richy

Daily ride is a burgman (mainly because it's stupid cheap to run and based on previous experience owning a zxr750, anything faster I would be dead). Dream ride is either a triumph explorer 1200 for 2 wheels or if I was pushed to get a cage it would be a TVR (Speed6 \ Speed 12 or similar) because you have to respect anything that goes over 200mph and is made by men in a shed out of old canoes.

I get what you are saying but the figures are way off. AT&T has a market cap of $190Bn and Voda has a market cap of about $170Bn, so combined it would be $360Bn. So your point (and it's a valid question with a sensible answer) is why would AT&T pay $360Bn to turn a $190Bn company into a $360Bn company, why not just keep the money and party like it's 1999. To understand it you have to flip it on it's head. Why would a Vodafone shareholder sell a share that is work X and will also pay them Y a year and appreciate in value by Z a year. If Voda was say Tmobile or Virgin Media or some company with the potential to eat money and not return any you would have an excellent point, however Voda is stronger than Mr T on angel dust. To make it worthwhile, to tempt a Vodafone customer to sell their shares they have to overpay the face value, just like Verizon had to do to buy back the 45% of itself that Vodafone paid (vzw paid a 100% premium, they paid $130Bn to buy ~$65Bn in shares). This 'premium' is difficult to calculate in advance, my personal guess is that there will be a large cash contingent (from reserves and additional bond issues) and shares in at&t. I think cash alone would be too much to easily raise, and all shares would not be attractive enough and may also leave them contravening covenants on their existing borrowing. Don't get me wrong, I totally understand why it would seem crazy to spend twice what something is worth to buy it, but it is worth more than the face value. Personally I neither like the concept of at&t buying Voda, nor do I think it is particularly wise as a business move. This kinda of smells like a CEO trying to hit an insane bonus payout or get a nicer jet. A merger might make more sense, but a buyout would be so highly leveraged that even a cash and asset rich company like at&t would find themselves straining, pushing up prices all round and leaving them less competitive. Then again, I don't own a cellco lol.

I think it's highly unlikely that Vodafone shareholders would sell for less that the market value of their shares as you suggest. The market cap is ~$180bn. It pulls in about $18bn a year operating revenue off $70bn revenue (converting from GBP in my head so sorry if theres errors). Verizon just bought out a 45% stake in itself (market cap of $144bn) for $130bn which is near enough a 100% premium. I just applied a similar premium to vodafone I would guess that there is the potential for a merger but a sale would be less messy regulation wise (especially with the german arm of voda) and it would be offered as cash plus shares. They would have to pay a handsome premium over the market cap because it is a healthy profitable company that is growing. Why sell your shares at book price when they will grow each year and return a healthy dividend (and special dividends at the moment given their scrooge mc duck pile of vzw cash)? I'm not having a go at you, just explaining where that number came from and why I believe it isn't as crazy as it sounds, Depending on what metric you choose, Voda is about the same size if not a little larger than Vzw and just as healthy. That will take one huge chunk of money to buy. I at&t want more reach they might get better value for their money buying smaller companies or 'tier 1.5' competitors (especially given the potential with upcoming auctions) and putting cash in themselves. Buying voda is buying a completed product and you are paying someone else for having done the work to get into 1st place. Given the current issues with the NSA I wonder how that will affect the purchase, especially with the French and German subsidiaries.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-31/at-t-is-said-to-explore-vodafone-takeover-as-soon-as-next-year.html Not sure this would fly, using similar metrics to the vzw \ vodafone sale AT&T would need to find at least $360bn. That is a lot of wonga to find, and thats if theres a deal to be had. AT&T are probably big enough to pull it off and it would make some sense, but they would be hugely in the hock on this deal. Borrowing is cheap right now, but that is a LOT of borrowing by anyones standards.

So the lighting was faulty and interfering with another business (in this case cellular transmissions), GE quite rightly offer to replace it FOC but the guy decides to be a cockwomble about it and now he is facing some consequences. I don't see any huge travesty of justice here. If he said to GE I want you to replace with with a non GE brand at your expense then I would probably agree he had a point, but if he is after cash 'just because' then he is creating his own issue. AT&T as much as I dislike them have a right to ensure they can use the frequencies they paid for. There was a solution here that worked for everyone, the people responsible were going to foot the bill but someone overestimated their own intelligence and landed themselves in trouble. Given recent events this is not exactly going to move the needle on the outrage@guberment-o-meter. This is simply karma at work.

