Dan Gillmor comments on the Cingular acquisition of AT&T Wireless and tells us the consolidation might be good for consumers because of the marginal service both companies have provided to date. It is not clear to me why two companies that don’t know how to do good wireless will combine into one that does. Gillmor also argues that consolidation won’t go too far because “there’s only room for a couple of mergers before the market gets too cozy for real competition. While expecting serious antitrust scrutiny from the Bush administration is probably futile, there’s probably enough angst in Congress to keep consolidation from being rampant.” The other obvious reason consolidation won’t go too far is that there are only several companies that use each of the several incompatible cellular protocols. Wouldn’t it be a daunting proposition, for example, for one of the GSM carriers left (T-Mobile and Cingular) to acquire CDMA-based Verizon, if they meant to consolidate their systems and user base?