Verizon and Altell Merger

[Bob Schafer]

Thanks for that info Bob, I appreciate the feedback.
One must also consider that verizon/Alltel will only have one major competitor at this point.
You are quite right about Verizon's earnings, and as a stockholder of Verizon I should have been more aware of the particulars.
I think that i was trying to point out that it was a move on Verizon's part to obtain a larger portion of the market's share of cellular customers would be realized if they lowered prices in order to draw away AT&T customers.

I don't like the idea of having to pay out more for on-the-fly data while stormchasing, as some AT&T customers now have this stupid 5Gb cap on their account. Verizon/Alltel has a break/chance to upset the price/useage conditions that currently exist.

What are your thought on tha subject?

You're very welcome. I personally use Verizon for my ONLY phone AND internet service, so I am very dependent on them. They really have given me no grief, but that means little.

I don't stream vid while chasing, but if I wanted to that 5gb limit would obviously be a problem.

Be an optimist. Things could be worse. We could still be living in the bad old days of no data at all. Adjust your strategies accordingly. Does that help?

 

[James Siler]

AT&T now is starting to enforce the 5gb cap. I am begining to hate my job more and more. And it will be like 1 cent for every 20 mb's over if memeory serves. But my biggest thing is, I can never remember getting any where near 5gb. I have hit about 1 and a half gig's before and that was really trying. Well I don't even have a laptop at this time so I guess I really shouldn't worry.

 

[Paul Austin]

....We could still be living in the bad old days of no data at all. Adjust your strategies accordingly. Does that help?

Interesting potential side effect: I would think such caps would encourage the use of locally installed apps such as GRLx, WeatherTap, and Swift Wx instead of internet-based sources. With web pages, a significant percentage of your bandwidth is occupied by advertising. That said, there are a number of sites I like to frequent on chase days.

 

[Wes Carter]

I'm wondering where all of this will be in 5 years. If we end up with 1-2 providers as it looks like is almost inevitable, will there be a stagnation of development of new technologies? With the great Ma Bell monopoly we had little incentive for R&D. After the breakup we had an explosion of new technologies. Until then we had rotary phones, party lines, and you had to be rich to call your family more than 10-20 miles away on a regular basis.

 

[Bart_Comstock]

Internationally I doubt we will see a stagnation of new tech and phones but here in the us I could easily see that as a possibility due to American phone companies tendencies to save money where they can (when I worked for Cingular I was told that if I wanted to change my plan I had already had with them for 3 years to the employee discount plan I would have to pay a 250 dollar deposit since at the time I didnt have a credit history other than my phone which i never once payed the bill late). While we may not have as much as one as we did back in the Ma Bell days, we will see new phones that make it to us from companies like HTC to be less powerful and lacking in features that the Vodaphone and International models will have.
I just wish the 3d barcode scanning features in Japanese cellphones would migrate over to here.