http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-20045184-94.html 

At&t Mobility is buying out the American arm of T-Mobile. I don't know why I posted this because most people here aren't even from the US. Well, at least I can buy an iPhone on T-mobile now.

I don't get this... What does Tmobile have that AT&T wants to take over? Or make dissapear?

I used to do Tmobile tech support back in 2004...good times. I'm lying it was terrible...

AT&T have become the largest provider in the USA. They've gone from being 2nd in a race with 4ish players, to 1st in a race with 2.5 players (Sprint cannot compete, anymore). So, it's basically gone from a fairly uncompetitive market, anyways, to an effective duopoly. That's what AT&T gains.

Are there any smaller players in the USA's mobile game? In Canada doors were wide open a year ago and we got Wind mobile, Koodo, Mobilicity, public mobile... They are killing the big 3 here...at least in the major markets, since they don't have coverage outside major cities.

Same thing happened here in Australia. It used to be Telstra having an monpoly on the industry, then singtel came in and called them shelves optus, then Asian gaint Vodaphone came in and then an new highly competitive and cheaper telco 3 and dodo came in. Dodo was basically became the poor mans communications and 3 force the big 3 to lower prices way down and increase serivces. Now vodafone bought out 3. We have basically 3 giants controlling the market. 

Thankfully they are in an massive price war which is great. But what you americans might get is what our Banks did. You know in 2008-2009 when global banks were going bankrupt. Well in Australia that cant happen because the Banks are supported by the government. So what happens in those periods, Our big 4 banks become the most profitable in the entire world. Yep 4 banks in an population of 20 million turning over near an billion dolllars in profit every year, By jaking up the prices and riding interest rate rises and fees. All united together. 

Thats what could happen to you guys with the telcos, all grouping up and halting the global increases in cap and speeds naturally given to customers for nothing. An instead halting that jak up the prices of the speeds and caps. 

Hopefully you get none of that. Thats basically what we had going on before an price war is going on (1 year an my cap has increased by 12gb to 50gb and paying 20 less) 

I could care less how big AT&T gets. Until they develop a network that isn't the worst for signal quality and dropped calls I will never switch to them.  My verizon phone with 3G has performed consistantly well for me no matter where I have gone accross the US, while my friend's iPhone tends to lose signal a lot while traveling outside of major population zones, even in major zones the signal is so inconsistant.

We have multiple smaller carriers like US Cellular, Virgin Mobile, and a few others. AT&T and T-Mo are the only GSM-band carriers in the States.

There are also a lot of spin-offs like Boost which use the Sprint network, and Straight Talk systems that piggyback both AT&T and Verizon's backbone.

Some analysts have noted that it is likely that US Cellular and the other smaller CDMA companies, sans Sprint, will join together and become what T-Mo was as the value leader, now that T-Mo will likely be forced to adopt AT&T's horrendous pricing policies.

As a T-Mobile user, I'm apalled that this happened. Although they were CDMA, I would of greatly prefered a merger between Sprint and T-Mo instead of AT&T which is the worst American cell provider.

Alternatively, I could see Sprint joining with the other non-Verizon CDMA providers to become the 3rd-way value leader, which would be pretty good as Sprints service is halfway decent, but vastly cheaper at $70 for unlimited everything (Unlimited everything is $100-$120 from Verizon and AT&T).

Hilarious after all those T-Mobile commercials bashing AT&T

Lol marketing is the last to know anything. I bet they had at least 4 more commercials ready to go.

When? Verizon has been number one for a while...  now if they do by T-Mobile they will become #1. And there are many people slowly switching to Verizon from AT&T when their contracts run out on the iPhone 3GS and 4 so even if AT&T becomes #1 it won't last.