AT&T, Cingular and Bell South are set to merge into a new telecom giant that could bring a huge showdown with Verizon. The last few years have seen some real consolidation in the telcom industry...IMHO due to very poor planning during the .com boom that left many telcoms holding huge debt loads when the .bomb hit. Now, the Baby Bells that were formed when AT&T was broken up have mostly found their way back together in one of the two giants.
The whole idea of the telcoms consolidating is a bitter-sweet pill for me. On one hand, the US cell phone industry is third world compared to Europe and Japan. We have too many competing standards that keep us from truly reaching the potential that ubiquitous communications could bring us. As it is, we have telcoms spending huge sums of money to build cell infrastructure two or three times in the same area to support the different standards. Think what we might have if that money was spent on upgrading instead of competing.
On the other hand though, I'm not a fan of big business consolidating to two or three giants. As we've seen this year in the oil industry, there is just not enough competition to keep them honest. Exxon/Mobil raped the American public for record quarterly profits (while crying about the scarcity of oil and the money grubbing Arabs). Drive down the road and look at the gas prices--chances are, they're within a few cents of each other. If that isn't price fixing , it's at least lack of competition. Our government has shown itself incapable of controlling the oil giants (or more likely they choose not to endanger those huge campaign contributions) so I'm not at all confident that they'll control the telecom giants either. We're already suffering the rising cost of heating our homes, driving our cars and price increases due to the higher cost of shipping goods. The last thing we need are raising telcom prices on top of all that.
I'm not convinced that the good out weighs the bad, but if this merger follows recent history, this merger is a done deal. Open your wallets America.
courant.com | Phone Merger Rings Bells
