This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2004 at 10:37 and is filed under News & Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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Tuesday, February 17, 2004
It’s making news all over the web and news it is. AT&T Wireless (ATTWS) has called it quits and accepted Cingular’s $41 Billion offer. With ATTWS’s already large GSM network and Cingular’s dense GSM network on the West Coast, this will make Cingular the largest GSM carrier in the U.S.. It will also offer customers the largest selection of handhelds available from any other carrier.
I have found no indication from any of the reports I’ve read if Cingular intends to keep ATTWS TDMA network when the merge completes, hopefully as soon as late 2004, but I suspect they will keep it. ATTWS sources told me late last year that their plans for the next two years was to slowly kill off TDMA when the GSM roll-out was completed. This may have been a big selling point for Cingular.
What this means for ATTWS and DoCoMo, I don’t know. I know the Japanese firm dumped many millions into ATTWS to roll out the new 3G network but there was a drop-dead date on that and I believe ATTWS didn’t make it. So, this may be void now anyway.
It’ll be interesting to see what this buy out does to Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile, especially for T-Mobile since they piggy back off Cingular in some areas. Stories of doom still loom in Nextel’s future, so I’d say expect them to get bought out by Sprint or the V.
