Big Telecom: Terms Set For Sprint To Buy T-Mobile For $32B 158
First time accepted submitter Randy Davis (3683081) writes 'A report from Forbes says that Sprint buying T-mobile for $32 billion is almost done. This will clearly rock the top two telecommunication companies in the U.S., Verizon and AT&T. The news report also said that T-mobile will give up 67% share in exchange of 15% share of the merged company. Officials of both Sprint and T-Mobile are confident that FCC will approve this deal since AT&T's $48.5 billion acquisition of DirecTV got approved.' One reason for that confidence: "The predominant feeling is that combined T-Mobile and Sprint will be able to offer greater competition to Verizon and AT&T , ranked first and second respectively in the U.S. market. It will also give Sprint greater might in the upcoming 600 megahertz spectrum auction, especially since part of it excludes both Verizon and AT&T from bidding."
InforWorld puts the potential price even higher, and points out that the deal could still fall apart.
InforWorld puts the potential price even higher, and points out that the deal could still fall apart.
Whoever wins, the customer loses (Score:3, Informative)
Also, AT&T's acquisition of DirecTV has not yet been approved. Huge factual error in the summary.
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Given the context of Sprint/ T-Mobile approving a deal, I assume it ment the Corporate approval of AT&T/ DirectTV, rather than FCC approval.
There are many approvals that are needed. The FCC is just one branch of government. There's the FTC as well... and I'm sure there are regulatory bodies for satellite and TV... and a hundred other things.
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That didn't help AT&T buy out T-Mobile, and AT&T is pretty much THE MOST "in bed with the government" telecom company there is.
It was actually that failed buyout that put T-Mobile in the competitive position that it is now in (without it, T-Mobile would be about $4 billion poorer and with a vastly inferior roaming agreement.)
I hope that both companies approve of the merger and then the government denies it, just like what happened with AT&T. I would love to see Sprint forfeit a billion dollars a
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Less consumer choice, higher prices ahead (Score:1)
The obvious problems here is #3/#4 merging meaning less consumer choice and higher prices and worse customer service ahead. Not that Sprint and T-Mobile aren't the worst already in customer service but this is a lose, lose all way around. I also can't help to think how Sprint's acquisition of another carrier, Nextel, didn't bode well for subscribers on that network either. I seriously doubt that the DOJ or the FCC will block it though since T-Mobile has been up for sale for quite awhile. Oh well folks,
Re:Less consumer choice, higher prices ahead (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Less consumer choice, higher prices ahead (Score:5, Interesting)
It's all relative. I had Verizon and bailed to T-Mobile a few months ago. Both had okay customer service, though I did have a Verizon person intentionally hang up on me. I had to call T-Mobile on Monday to make changes to my plan - I couldn't make the changes via the web site, nor could I go to a store to do it - I had to call. The person I spoke with was pleasent enough and made the changes quickly.
As you say, they have the best network, highest prices, confusing and awful plans, and terrible ETF/subsidy policies.
Re:Less consumer choice, higher prices ahead (Score:5, Interesting)
until a few months ago, I was working at a cell phone tech company (android software and server back-end stuff) and we had to be able to test our stuff with all the local carriers.
we moved our site and wouldn't you know, we could not get any t-mobile reception (and I have a t-mo phone). stepping out of the building didn't help much. putting a real antenna/repeater on the roof and repeating to the bottom floors didn't help!
we had to rent hotel rooms nearby, for days and weeks at a time to do our testing. our corporate headquarters just did not have good cellphone reception (pretty much across the board but tmo was the most useless). if I got an EDGE connection, I felt lucky (sigh). if you can imagine a cell phone company not doing a check of the RF reachability before picking a new HQ, maybe its good for a laugh or two right now. was not very funny at the time, though.
I do like the unlimited plan and no-contract of tmo but letting giants merge to become bigger giants NEVER helps the consumer.
if this is allowed - and we all know it will be - its further proof of the utter detachment of those who make the laws and rules from those who are forced to live under them.
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Strange. I actually got a prepaid phone for a few months from TMO so I could try the data and voice connections (I'm in eastern MA). Connections everywhere were great except for a few parts in the western part of the state. In some cases I got better signal than my Verizon phone.
My current Nexus 5 doesn't offer it, but the prepaid phone lets you do phone calls over wifi. Worked pretty well.
