As of yesterday T-Mobile is going to be bought out by AT&T. Do you think that this'll be good or bad for consumers?

News story here

I thought the only reason people used AT&T was for iPhones, and now that Verizon is selling them...

That's kinda what I thought, but the fact they're buying out T-Mobile could mean that cheap cell service is going out the window in favor of smart-phones with high priced data plans that they monopolize.

Technically the deal hasn't passed regulators yet.

I personally doubt it will, and I feel for T-Moblie customers if their current plans and phones aren't fully grandfathered. I would hope AT&T would leave them pretty well alone in the older (and cheaper) style of takeovers, but looking at all the old Wachovias around here that have already been completely gutted and remodeled (not just signage changes) that's apparently no longer the vogue.

Hmm..this could turn out very bad. One of the main reasons why my family switched from Cingular to T-mobile in the first place was

a) coverage sucked. I was living in Orange County at the time for college and at the time, at least in 2003-5 before the merger, the coverage that Cingular had in LA was crappy. I remember getting no service in my school buildings and in parts of LA, you'd go through and the calls would just drop all of a sudden because they didn't have service there.

One of the upsides to the whole Cingular and AT&T merger was that there was a wider range of service available, but it did mean that the prices went up. My family actually ended up leaving Cingular right before the merger happened if I remember correctly and as far I can tell, AT&T doesn't necessarily have the best reputation.

I've heard some pretty bad stuff about their customer service and service itself, but I've never been an AT&T customer in the first place, nor do I own a smartphone so it's not something I've personally ever worried about.

I do hope though that they at least attempt to keep some of the plans from T-Mobile or attempt to grandfather people in before attempting to make drastic changes and increase the price of the original plans.

My parents went to T-Mobile in the first place because it was cheap and from the looks of it, it's going to cease being cheap now. :/