Alysha Sewell

News Editor
On Sunday, Mar. 20, AT&T announced that they are merging with T-mobile USA.  The company bought T-mobile from Deutsche Telekom for $39 billion.  Along with the money, Deutsche Telekom will be receiving eight percent of the AT&T company and a seat on their board of directors.
“It’s no secret that AT&T has a tattered reputation. The iPhone may have brought it millions of new customers and billions in revenue, but the vast increase in data usage has also strained the network to unacceptable levels,” explained Ben Parr, writer for CNN Tech.
While AT&T has forked out billions of dollars trying to expand their network to accommodate for this strain, it takes almost a year to get approval to build new towers, especially in the larger, densely populated cities that need them the most.  So in order to keep up, they acquired T-mobile and with the company they can expand their LTE 4-G footprint.  Phandroid.com claimed that “coverage area expands by 46.5 million people from this deal alone.”
This merger will create a combined base of almost 130 million customers, making this the largest carrier in the United States.  AT&T and T-mobile combined have over 25 percent more subscribers than Verizon, who has around 93 million customers.  This leaves Sprint trailing behind with only 50 million.  There has been speculation that Verizon and Sprint could possibly merge as well.
Gigi Sohn, president of the Public Internet group Public Knowledge said, “We know the results of arrangements like this– higher prices, fewer choices, less innovation.”
For customers the merger could potentially cause problems because there will be less competition meaning that there would be fewer choices for devices and service plans.
Also, there might be less innovation.  If they are not competing as hard to have the top device, many believe they won’t try as hard. However, things won’t change for customers quite yet though; the deal will take about a year to be set in place.