I'm sure if I lived in a more rural area I'd go with Verizon for the coverage, but what I have now works good enoug
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I live in northern NJ and use T-Mobile; the reception here is generally pretty good. I've heard coworkers complain about reception in my office building, but mine is great.
My mom, who lives in a small town in VA, uses Verizon because everything else has terrible coverage there.
It seems to me that Verizon is the best choice if you really need good coverage in more rural areas, but doesn't have that advantage in more urban areas.
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And accounting actually believed that? Bravo. "No, really, we're, ummm, testing. Yes, that's right. Testing. No, the room service was necessary for the testing. And the champagne."
That's just what they tell us. In reality, it's supposed to help shareholders, and ultimately ensure executive bonuses.
Mr CEO, you've just axed 20,000 jobs, what now ....
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we rented uhaul trucks and had them sit in the parking lot, in the middle of winter (bay area 'winter', but still) and we ran long power extension cords from the main building to the trucks. I kid you not! wish I was kidding. was pathetic to see. the company bought wool ski hats for the poor engineers who had to sit in the truck doing phone/apps testing. I joked that we had a bunch of mike nesmith's working for us...
and the strange part was that being inside the uhaul STILL gave better reception than b
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Sounds like poor planning on your companies part...
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Naw, I'd put Sprint as dead last both from my friends, coworkers and family with T-mobile slightly ahead of them them in terms of customer service. I had Sprint for years, disconnected calls, no network access, slow network and then 3 years ago I cancelled. After 6 years with them they sent a $400 nasty gram saying I had 10 days to pay or they'd turn it over to collections even though my bill was current. The $400 was for a smartphone and early termination of that. I then went with T-Mobile who I'd been
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I've had nothing but good experience with T-Mobile customer service. I can't speak to Sprint's level of service, however.
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As I've heard someone say, Verizon is the hottest girl at the prom, and worse, she knows it.
I understood what you were saying up until that point, now I have no idea what you mean.
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Sprint has free roaming onto Verizon's network wherever theirs isn't available. If you really need great coverage in remote areas, but don't want to pay through the nose for it, sign-up with Sprint (proper Sprint. Not Boost/Virgin/MVNOs/etc) and keep using Verizon's towers. In-fact, RepublicWireless actively promotes this aspect of their dirt-cheap ce
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They ALL have bad service. But I thought it was generally accepted that T-mobile had the best service of the bunch (though still not great by any means), while Verizon was renowned for having the worst.
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Not that Sprint and T-Mobile aren't the worst already in customer service...
They aren't, or at least T-Mobiles not so bad. Verizon... boy, there's a company with some terrible customer service.
What worries me more is that Sprint is buying T-Mobile, and not the other way around. Though, I don't know why anyone would want to buy Sprint. My impression is that their customer service isn't so bad, but... boy, there's a company with some incompetent management.
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Sprint MVNOs offer some of the best deals in the US. I currently pay $10/mo for 400 Minutes, 400 Texts, and 300MB of data using RingPlus.
If they continue with the MVNO model and add T-Mobile towers to the network, that sounds pretty great to me.
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Re:Less consumer choice, higher prices ahead (Score:4, Insightful)
CHOICE: 2 bowls of candy, and 2 bowls of steaming dog crap, isn't a lot of "consumer choice". If a merger turns that into 3 bowls of candy, then consumers will have MORE choice as a result of the merger. That's a big "IF," but both outcomes are possible.
PRICES: While prices could rise a bit, AT&T and Verizon are both desperate to get a foothold in the prepaid cellular market. To do so, they have dirt-cheap service plans that are nearly competitive with Sprint and T-Mobile, without that whole lousy coverage issue. I don't see how SprinTMobile will be able to raise their prices much, without losing all their customers to pre-paid plans from the big two.
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We don't have the choice of any bowls of candy. We only have 4 bowls of steaming crap of various kinds. One's dog crap, one's cow crap, one's horse crap, and one's cat crap (the stinkiest of all; any cat lover will agree with me on this).
This merger will only give us 3 bowls of steaming crap, and instead of more herbivore crap, we're going to get more carnivore crap.
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One's dog crap, one's cow crap, one's horse crap, and one's cat crap (the stinkiest of all; any cat lover will agree with me on this).
You have obviously never been to a hog farm, cat crap is like smelling roses by comparison.
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You're right, I've never been to one of those. But of the four animals I listed, I'm pretty sure cat crap is the worst-smelling.
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Pound for pound, horse crap is maybe the least offensive crap in the animal kingdom. Horse piss, on the other hand...
