AT&T Perdicted to Aquire DIRECTV or EchoStar

Big Ed is going to give the cable companies all they can handle.

 

This will not get FCC approval.

 

It might be too expensive to provide fiber to some locations. After all cable companies don't do a total blanket coverage. I believe that Ed is tired of seeing the cable companies take customers. Maybe it is time to fight back. LOL

 

I kind of agree with this person, between their recent mergers & integration of everything under 1 name, they have & will spend a lot of money for this year.

I give it a few years once the dust settles & they see how their FIOS rollout is going, it will give them area's that they don't offer regular service like landline & FIOS, like in Verizon's neck of the woods to add TV to wireless ect...

 

I would like to see EchoStar (Dish) and DirecTv merge to form one satellite company.

I don't know if it would get approved, but if it does, then prices would go up a little, but Dish customers like me would get the additional channels that we do not already get (since their package....i.e. similar to Dish's 180) has some channels that we do not get and vice versa.

 

My family and I have Dish. We have the America's Top 180 with local channels and the HBO package.

We are very satisfied with Dish, but we have not compared DirecTV to this. The only problem we run into occasionally is the dish will go out if it rains. This only happens for about 5-10 minutes. Other than that, we are happy with them since we used to have Comcast. The only thing that Comcast had going for them was that there internet is a little faster than our Embarq 5.0 MB DSL.

 

I hope things stay the way they are. Seriously, every consolidation process we've seen lately has resulted in higher prices and less competition. DirecTV and Dish Network are fine the way they are and I would like to see them stay by themselves...I can see prices rising again if there is another takeover.

 

No way the FCC will fly with this... antitrust issues...

 

I agree Andy, it seems that these companies merge for the investor's, since they want more money from these companies every qtr. and as there is less & less competition & the investors want more money, they jack up our prices.

It does seem like it's a bad cycle & in my humble opinion, the markets & investors are the main cause of the problem. We have to also remember what's hurting us, is the higher energy prices that effect everything from manufacturing to delivery & installation depending on the field. Yes fuel prices have come down from last year, but they are still up from before Hurricane Katrina.

The consumer has been suffering more & more and bringing in products from other countries only helps them in the bigger picture, for the short term prices are lower, but for how long, and this is also part of the investors wanting more & more profit.

 

yeah I really hope this doesn't get approved. at&t is going to own everything that I pay a monthly bill to!!

 

It is funny how things turn around. It was the investors who caused the divesting of subs and now it is then causing the mergers of what was divested back into the business. Can we wonder how things would have been if one stayed as is AKA AT&T corp and if it would have been real dominant? I remember at teh time when AT&T Wireless was owned by AT&T Corp it had the best customer service ever and no one was able to match it. As to the energy cost, I still say they are artificialy inflated and all what we have to look at are the record profits that were achieved this year by the oil companies like Mobile and so on. We can also forget the taxes that we also pay on teh per galon basis as some states do not have a max and NY state is one of the wors ones out there when it comes to that. The rise of the price at teh pump has created a great windfall for the state.

 

Very true hf1khal, the oil companies are the worst of the bunch and the goverment is the top by all the taxes we get hit with & double and sometimes triple taxed.

Ok, I don't want to get off topic & started on this ugly subject.

 

It all goes together, the government with their uneven rules and their greed to make more money which causes the high cost of spectrum allocation has a big effect on our ultimate costs. No other country (gernmental) has bennefited as much as the US from such auctions of spectrum. may be it is high time that the FCC lets them loose so may be they can go and beet up each other and this might lower the prices and increase the competion.