I have to admit I would love to be able to buy roaming. Coverage is an issue in some areas. I wonder if it's a restriction from Verizon (or at&t in the case of tmo for me) or a choice by Sprint directly? There must be a reason (and likely we will never actually find out lol), it isn't coincidence, but it could be down to legal or marketing or just perception management. I don't expect sprint (or tmo) to offer unlimited roaming in the base package or even as an add on, I would just appreciate the ability to pay a fair price for some metered off network usage. I guess I'm approaching it from an overly simplistic viewpoint, but I want something, they can sell me it, so I'm struggling to understand whats holding them back. I guess my big hope is that in the medium term Sprint has an aggressive physical network expansion planned! This would just be a nice stop gap.

My experience is from the UK railways (engineering supe), we ran all year round. This included laying \ replacing trenches (plenty of major backbone runs alongside railways there including their own network) and un-trenched pipes. The weather made a difference to some aspects of work, safety was a big one, and test pits took even longer (30cm at a time ) but basically short of an outright hurricane blizzard work continued. Shortcuts may have been taken when no one was looking to thaw some ground and costs were higher but theres no way you just stop work and furlough everyone for 4 months because of snow and ice.

I got the tmo note 3 (yeah boo hiss etc ) and I noticed the calls over wifi app has some voice quality issues on outbound calls i.e. it turns your into alvin and the chipmunks. The wifes s4 doesn't. Skype is ok. Weird but survivable, it will probably get fixed at some point. Not sure if it is in any way related to the sprint issue with voice. The note 3 is a hell of a beastly phone, it's surpassed my expectations. I know the screen has a wider gamut than LCD which puts some people off (completely understand why) but it's glorious for watching clips and works pretty well for impromptu portfolio displaying. I had played with samoled screens in the shop (hated the older blue dots on white background issue) but I'm liking this a lot. This is about the closest a phone has been to my htc X7500 for a long time. Now if only I could get me an updated x9500.

Are they having a permit issue, or access issue to the site? That is a crazy situation, they are still upgrading the 3g sites here (additional capacity prior to NV) so it's not like they don't have any budget. They also should have a huge pile of kit to use from NV sites that have been updated to raid for spares.

hmm 1 Wireless bridge (bluray and desktop connected to it) 3 phones 3 tablets 2 printers 2 desktops 1 laptop 2 psp's (intermittently) I'm waiting till black friday to pickup a new router (plus probably a new bridge and maybe an extender) Not everything on that list is turned on all the time, but the wifi also gets used by family when they come over as cell receptions is poor in some parts of the house. I probably need to get a hammer out and add some wire!

Kinda It provides 2g speeds for free. That could be capped on 3g or 4g like on the limited plans when you exceed your allowance. What I was meant was the 'passes' you can buy that give you X amount of international 4g / 3g speed data and minutes on top of the free service. Their proposition is pretty sensible, you get a bare minimum free service with a chance to purchase a faster service at a vaguely sane price, no carrying (and activating, and funding and purchasing in the first place) a sim for each country (that gets really old fast travelling around Europe). This isn't about being as cheap as a prepaid provider in each country, just about moving tmo's proposition closer so you'll say sod it and give tmo the money instead. Fair enough Whilst custard services advised it will not attract a charge I won't take their word for it. I will see how my bill looks next time I'm away on a shoot which is probably the only surefire way to tell how they will bill in this circumstance. Anyone worried and just wanting free international 2g speed data could just use the international barring as mentioned earlier in the thread. Heh, I'd like to see this, I said before (technology aside) it's about the only merger that makes sense competition wise (to me at least). I'd love to know what their plan is medium term. They need money and they need spectrum, not a good mix. I am very lucky that I get fast enough speeds for my needs in the majority of the places I routinely go. However, I do notice the large areas of no service. Hopefully, somewhere in their future is more spectrum and more coverage although I'm not sure where the money is coming from, even if their sales are up. This is largely why my personal plan is to stay at tmo until Sprints NV upgrades progress here. Even tmo's fauxG speeds are reasonable (I see 8-12mbps down) here whereas with sprint until lte comes along here their 3g is heavily oversubscribed and wimax wasn't an option on the phone I wanted. Things hopefully will be very different in a year or so.

