AT&T Issues Scathing Response To FCC Report 215
An anonymous reader writes "AT&T has issued a scathing letter in response to the FCC's decision to release a staff report on its findings surrounding AT&T's planned $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile USA. 'We expected that the AT&T-T-Mobile transaction would receive careful, considered, and fair analysis,' Jim Cicconi, AT&T Senior Executive Vice President of External & Legislative Affairs, said. 'Unfortunately, the preliminary FCC Staff Analysis offers none of that.'"
Re:Make sure to read the bottom of the page (Score:5, Interesting)
We agree with AT&T on one point however: the public should read the Analysis and Findings on AT&T’s proposed takeover.
Re:Terrible idea... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's kinda what they did when they went AT&T exclusive at the start.. there's a whole big argument to be made regarding what would've happened with iOS vs. Android had Verizon not been left out of the iPhone sales fest early on and decided to retaliate with pushing and marketing the Droid the way they did.
Re:Terrible idea... (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, it's possible that Android would never have been able to make it to market without Apple first muscling their way into the game the way they did. One of the benefits they got by going exclusive was that they were allowed a lot more control over their hardware and what could be installed on it than any other phone manufacturer was. You could make an argument that the smartphone market wouldn't be as big as it was without Apple showing what was possible.
Hard to tell. It's all guesswork at this point.
Question: Are these committments binding? I doubt! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's good the government did not approve this merger. Here's why:
First, behind all these statements will be legalese that I describe after each one of them.
AT&T should know that public commitments are not legally binding.
How many are these? You will not be surprised that there could be a handful of them in the USA. Even then, you could find that these so called call center employees are not directly employed. Many times, companies will outsource services to the extent that there are pay disparities for employees doing the same job.
Over what period of time may I ask? AT&T could later argue that they meant returning these jobs "over a period of two or three decades!" Imagine that.
What they do not tell you is that the offered position will be at a significantly lower pay, or that these positions will not be permanent, or that they will have conditions attached to them such that employees will fire themselves.
Who does AT&T think they are fooling?
Senior Executive Vice President (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Make sure to read the bottom of the page (Score:1, Interesting)
I disagree. I'm no lover of AT&T, I got screwed by them once on international calls and had to fight for a couple of months to get my money back. This was at a time when money was in really short supply, and the $500 or so that I had to get back would have made a big difference. If you actually read FCC's Analysis, and look at what AT&T disagrees with, you can't but agree with AT&T. Their rebuttal is backed by facts, and an hour of googling later you will see for yourself that they are certainly right in the issues they have enumerated. I would have personally really wanted AT&T's response to turn out to be made up shitty troll, but it turns out not to be so.
Sprint's "short and sweet" response turns out to be completely unfounded. It essentially translates to "yeah, yeah, we don't like AT&T either, kudos to FCC for sharing in our dislike". FCC did a pathetic job in their Analysis, that's all there's to it.
Calling AT&T's response "scathing" is uncalled for. We have a saying in Polish: the truth stings you in the eyes. As far as I'm concerned, the submitter takes "factual" for "scathing". It's silly. People often take a defensive stance when presented with facts that clearly contradict whatever they previously claimed, so I can at least understand the psychology in the mostly negative reaction to AT&T's rebuke to FCC. What I don't get is why people side with FCC without spending the time necessary to verify the sources. It only takes a couple of hours.
Re:That's a rude response (Score:5, Interesting)
Recently (tough economic times and all) I decided to really have a look at what I was paying for and what I was getting. I found out that more of my "rollover minutes" simply decayed after non-use than I ever actually used. I never used more than 20% of my "evening and weekend" minutes. I never used more than 10% of my Internet bandwidth cap.
Basically, I was paying $85 or so per month and letting most of the value of it go to waste.
So, I switched to pre-paid TracFone. I bought a decent Motorola that has a touchscreen and a decent collection of features. I lost GPS navigation, but that's ok because I have a GPS in my car now. Other than that, I can still talk, text, browse, play games, and anything else I could do before.
The phone came with a "triple minutes for life" deal. Basically, that means that so long as I use that same phone, I buy my pre-paid minutes at $0.047. If I browse the Web, it charges me for the time in minutes, instead of metering my bandwidth. Text messages are about 1.5 cents apiece to send and receive.
And all of it goes over AT&T's network. I have the same service provider as before. Same signal quality. Same Internet bandwidth.
Another thing I did was invest $30 in a decent headset for my computer. When I'm at home, I now use Google Voice to make outgoing phone calls. I get great sound quality and don't pay a penny for it. These are my new "evening and weekend" minutes...
