Then they popped up about a year ago, wanted to follow the rules to get on one of my sites, and acted like they wanted to follow the rules. But they didn't, and just sort of dematerialized and the whole proposal fell apart.

I'm interested in what the weren't willing to do right? Was it background checks, was it structural/rf studies, was it NEC/code/best practices, or was it a mix of everything.

I'm also curious how they tied to sneak onto a site. Did they think they could just turn up and start bolting things to the tower?

Rather than break up the big phone company by regions, I'd like to see them broken up so that "the last mile" is a not-for-profit business. Whether a twisted pair, fiber or something else; that "last mile" would be managed by a single company nationwide. This way you don't have every cable(TV) company, phone provider or ISP all digging up the streets/etc. and managing parallel signal paths.

I'm not sure I agree with this, unless there are absolutely zero stakeholders, and some kind of audit that there is zero profit. I still don't see it working the way you wish it would.

 

[mmckenna]

I recognize that POTS is not POTS any more beyond the CO (Central Office). My biggest concern is having everything rely on "Cell Towers". There is not enough bandwidth for everyone to be on at once, then we've got everyone on the 'net, and in many cases first responders using the same system(s). I see the only thing 'reliable' is that direct connection to the CO. Yeah copper fails too.

Copper fails much more frequently than fiber. With fiber, they often do self healing rings, diverse routing, redundant routers, protection circuits, etc.

But eventually it all fails. That's why there are so many of us employed in keeping equipment running. Nothing is fault proof. Best option is to have more than one choice. Sinking everything into one technology is the risk.

I've had interactions with AT&T employees/contractors in the past couple of years. It is amazing how much they do not know. Just like most things, people who've kept the older technology working for the past century+ are gone or leaving. People taking their place are clueless and being led by the $$$ motivated companies.

They pushed their experienced guys out to save money. They want to save money to increase profits to the shareholders. It's all about making money and providing the minimal amount of service they can get away with.

Goal should be not to rely totally on any one technology or any one provider.

 

[mmckenna]

I'm interested in what the weren't willing to do right? Was it background checks, was it structural/rf studies, was it NEC/code/best practices, or was it a mix of everything.

I'm also curious how they tied to sneak onto a site. Did they think they could just turn up and start bolting things to the tower?

We partner with Crown Castle for tower/fiber leases and they wanted to bypass that. They wanted to install a new cell site at a strange location (from an RF standpoint) that appeared to be an attempt to get their foot in the door bypassing CC. It got kind of weird after that. They pulled out and made a slightly better attempt a few years later, but that never moved forward.

Just didn't seem like they had their act together at any point. They were always very light on details and what plans they had were often found to be lacking. Compared to the other carriers we work with, it became obvious that they were not working on the same level as the others.

We wasted a lot of time in meetings/site walks with them, and it became obvious they didn't really have the resources to make things happen.

I'm not sure I agree with this, unless there are absolutely zero stakeholders, and some kind of audit that there is zero profit. I still don't see it working the way you wish it would.

I think there's where a municipal provider would benefit. Just like sewer/water/garbage service. Elected officials answering to the voters. Others have done it with local phone services, cable TV, etc.
There's a lot of options for a city to do that with franchise agreements. Many companies that would run such a service for them.

 

[tweiss3]

We partner with Crown Castle for tower/fiber leases and they wanted to bypass that. They wanted to install a new cell site at a strange location (from an RF standpoint) that appeared to be an attempt to get their foot in the door bypassing CC. It got kind of weird after that. They pulled out and made a slightly better attempt a few years later, but that never moved forward.

Just didn't seem like they had their act together at any point. They were always very light on details and what plans they had were often found to be lacking. Compared to the other carriers we work with, it became obvious that they were not working on the same level as the others.

We wasted a lot of time in meetings/site walks with them, and it became obvious they didn't really have the resources to make things happen.

Thanks for sharing. With such a "big" name behind them, you would think they would have had decent resources to do things correctly. Though CC is nearly impossible to get a call back (or email returned) from in my limited experience. They may be easier to deal with in the next 5 years when big towers are more liability then income (with the micro cells going in now).

I think there's where a municipal provider would benefit. Just like sewer/water/garbage service. Elected officials answering to the voters. Others have done it with local phone services, cable TV, etc.
There's a lot of options for a city to do that with franchise agreements. Many companies that would run such a service for them.

I can see that being a benefit. Doesn't help the cell companies/services though. There has been some really good things to come from municipal run last mile. My office now has 4 providers to choose from for ISP, 2 are local (City & County) and the other two are stupid expensive. There are other cities in the area offering very competitive FTTH services, I wish my City would catch on. That being said, I don't necessarily trust the municipalities as a not-for-profit organization, I've been to too many "economic development" presentations.

 

[mmckenna]

Thanks for sharing. With such a "big" name behind them, you would think they would have had decent resources to do things correctly. Though CC is nearly impossible to get a call back (or email returned) from in my limited experience. They may be easier to deal with in the next 5 years when big towers are more liability then income (with the micro cells going in now).

Crown Castle is OK if you are a big enough customer. We have monthly meetings with them and they always attend.

But CC has filed with the FCC to sell off their fiber and DAS businesses, so we'll have to see where this goes.