There are many apps that also do the same thing, it's just been integrated into android now as well. It basically just presses the reject button for you, nothing fancy. I guess you can also have tmo add call forwarding to your account. It might not be unlimited 4G and calls for free but is a step in the right direction.

I checked and android 4.3 also has an auto block for sure under call settings > call rejection. If no connection was made it would be rerouted at the egress switch to vm. The only completed call would be to vm within the states although I wouldn't put it past any cellco to charge you for it. When custard services is open I will give them a call and see what they say. It's great to see an interesting product, no matter who it is from. This walks the balance between being just useful enough not to buy a foreign sim and just useless enough to make you say sod it and cough up a few bucks for calls and some 4g. Seems to be nicely played on their part. Any carrier making a move like this makes it interesting for everyone, look at the whole update your phone whenever thing, now every carrier is at it one way or another. You can bet every carrier is taking a look at this if they haven't already. They probably won't all adopt it, at&t would be the most likely given GSM, but it will at least prompt them to run a cost benefit analysis on it. Now if only I could pay tmo to let me roam on at&t when I can't get a tmo signal lol.

Love the post. Re inbound calls from abroad, there are some great apps which can run white and black lists for you on calls and reject as you desire. I think android 4.3 has started to integrate more advanced blocking features as well. Completely agree with your last statement. For me it's tmo for now until NV finally gets done which should change the game a lot. Sprint have a spectrum advantage in general, they have 800MHz spectrum and huge amounts of 2500\2600MHz (whereas tmo has less spectrum and no sub 1k yet, although they frequently have more 'mid dial'), but of course this is pre 600MHz auction which either carrier could spend big in. It's always a roll of the dice but luckily for the vast majority of us things seem to be improving no matter what your carrier is.

It isn't unlimited, not that it is a huge issue, but it has limits ergo it is not unlimited. It isn't 'stupid', it's the English language. The definition is- not limited or restricted in terms of number, quantity, or extent. to place a limit on it, means it is not unlimited. It is unmetered for specific uses, which is fine, hell it's exactly the way it should be. Sprint and Tmo can and should restrict the usage to preserve the service. I totally agree that they have the right to ban tethering (where a plan doesn't support it) and of course it makes sense to use wifi at home and where you can to preserve the level of service. The question was at what level of usage of the types Sprint allow will get you chucked, my answer was likely none, you would probably get QOS'd rather than kicked if your usage was within a type contractually allowed or suggested by advertising. i.e. TMO would not get very far kicking people who stream netflix 'all day long' as they explicitly state you can do it, but they can give priority to other traffic over yours. Given what I have read of Sprints terms this is what I would expect them to do. If you tether without a plan that allows it, you will get kicked, if you use 200gb of netflix in a month I would suggest you would probably find that traffic 'shaped' int he future. As to what is right in $per GB or unlimited, Sprint choses to offer unlimited. Their game, their choice, if they cannot they should not. There are other providers who offer $ per GB and Tmo offer that as a different option with that traffic getting priority, Sprint could do this also in the future if they felt it would compliment their offerings. Frankly I see it as quite a sensible proposition. Unlimited where there is capacity, but fixed plans when you want the guarantee of top priority. Best of both worlds no?