I would allow them to merge allright (Score:3)
But they would have to give back some spectrum which would go back for sale to someone else.
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The thing is, that wouldn't really help. If they give up spectrum, it'll just be bought out by AT&T or Verizon, either through themselves or through shell corporations. Now, if they had to give back both spectrum and exclusive rights to some of their infrastructure so that competitors can come in, that would be a fix that might work.
Re:I would allow them to merge allright (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, if they had to give back both spectrum and exclusive rights to some of their infrastructure so that competitors can come in, that would be a fix that might work.
This is the thing I think people don't understand about the US cellular industry - you can't try to "create" a new competitor because it will fail. The reason is that cellular business is all about scale - precisely the thing that is driving the T-Mo/Sprint acquistion. Fundamentally, you need to have the same 30-40K+ cell towers to cover most of the population centers in the US whether you have one million users, 10 million, or 100 million. When you are distributing that same infrastructure costs across fewer users, your economics are far worse than the big guys and it's very very difficult to compete. Additionally, size brings additional benefits such as more clout when negotiating device costs from Apple or Samsung, better deals with network infrastructure providers, etc. Scale is everything.
So the problem with bringing in a new competitor is that it will take them many years to even get to a point equivalent to today's T-Mobile, which is struggling to make ends meet with a national network supporting 25 million users. Even if you subsidized out of taxpayer pockets the spectrum and some of the infrastructure, you'd just be propping up a company for the sake of competition that would have to merge/get bought by someone else eventually or remain uncompetitive on pricing and probably go out of business.
It's unfortunate for a variety of reasons... but when you have businesses with a high financial barrier to entry and a model that grows efficiency with scale, economically speaking you will always see a trend towards consolidation to the minimum number of viable players.
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I'll also add that AT&T's failed attempt to acquire T-mobile, resulted in AT&T having to hand over $3 billion in cash to T-mobile for failure to complete the merger, allowing for the very significant LTE rollout to major metropolitan areas that has allowed T-mobile to obtain the dramatic increase in customers and brand improvement they've seen in the past few years.
If Sprint acquisition of T-mobile fails, they probably won't be handing over $3bil since Sprint is a much smaller player in the market t
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Scale is everything.
Mostly agreed - but it *is* possible to overcome that. Take a good look at MetroPCS which started as a "budget" regional carrier in the Sacramento/Bay Area. Recently merged with T-Mobile in a multi-billion dollar deal.
The only thing really necessary to succeed is to have revenue higher than expenses. The difference between the two determines your growth rate and/or your ability to finance growth.
Two different tech (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Two different tech (Score:4, Insightful)
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Why spend all the effort to migrate to GSM off CDMA when they can just migrate both networks to LTE and VoLTE?
Umm no (Score:2)
The combined T-Sprint will have to maintain both CDMA and GSM networks for some time. I hope that the tower hardware costs have dropped and dual CDMA/GSM hardware is available. I bet there will also be significant frequency waste.
Both carriers are dragging along a wagonload of MVNOs, [wikipedia.org] so customers of several other companies will see migration impacts.
Verizon is dumping CDMA [extremetech.com] for their own customers, but keeping it for the MVNOs. This will become more problematic, as Android is dropping support for CDMA, [androidcommunity.com] so e
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Except, t-mobile doesn't have contracts any more and no intelligent person had them before anyway. While t-mobile's service leaves something to be desired and so too probably the customer service I'd not switch to another carrier as the alternatives are worse. AT&T is expensive as hell and had a cozy relationship with Apple (another evil operation). AT&T's benefit though is they are also on the GSM standard (which does mean they are my 2nd choice among major providers). Then comes Verizon. Well, jus
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CDMA is a protocol, LTE is a catchphrase that says "When a better protocol is found, we'll send you the program to make it happen over the air!"
This was all planned about 10 years ago... when new things happen, there's new ways to compress.
If bowling ever becomes popular as a TV sport, there's going to have to be changes in MPEG standards. If you're watching the show on an iPhone... oh boy do we need to get ready. Get that?
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Eh, on T-Mobile I'm already using "voice" [over IP] over LTE so a change to Sprint wouldn't affect me at all.
Who writes these summaries? (Score:1)
"'A report from Forbes says that Sprint buying T-mobile for $32 billion is almost done."
Who talks like that? It's grammatically incorrect.
