Tek-Bull

Facebook Mobile: Why Facebook Should Buy Out T-Mobile

Now that the US filed a Law Suit against the AT&T and T-Mobile merge, T-mobile will have to go out and start to look for other alternatives to stay afloat as a profitable company. They have a couple of options if the merge doesn’t go through,  either go out on it’s own, partner up with Sprint, or sell off to other companies.

If they decide to sell off, Facebook should really jump on the opportunity to try and acquire the network. Facebook already has several applications out there that will keep us connected via their facebook mobile interface. But we’re only connected at home, or when we use their application – which requires a data service at $20 a month from current cell providers. If facebook buys T-mobile they would instantly create the world’s biggest network in the united states and quite possibly the world.

A good question is, why would this be a good purchase for Facebook? Well, facebook has over 750 million users, and over 250 million of the users interact with facebook using their mobile devices. That’s several million more than what T-mobile had at it’s peak. That is also more subscribers than AT&T and Verizon have combined. So if facebook came into the picture and offered a service that was cheaper than all companies out there and they integrated their facebook application with the t-mobile network, they could make a profit even if they were selling the service at $10 a month.

They could incorporate their chat service with the text messaging service to stay connected with your friends and family. I’m sure you can argue and say that we already have that via applications but in order to use the applications we need to have the data service that I was talking about. I’m sure facebook would have problems with the whole connection and the dropped calls etc. but it would be a very appealing offer to have a cheap service that keeps us connected with everyone we have in our friend’s list.  So you could technically talk to your friends on the cellphone while they use their computers at home. So if your friend doesn’t have a cellphone, you could make calls using your computer and everything would be perfect. Yes they do have services available like Skype, MSN, and Google Voice, but humans tend to move towards the path of least resistance. Why would I want to have 3 different accounts when I could have just one account on facebook to take care of the three?

If facebook came in and offer the same services as a big company for a fraction of the cost, a lot of the users would move over to the facebook mobile interface because of how easy it would be to use. I’m sure there are some cons to this, like the inability to stay unconnected from people, facebook security, dropped calls, and so on. But at the end, I’m sure they could make something work, and when something is cheap enough, people buy it.

If they really want to blow Google out of the water and make sure that My Space’s coffin is truly sealed, then this option would guarantee this spot for them. This would also put them as one of the top competitors for phone services. I think this is the next big thing to stay connected in the social world.