It matters because it increases the switching cost for anyone that wants to go to a competitor. You can't bring your phone with you, so you MUST make an upfront commitment of either buying a phone or signing a 2 year contract to get the phone without an upfront cost. When there are multiple companies that provide the network type your phone uses, you can move between them at no cost.
But with only two providers of GSM, you already have emerging cartel pricing dynamics. It's not even as good as airlines (which are also somewhat collusively pricied), where you usually have 5-6 choices for any trip.
More competition is good, but, from a pragmatic perspective, the loss in competition (such as it is) might not outweigh the gain in efficiency for AT&T and T-Mobile subs.
> But with only two providers of GSM, you already have emerging cartel pricing dynamics.
And people already complain about the fact that there are only 2 GSM providers and 2 CDMA providers in the US. Your statement appears to me to be "I don't understand why you are complaining, it's not much worse than what we already have", but people already don't like what we have. This just makes it worse. Between a rock and a hard place, I guess. I completely understand your point, but slowly taking away options and freedoms to slowly turn a free and complacent consumer base into a single group under control of one entity is not a cool thing to do. Look at the current political debate over wiretaps and the PATRIOT act, it's the same idea.
Our choices as consumers and citizens are slowly being whittled away and no one gives a shit because "It won't be much worse than what we already have."
We don't have a small number of wireless providers because of some collusive conspiracy. We have a small number of wireless providers because it costs billions of dollars to create nationwide wireless networks in a country the size of the United States.
I completely understand your frustration at having to choose between two goliath companies for wireless access that works when you get off the plane no matter where you fly. But them's the breaks. What you really want isn't some legal action that increases to 3 from 2 our number of options; what you want is a technological improvement to reduce the cost of providing nationwide wireless access. You can, seriously, go work on that and maybe get somewhere.
Right. It's not the best situation to have one or the other. More would be great in an ideal world, but we have this right now and until you or I can deploy a wide wireless GSM network for a few grand nothing will change.
I was commenting on your point that it's not that big of a deal for AT&T to acquire T-Mobile. It is a big deal because, why it may not be easy (or in fact possible) to stick a third carrier in the middle of this in a completely hypothetical scenario, combining the two carriers in a real life, AT&T just announced it was planning on doing just that scenario is not good for consumers. It is worse than the already less than ideal situation we have right now.
I am saying that despite people's concerns that consolidation in the wireless market will allow AT&T to abuse customers, the wireless market is already so intrinsically consolidated due to capital requirements for entry that AT&T was already asymptotically close to the maximal level of customer abuse it could inflict. This is similar to the argument security people have about the "Microsoft monoculture", as if 2-3 more operating systems were going to be anything more than a speed bump to attackers. One is a monopoly. 2-5 is still a cartel.
Technology lock-in. Admittedly, it's rather pointless for me to argue this, thanks to phones locked to specific carriers, but competition is severely hindered by the fact that I can't just pop in a new SIM from a different GSM carrier. Instead, I have to buy a new handset and, as phones become mobile computing devices, I'll have quite a lot of setup and data porting to do.