This is a subject I have been carefully considering recently. I opted to stay with tmo and take their unlimited internet but sprint was also an option (and I will likely be on sprint in 2 years if they have NV permits done on Hawaii by then lol). So how much is too much? Firstly they sell it as unlimited, in reality it is unmetered with usage restrictions but unmetered doesn't sound as good to the bods in marketing with their square glasses and turtle necks so they lobby to be allowed to use the phrase unlimited, then put limits on it?? So what are the limits? In the T&C there are outright limits, such as no tethering etc, and vague limits such as 'actions which degrade the level of service'. Honestly, I agree these make sense, they are limits so therefore the plan is not truly unlimited, so to clarify to some degree you may get help from their adverts. In tmo's adverts they say, and I quote verbatim "100% on. Great for watching movies, as many as you want, all day, everyday" . So if that is what you want, at least on tmo, they say it's ok. There is a catch and it is a sensible one, when there is congestion, set amount data plans over the base 2GB option (but not including it) will get priority. I am not as familiar with Sprint's position, but if they tell you outright you can do it, you can do it, otherwise don't extract the urine If sprint starts booting people for using too much data for legitimate reasons it will make them look bad, they will weight this against the damage to the network and attempt to come up with a middle course, a way of limiting abuse (i.e. qos). Legitimately and non maliciously using a lot of data does not make you a Bad Person ™, deliberately using a lot solely for the purpose of seeing how high you can push you bill, perhaps is another story If someone is unemployed for a month and watches a lot of hulu and netflix at the beach, you were told outright (at least on tmo) you could do it, why shouldn't you feel that is ok? I think Sprint is in a great position capacity wise, at least post NV \ NV2 to deliver a sane unmetered experience to customers. Is there a set or even vague range at which point you should worry? My guess, at least for now, is that it would apply far more to what you do rather than how much you do it. Maybe they will bring in QOS in the future if they don't have it yet, they are already talking about 1mbps limits on video streams so the tacit admission there is stream all you want but expect it to be limited bitrate wise. PS none of the above comments are in any way intended to suggest one provider is better than another. Unless we are talking about the evil big two, in which case they club baby seals. I just included the tmo info because it clearly illustrated my thinking so apologies to the mods if that was incongruent with the site rules.

Thanks for the heads up. Not sure if it's the carriers wanting to make it harder to swap sims or samsung trying to avoid grey market sales. It sucks but to a large number of people this will be a challenge and it will likely be overcome. For now I have two other phones I can use and have act as hotspots if needed but this certainly does make it less attractive. Cross market selling does impact sales, but then again so does artificially inflating prices in different regions. I remember lots of shops back in England would have coke from Greece and other random countries as it was cheaper to buy it there and truck it in then buy the locally sold cans. Coke bitched that it wasn't right because the ingredients and nutritional (or lack of) information wasn't in English, so the importers just made labels and stuck them on. Sucks to try and shaft people to make money when the people are smarter than you, the more money you try and screw out of people the more incentive there is to find a way around it.

And they manage to recognize (i.e. get off work) every holiday from St Kermit's Day to Beltane to Makar Sankranti I'm just jealous of course

That's a fair comment and I should have been clearer in my comment, sorry. There is a need for more flexible capacity between islands, but attempting to illegally exempt yourself from the environmental impact studies & requirements then just forging ahead anyway, bankrupting a local airline (and massively impact many other businesses who either expanded in Oahu to ship to the outer islands then were over-committed or were in the outer islands and got wiped out by competition from Oahu) and then having to stop having wasted all that money was rather silly I don't think many people really disputed there was a need but the manner in which it was attempted was absolutely insane and always doomed to fail but politicians never gamble with their own money right? Perhaps we can be overprotective but when your economy is built on tourism and you have before your own eyes evidence of what will happen when it is left unchecked (i.e. expand to the point where it compromises the original reason people go there) then people do want to ensure that changes in the island won't endanger the land, the ocean or the flora \ fauna, if you want to play here it's got to be pono and there is a lot of history and mistrust due to things being anything but pono. Just to put it in perspective imagine what you would feel about a local developer (and the state are not immune to doing this also) who disinterred everyone in your local cemetery then built a supermarket on it? Now imagine that time and time again, you would, at a minimum, not have a high opinion of developers or their friends in government.

Is Volte all that necessary in the short to medium term given tmo have a pretty good wifi calling setup that could be adapted to use the data network as well as wifi. It isn't perfect but it is an option no?

This is something I would like to see. At&t eating tmobile kills competition, sprint and tmo merging boosts it. Consolidating the networks and sites would make for better coverage, higher capacity (especially for tmo) and more money to start filling in gaps in their networks. Yes neither company is endowed with huge swathes of <1000mhz spectrum but sprints 800mhz should be enough to make the difference. Even with it just being for voice and a single lte carrier it would be enough for now. This would be about the only merger of significance (obviously excluding eating up small regional carriers) that would make much sense. Sadly it would probably result in job losses in the short term where there is redundancy but hopefully would continue to provide for lots of engineering jobs and also making a more competitive carrier with more subs and therefore more jobs.

