AT&T-Mo: so what?

So AT&T is gonna buy T-Mobile. Big deal. T-Mobile fans are threatening to bail to another carrier because they don’t like AT&T. Seriously, when did the choice of mobile carrier become something akin to the religious fervor of Mac vs. PC?

As I ranted about on my Posterous blog, the wireless carriers need to figure out that they’re become wireless broadband providers, not mobile telephony providers. Thanks to Apple’s muscle, they’re also becoming less relevant than the devices on their network. The walled gardens are disappearing. Sure, customers and equipment providers may lose out in the short term, but ultimately, wireless carriers will evolve into not much more than utility companies.

I predict that after the dust of the 4G rollouts settle, choosing a wireless company will largely resemble choosing between cable or DSL for your home broadband connection. Sure, it somewhat matters, but no one really gets that worked up about which company they choose or bitch about the customer service. Neither the phone company or the cable company are all that stellar when it comes to customer service, but as long as the connection is up and not noticeably slow, customers are happy.

Maybe Sprint will stick around and we’ll have three major carriers in the US, or maybe it will be bought up and we’ll have only Verizon and AT&T. In the end, the devices will matter far more than the carriers.