Weird speculation

During my course of handling calls tonight I came across some insider info that I thought was very interesting. A corporate store rep in one of our markets where Alltel is a direct competitor told a customer that they would be able to use their att phone to call Alltel customers and it would be registered as mobile to mobile. The customer did exactly that and incurred a more than $4k phone bill. Due to this being untrue (at least at this time).

When checking into the docs in the account there is indications that the rep that took the initial call did her homework to see what she could find out. In the memos there are extensive notes about a call that she placed to a local (for that area) Alltel retail store.

The person that she talked to was a store manager and they were able to confirm the information that there is "talk of a merger." Apparently there's been some sort of memo that went out to the Alltel retails in that area. The store manager refused to mail out the physical memo due to corporate securityviolation, but did agree to forward the email that he had received.

Out att rep received the email and it was vague at best. The summary of the information is that there is talk for a merger, nothing has been carved into stone yet, only set in Jell-o at this time - and that there is not to be any release of this information to the general public until at least early 2008. A more concise date would be provided at a later time.



I'm starting to wonder, just how many more is att going to suck up? Or are we going to end up with another tower time sale?


Well, there's my scoop of news for the week. If I get more details on this possible merger info, I'll give them to you here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtFtcp4mNzA

wooow, this is a hot news. Man, att is trying to build a monster and it will suck for us as a customer we will have fewer options. I think at the very end after 4/5 yrs all we will have is att, tmobile, sprint and verizon. Lets wait and find out about it.
Great news once again, and keep us updated

Interestingly enough I missed this information back in April. Apparently there was an article about it at the end of the first quarter. When doing some research on the speculation that I had made based off of account history of a customer, I came across these tidbits:

http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/...edium=internal

http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2007/04/2.../?mod=yahoo_hs



To be honest, after I had spilled out that information last night, I had sat up thinking about how it is that such a merger would work. With Alltel being CDMA and att being GSM, I figured it would be a big undertaking. But the more that I pondered it the more that I realized - att's already been through similar once before with the Cingular merger. So really, it's just history repeating itself since I'm pretty sure that if Alltel is brought into the fold, that they wouldn't be allowed to stay cdma.

Blue att was/is TDMA. Bloarnge (blue plan, orange equipment) and orange are GSM, we don't have any CDMA towers. I would think that if there's a merger or acquisition that we'd inherit the towers, but I'm pretty sure that there'd be a forced migration off of CDMA as is happening right now with blue TDMAs via the extra $1.99 or $4.99 (I'm not sure what the rate is, I work with blue accounts so rarely anymore) per line/month to "support the cost of operating" the old network.

Don't take any solid stock in my musings as to how it would be achieved. I'm only thinking out loud at this point.