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AT&T Buys Dobson Communications

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Why does at&t NEED to buy customers?

barryefau

Jun 30, 2007, 12:32 AM
hrmmmm 1.7mil for 5.1bil -- can't they just earn them fair and square?
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RUFF1415

Jun 30, 2007, 12:44 AM
Where does it say that this buyout was EXCLUSIVELY for the customers? Oh...it doesn't.
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barryefau

Jun 30, 2007, 12:50 AM
Read between the lines plzzz... when cing bought at&t they had 9 mil more customers than vzw... now (cing) at&t has 1.5 mil more customers than vzw... they're not going to come right out and say it, but a larger base was a big factor for sure. It's all good tho, its 1.7 million more customers who will have access to the network with the fewest dropped calls. 😁 🙄
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RUFF1415

Jun 30, 2007, 11:12 AM
It couldn't be that Dobson's network largely complements the areas that AT&T's network doesn't currently cover? It couldn't be for the 17 million POPs that they will have just added to their coverage? It couldn't be because of the spectrum they need in markets where they haven't reached the market cap (to deploy HSUPA and beyond)? It couldn't be because of T-Mobile's reliance on roaming agreements with Dobson?

Hmmm. It couldn't be. 🙄
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prepyjuan

Jun 30, 2007, 1:59 AM
Its not soo much the customers, as the network spectrum/license(s) it aquires. Dobson for the most part is a rural provider. It's main markets include the Midwest, rural Texas, Oklahoma, and upstate New York. Appearantly its also the largest provider of cellular services in Alaska as well as in Michigan. So they say.

Boasting aside, this will be a good thing for AT&T, for one can never have enough spectrum and more importantly, coverage, to stay ahead of their competitors.

Lets just hope we don't get those annoying dropped calls...
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Cellinovation

Jun 30, 2007, 9:18 AM
I think that everyone is failing to catch another big part of the issue. I know in our area AT&T customers are being canceled by spending more than half of their usage off network. (it just costs the company too much money) Here they use dobson, as I suspect happens in many other places as well. If they don't have to cancell customers for this (they would no longer be off network) they get the revenue from the customers, pick up the revenue from the existing customers of dobson, and PAY WAY LESS to service the areas that are causeing them a huge pile of angry customers, and twice as much money. If you figure the numbers, it becomes more about revenue streams than anything, T-mobile will pay them to allow customers to roam also. Ive hear...
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sangyup81

Jun 30, 2007, 9:41 AM
Yeah so those customers aren't forced to go with VZW or Alltel anymore.

This must be part of what the $2.5 Billion in savings comes from
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jskrenes

Jun 30, 2007, 11:01 AM
Don't forget that this also lowers churn. Of course the problem is that dropped calls are a fact of life in rural areas.
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algorithmplus

Jul 1, 2007, 10:10 AM
That is an excellent point. I know of a LOT of people who were cancelled for roaming too much in Morgantown, West Virginia, and in on year it ranked well into the thousands.

By taking on Dobson's infrastructure, since they didn't directly compete too much Cingular, AT&T can compliment their network. For a smaller company, it is becoming increasingly harder to compete with national plans because of paying roaming revenue to other carriers.

That said, I think it's going to be a win for Dobson and AT&T customers. I don't think it will have a huge effect on T-Mobile customers, or even T-Mobile as a company. T-Mobile may end up paying less in roaming charges because they may have a better agreement with AT&T than with Dobson (but the...
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johnnycashak

Jul 2, 2007, 6:25 PM
While I agree with everything you said, keep in mind that maintaining a rural cell network is about three times as expensive as an urban one. What's more, rural customers are also per capita the most displeased overall with their service, as local factors make providing the same level of coverage there as they find in major cities next to impossible. The added number of angry callers, combined with the increased call time required to deal with said customers, is certainly going to increases the costs of AT&T's call centers.

When you combine all these factors up, even when you consider the points about roaming that were previously brought up, you have to wonder if this really was a smart, revenue generating decision for AT&T, or was it ju...
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algorithmplus

Jul 3, 2007, 5:45 PM
Well, another point, is that the cost of infrastructure both to service the current Dobson customers and roaming AT&T customers may be so significantly less with a single network than two separate companies that synergies and vendor contracts may save more than enough money to deal with anticipated additional call volume.
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johnnycashak

Jul 8, 2007, 10:42 PM
True. Keep in mind though that some of these rural networks are very outdated, and will most likely cost a fortune to upgrade. It's one thing if the provider is local, but I have heard of class action lawsuits brought against companies that fail to offer the same level of service to one set of customers as they do others. As I'm sure the people crunching the numbers for both companies aren't idiots, I wonder how much of the 2008/2009 operating budget will be allocated to those upgrades, and what that will ultimately end up costing AT&T.

Centralization is going to leave a lot of nice people at the Iowa call center out of a job come Christmas as well. Only a corporate sponsored Santa would leave pink slips under the tree instead of gifts. ...
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johnnycashak

Jul 2, 2007, 6:13 PM
Actually it's not the largest in AK, just the only national brand that offers service here natively. They do have the largest network (but not by much) but the local company, ACS, has a larger customer base in part to better call quality as well as their highspeed EV-DO network compared to Dobson's 2G GSM network.

Dobson's current network is actually leftover from the original AT&T wireless, which swapped customers in 2003 with Dobson only months before bringing the then brand new GSM network online, at an install cost of millions.

While Dobson hasn't increased the overall size of the network since then, they have added several new towers that offer twice the range and call load of previous towers, taking care of spotty coverage and ...
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momcat1

Jul 1, 2007, 10:22 AM
I don't see it as buying customers as much as added native COVERAGE for all the subscribers. Those of us in outlying areas will use the same towers we did before, but it will be native, not roaming.
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algorithmplus

Jul 1, 2007, 10:28 AM
And, best of all, not chance of being dropped for using more than 50% of your minutes as roaming each month.
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momcat1

Jul 1, 2007, 5:37 PM
Exactly!
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