Top Ten Irreverent Predictions for 2019 (Part One)

1)         TMobile CEO John Legere opts for a shorter hair style and 
             develops an aversion to pink.
           
            At age 60, Mr. Legere never convinced me with his “maverick”

hair and clothing style.

            In 2019, he will cut his hair and ditch the biker garb, because a combined TMobile-Sprint venture will not be the disruptive competitor that TMobile truly was when it had no alternative.  The merger enhances the ability of U.S. wireless companies to charge some of the highest rates in the world.

            Expect even higher rates, bolstered profits and lots of “free” and “unlimited” services that are neither.

2)         4-1 is less than 4.

            A reality check folks: does anyone honestly think reducing the number of major U.S. wireless competitors to three will benefit consumers?  Competitive necessity and the burden of devoting sleepless afternoon innovating declines when it becomes easier to match prices set by AT&T and Verizon.  A combined Sprint-TMobile means fewer 5G towers and less pencil sharpening.

            Unfake news flash: four viable competitors are better than three.  The combined company has no greater incentives to make capital expenditures and no greater access to capital than the efforts of two separate companies.

3)         It will get even more difficult to talk to a human 
             “customer service” representative.

            Recently, a series of remarkably bad corporate screw ups have sucked massive amounts of time and spirit from yours truly.  Vanguard Investments mishandled a major roll over of a retirement account and compounded the error by having a customer service procedure designed to prevent access to someone with authority to correct mistakes. 

            There’s a right way, a wrong way and the fill in the blank company way.  Vanguard cannot convert the registration of a retirement account while maintaining the identical number of shares.  To add insult to injury, the company generated a scripted letter that blames  unspecified government regulations requiring a two-step over process that imposed a sizeable financial risk when account one gets cashed out and account two cannot get funded for days.

            At least in the Vanguard screwup, I got to talk to a human.  Experian, one of the three major credit reporting companies, makes it just about IMPOSSIBLE to talk to, or correspond with, a human.

            At the tender age of 63, I would think that Experian could have reached the conclusion that I am credit worthy.  I have a multi-decade record of timely bill payments, have hefty lines of credit, handled six figure mortgages and have an excellent current credit score. 

            Imagine my surprise and embarrassment when, at point of purchase with other purchasers in line behind me, I was denied opportunity to apply for a BestBuy credit card and receive a 10% discount for my first purchase. The reason: Experian’s incomplete report convinced a Citibank algorithm that I lacked “sufficient credit experience.”

            I think insufficient credit experience means I do not pay 24% interest rates on credit card debts and lack other kinds of debt, such as a mortgage.  In other words, I do not deserve a high end credit card, because Experian does not have enough evidence that I can manage debt, or perhaps the algorithm projected insufficient fee and interest revenues.  Apparently, being debt-free is bad, but of course Citibank would allow me to get an inferior card if I agreed to pay it a $59 annual fee.

            Does this make sense to you?  Might human intervention and common sense have remedied these problems?  Ask the algorithm.


4)         If you can “handle the truth,” listen to buy side Wall Street 
             telecom analysts.

            Being an academic, telecommunications policy researcher and writer, I consider it a worthwhile duty to seek out all points of view and even alternative facts/statistics.  I am inundated with obviously bogus assertions how a specific regulation helps or hurts Americans.  This Blog attempts to refute unbelievable assertions such as the canard that network neutrality regulation singularly caused U.S. companies to invest billions less in infrastructure.

            Listen to financial analysts, if want to know the truth about the current state of play in 5th generation wireless, the health of the broadband ecosystem and true marketplace conditions.  In a recent teleconference, an analyst advising what stocks to buy in the Internet/telecom sector, made several matter of fact statements that clearly dispute what Chairman Ajit Pai and others want us to believe:

1)         Network neutrality, or the lack of it, has limited—if any-- impact on carrier capital expenditures.  Capex ebbs and flows with the need to invest in next generation plant and that necessity trumps regulatory uncertainty, the potential for future disruptive litigation and whether carriers have duties to make their networks accessible, or not.

2)         The likely approval of the TMobile-Sprint merger will help carriers raise prices and increase Average Revenue Per User, no if, ands, or buts about it.


5)         In these uncertain times, don’t expect “unlimited” to have 
             a simple, singular meaning.

            Sadly, no court or regulatory agency (included the much touted reliance on the Federal Trade Commission) will insist that unlimited has a singular and commonly understood meaning.  Once upon a time it did: unlimited meant without limits, and no caps on usage, or throttling of bit transmission speeds. We live in a more sophisticated and complicated world now where unlimited has a new meaning: conditional and qualified use of a service.

            I readily admit that the court of public opinion likes to think that some service is unlimited and free.  There’s a suspension of disbelief and common sense when unlimited actually means that caps on usage will result in service so slow that it cannot provide reliable carriage of data.