i've been asked by many why i haven't been commenting on the AT&T/Cingular and Nextel/Sprint mergers so here's what i think in a few sentences...
it's been clear for a long time that consolidation would happen in the US market - the market couldn't have had six major operators and have them all be profitable.
Sprint has wanted Push to Talk (PTT) forever and their own implementation was a little lacking, to say the least, so this doesn't surprise me that Nextel was in thier sights. Sprint has also wanted to further their corporate penetration, which Nextel probably has covered - so this was another move to round out their strategy at a very large level.
The AWS/Cingular merger made sense as well from a strategic level - AWS was doing everything Cingular wanted to do, but better - market to both a hip younger crowd and a business focused crowd.
who will be hurting in all this?
clearly, T-Mobile has the largest challenges ahead. T-Mobile's choice to invest in wi-fi over 3G technologies looks like it turned out to be a losing move, even with wi-fi capable devices on the horizon.
Posted by Steve at December 17, 2004 05:11 PM | TrackBack