Sorry but they are not similar, NM has only ~50% more population but ~350% of the number of welfare recipients as compared to HI (for SNAP I think the increase is around 250%). Kanaka are not overly dependent on the government, they would be very glad to see it gone. Hawai'i has issues relating to the geography (it's just going to be more expensive to do business 2500 miles into the middle of an ocean), abuse of the taxation system (rich mainlanders building on agricultural land to get cheaper tax), under-funding of government agencies and the SMA system. Unfortunately a large amount of money was misspent on follies like the superferry so when the bad years came due to a lack of regulation on wallstreet there wasn't a lot in the pot to tide people over so government services (like permitting) were cut heavily. This combined with the SMA system lead to large wait times. There was also a political influence that saw permit fees not truly reflect the actual cost of processing, ideally the system should be self funding but it was not (although post Lingle this has started to be corrected). The SMA system is designed to protect our natural assets, the beauty of the islands. Sadly it is a difficult task, takes time and is often misapplied. I want to rebuild the wall of a loko i'a which has stood for hundreds of years on my land, I pay nearly 100k in permits and two years to get them at least. Yet someone wants to build a new marina and dynamite a reef, no worries. It needs redoing but the problem with any political duopoly is that it is constantly being bodged by one party then the next so it ends up not doing what either party wanted. So no, complacent or dependent citizens is not the issue and I'm sorry you think so lowly of us. I hope the above explains a little more of where the issue lies and that it is not quite as clear cut as it may seem from far away. I have a great deal of respect for you, in the manner that you conduct yourself and the atmosphere you have created here but dismissing an entire state as lazy welfare recipients is hurtful and inaccurate. As to whether HI should be a priority for Sprint, that's their call. I doubt they were taken by surprise that it would take so long for permits to be approved. The local at&t site has been waiting 10 months at least so current data is public knowledge, they would have known. NV is awesome, I cannot wait for it to be rolled out here, but frankly my money is going elsewhere until it is. I have no ill will against Sprint, it's their game to play, but if the message they are sending is we are a low priority then that's something we will take into account when we come to buy. It makes sense on one level that there is a huge degree of competition, so lower margins, and also higher civils costs but if anything with the geography here and Sprints reputation I thought they would have been falling over themselves to do it here and gain market share. Hawai'i is about the 8th highest state for median income, so it isn't exactly like we don't have the money to spend on cell phones, even if bread is $4 a loaf and gas is $5 a gallon.

Samsung engineers testing != the gs5 running tizen. There is a small chance the gs5 or a refresh of the gs4 may be released with one sku of many running tizen but I find it far more probable that at some point Samsung may fork android. As regards Samsung paying Google, they may pay something as part of a membership and they do pay Microsoft (which would be as potential motivation for Tizen) but as I understood it (and I could be very wrong here) Android is not licensed in the same manner as say Windows Phone. My feeling is that Samsung will most likely make the decision based upon it's ability to differentiate its products from other Android handset makers rather than any financial relationship with Google, or even Microsoft at least in mid to high end markets and phones. Shaving the MS money off $50 handsets would be far more important, but not the GS range.

I have the tp2, you could always just use it as a wireless router (for another smartphone) + dumbphone. I have taken this approach. It isn't the fastest phone but it is more than capable as a router and there are freeware apps to do this.

Thanks for all the help !! As much as I dislike the idea of giving money to at&t (seriously, they have the deathstar as their logo, thats a hint) I c an console myself with Sprint NV being completed here in 2 years, or at least the permits might be completed. Much of the advice given would work wonderfully in other markets but unfortunately there are areas on island where you can only get vzw or at&t, and some areas only vzw. tmo and sprint (pre nv, I hope this will change) have coverage issues inbetween towns and in bays which makes them less attractive, tmo is great when you get a signal, sprint is less great but more signal and a much brighter future. NV is just dog slow here due to permits (something I can sometimes agree with, given the sma system but thats another thread). I am somewhat curious (and resigned to the fact I probably won't ever know why) that both sprint and vzw have managed to cut corners with their devices or make them less attractive then they could be. vzw with their droid line I can understand, but sprint?