AT&T to Buy T-Mobile
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/20/att-to-buy-tmobile-for-39-billion_n_838144.html
Back in March this year, AT&T announced its intent to purchase T-Mobile from Deutsche Telekom AG for a whopping $39 billion dollars. This would be the merging of the United States’ the second largest cell phone service provider (AT&T) with the fourth largest (T-mobile). The resulting merger would vault past Verizon Wireless and become the nation’s largest cell phone service provider.
Now, what does this mean for the network of all people who use cell phones (which is almost every adult in the nation)? For one thing, this decreases the total number of cell phone service providers from four to three. We can model the people (who use cell phone) of United States into four networks formed by the current four major cell phone service providers (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile). The people will be the nodes, with the communications between them being the edges. This is a reasonable model because people who use the same provider get unlimited calls with one another, and usually people’s family and friends are more likely to use the same provider as them. What this merger does is that it combines two of the networks into one, forming the largest network among the remaining three! In fact the number of nodes in it would be 129 million, higher than the Verizon network’s 102 million.
How will the formation of this new network work affect the nodes (people) and the network as a whole? It will certainly benefit the network overall, as it is now the largest network in the nation by surpassing Verizon. However, I believe that the nodes within the network will suffer as a result. This is because that as more and more networks combine, the ruler of the merged network become more and more powerful, since his network is getting more prestigious. And as a result, membership fees for the network will increase, and the nodes will have to pay more and more to stay with the network. It is due to this very reason that the government is trying to stop the merger, or at least put limiting conditions on it so that AT&T does not become too powerful to upset the balance between the remaining networks.