Dish Network wants to buy a cellular company, and it's not picky which. But why is it so desperate to get into mobile phones?

You don't know Softbank yet. But you're about to, as they're coming to America and hopefully bringing Otosan with them.

It was a match made in heaven, if you define "heaven" as "competitively squelching a possible rival to your business before it can really get started.

AT&T may have a bluer logo than usual as it watches T-Mobile walk away, but Google is all up in Motorola's business, at third base and going for home.

We've been whaling on the AT&T-Mobile merger for a while, not because we hate capitalism, but because it was so blatantly lazy, and the spin AT&T put on it was so blatantly disingenuous.

When we last checked in with the terrible idea of merging AT&T and T-Mobile, AT&T had just withdrawn their merger bid from the FCC over Thanksgiving to make sure their damning, unfriendly, and generally "no effing way this is ever happening dude" report wasn't released.

Hey, remember when AT&T tried to disguise a major setback in their attempt to gulp down T-Mobile like a fratboy gulps down a goldfish by pulling their FCC application over Thanksgiving.

This is how you know a bad merger is completely screwed: when the people involved attempt to cover up a major setback by doing it over Thanksgiving.

I spent most of last week on the road, due to a death in the family.