So AT&T is buying T-Mobile USA for $39 billion in a deal that makes perfect sense if you are an RF engineer or a fat-cat telco tycoon, but my question is what happens to all the jailbroken and unlocked iPhones?
T-Mobile and AT&T are the USA’s only GSM wireless network operators, so if you had an iPhone and wanted to dump AT&T to allow things like free tethering, the obvious (and frankly only) way for Americans to do so was by jumping from cranky old AT&T to the much friendlier T-Mobile. And so tens of thousands — maybe hundreds of thousands — of AT&T customer did just that, and were gratefully accepted by T-Mobile.
But now with […]
Bloomberg reported today that Sprint is in talks to buy T-Mobile, the U.S. wireless division of Deutsche Telekom, according to the usual unnamed sources. As a result, shares of both companies are moving, tongues are wagging, as are the fingers of technical analysts saying such a tie-up might not be a very good idea given the technical differences between the two networks. After all, look what happened the last time Sprint tried to absorb a foreign network, Nextel, back in 2005. That wasn’t pretty for Sprint or its shareholders. But Wall Street loves news, whether it is true or not, and I am fairly certain this news isn’t true.