I paid $90 for the phone, and I charged it up with a little under 1300 minutes at a price of $60. That was 2.5 months ago. I still have 430 minutes remaining. That basically means I'm using my phone for a hair under $16.50 per month now. That's a savings of about $70 per month. The cheaper service has already paid for the phone. Anybody want to buy a used iPhone 3GS?
If you use the hell out of your smartphone, you might be getting your money's worth. But if you're a more "casual" smartphone user, then you're getting seriously ripped off.
Re:That's a rude response (Score:4, Interesting)
The company that now calls itself AT&T isn't really the same company as the one that was broken up.
Considering that the AT&T which remained after the original breakup was bought out (largely for the name) by one of the Baby Bells, and that's the AT&T we have now, I'm not sure how much difference there really is. The old Ma Bell culture stayed alive and well throughout. Monoplies like Standard Oil and the original AT&T are like goddamn T-1000s: break them up all you want, they'll just reassemble and keep coming after you.
Re:Make sure to read the bottom of the page (Score:1, Interesting)
the truth is this merger is a bad idea, at many levels.
If this is true, why did the FCC feel the need to (in AT&T's opinion, and I agree) make shit up to show that it was a bad idea? If it was, in fact, a bad idea the evidence supporting this should have been pretty easy to find.
Re:translation: (Score:4, Interesting)
(cite) [dailycaller.com]
They just love appointing foxes to guard the henhouse, don't they? It sure worked out well for the banking industry, why not telecoms?
Re:Unimpressive. (Score:5, Interesting)
You took the words from my mouth, the last few days the only impression I've been getting from AT&T is one of a crybaby.
My favorite part of TFA was Sprint's comment, they're basically using fancy words to point and laugh.
Re:AT&T stock (Score:5, Interesting)
The FCC's directive is not to ensure the value of your stock. The FCC asked AT&T why the merger was good for consumers and AT&T wasn't able to provide a reasonable one.
As someone who recently came of voting age, its kind of jarring to see our government function like this. I'm used to seeing the public interest railroaded to benefit a corporate interest, a corporate interest railroaded to benefit a different corporate interest, but I've never seen the public interest held above a corporate interest like this. Hell, they didn't even decide anything and I'm excited to see this, I know they would be able to jam up the merger eventually, but right now they've just presenting findings.
Is this what democracy is supposed to look like? I fucking love it. Shit, even if government decisions continue to be against the public interest, I'd be psyched if they just had the balls to admit it with reports like this. That would be a huge step forward from the bullshit "someone is making money, therefore its good, fuck off" level of analysis I'm used to seeing.
Re:Newsflash! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Unimpressive. (Score:5, Interesting)
You could try reading it, then you would see they bring up some good points.
Of course, nothing showing that this merger is not a stupid idea for consumers, but they do make some decent points about why ATT wanted this merger, problem with spectrum, and running out of space.
Re:AT&T stock (Score:4, Interesting)
That's because you're new, and have been mostly going on anecdote, media, and word-of-mouth.
Media sucks, but word of mouth is actually less accurate. Believe it or not.
Consider this... the vast majority of our "government" is people who work for a living. For the USA. When the President or congress change party, you don't get a new mail carrier, firefighter, or IRS auditor. They work the same job, under largely the same rules, from one year to the next. They are neither thieves or sell-outs, but workers. And most of them are patriotic. That is the government of the people, by the people, for the people.
Don't let the idiocy of the elected officials and a couple bad court cases make you excessively cynical. It is not only a personality flaw, it will bite you. Consider an IRS audit; if you assume that The Guberment wants all your money, you're going approach it as most people do, in an adversarial way. The IRS agent can only work against you. If you consider instead that this is probably just a worker who doesn't have any ill will towards you at all, and whose job it is to make sure the number are correct, who doesn't work for a company and isn't evaluated on "profit" then you can see that a cooperative approach can have this person helping you to make sure you did your adjustments correctly so that you can keep them. I've seen people take this approach and come out of an audit ahead of where they went in, because the IRS auditor gave them some hints about deductions they were missing.
At the level of the FCC, when the agency's primary duty is to manage communications for the companies it is no surprise that they typically look for a way to give the companies as much of what they want as they can. That is actually their purpose. Most regulatory agencies are tasked more with making sure the companies are fair to each other than anything else. Can't blame them for doing their job. In this case, AT&T was basically asking to do a merger that would make them bigger than is fair to the other companies, and their correct criteria in that case is to only allow it if it is clearly better for the average citizen. That's the only reason to let one company control more of the field than congress said, with consultation from the companies, would still allow competition.
Changing the mandate of some agencies to be more worried about the average American would be great, IMO. Of course, most of the "government workers" at those agencies would like that too, they're patriotic themselves!