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Nonono. It's fine. Isn't it obvious that the report from Frobes is almost done?
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"'A report from Forbes says that Sprint buying T-mobile for $32 billion is almost done."
Who talks like that? It's grammatically incorrect.
I'd think most people talk like that. Few would use the grammatically correct "A report from Forbes says that Sprint's buying T-Mobile for $32 billion is almost done."
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I would suggest "A report from Forbes says that Sprint buying T-Mobile for $32 billion is almost a done deal.", because this is what they fucking mean (not that it's true). Sprint buying T-Mobile is no where near done in terms of regulatory approval let alone execution. It is, however, a "done deal" since there fat cats have agreed and it's just a matter of time before the government allows some form of the deal through.
But...how? (Score:2)
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The proposed AT&T+T-Mobile merger made sense, because they both use GSM over similar wavelengths. But how would Sprint and T-Mobile combine their network services? Their voice data at least is on completely different infrastructure.
Hopefully better than Nextel + Sprint did!! As I recall the iDEN to CDMA transition was a clusterf***.
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The proposed AT&T+T-Mobile merger made sense, because they both use GSM over similar wavelengths. But how would Sprint and T-Mobile combine their network services? Their voice data at least is on completely different infrastructure.
Device convergence, perhaps? The Nexus 5 I just bought from Craiglist (I guess from someone who bought an Android device by mistake) has both GSM/HSDPA+ and LTE radios in it.
Just out of curiosity, how did Sprint manage to absorb the NextTel "push to talk" technology that was popular back in the pre-Blackberry days?
I'm a bit worried about this Sprint acquisition, but as a Voicestream customer back in the 90s that weathered the T-Mobile takeover, I guess things could turn out OK. I suppose this is why T-Mo
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Re:Sprint and T-mobile should give up on LTE (Score:4, Insightful)
I disagree. 1st. tier cellphone companies DO in fact have to be big .... The dollar amounts involved to roll out and maintain a cellular network across a whole country the size of the United States is steep enough that the little guys just can't accomplish it well.
What we do have room for are the 2nd. tier "regional carriers" -- and personally, I'm disappointed we haven't really seen more happening in that arena. If you're not big enough to compete with the likes of Verizon or AT&T in nationwide coverage, fine. How about focusing on providing top quality coverage and customer service, with good data performance, all within a few states?
For many years, I had an account with U.S. Cellular, in St. Louis, Missouri, and was very pleased with them. Their little marketing strategy of "all incoming calls are free" meant I didn't really need to buy a lot of cellular minutes on my plan. (It's relatively rare I place a call to someone vs. all the times I'm taking a call.) Signal strength and call quality were excellent too. Really, the only downside was a relative lack of choices in phones, because you had to select one designed to work on their network - and they didn't have as much pull as the top carriers to get the latest handsets first. Still, they'd typically manage to get at least 1 or 2 of the "hot" phones out there at any given time. (I had a Motorola Razr flip phone with them, when it was still the in thing.)
T-Mobile, IMO, has really gotten on a roll with upgrading its network to become something respectable. It has a lot of issues still, but as a current customer, I see evidence all the time that change is happening. (My phone has carrier updates pushed to it practically every week, as new towers come online.) Just last week, something changed where I live, too. For a couple days, all of us received "no service" or weak signals throughout the business day, but then suddenly, things came back up with a signal strength far superior to what we ever had before. (I used to use a signal booster in the house, but was able to turn it off after the upgrade.) Can't say if it was a new tower, or a modification or repair made to some existing one -- but it was a nice improvement.
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Now, a regional carrier works fine for some people, but doesn't really cut it for others. Today, I'm on AT&T and wouldn't even consider US Cellular. That's because I no longer live in Maine and travel (for business and for pleasure) quite a bit. What good i
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T-mobile has indeed been on a roll with upgrading it's network.
It's interesting to note that this was made possible by a $3bil cash infusion from AT&T because AT&T failed to complete their attempted acquisition of T-mobile a few years ago. So even if Sprint fails to complete their merger attempt, they obviously won't have to pay up quite as much, but they're likely to have to fork over something, which could result in even more expansion of T-mobile's network.
(I'm a current t-mobile customer and the
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Sprint can't give up on LTE. Sprint 3G IN THEIR HQ CITY is worse than dialup. Go to a baseball or football game here and you can just forget about having any data at all, which is funny, because they're a big Royals sponsor and have all kinds of in-stadium promotions where you text or tweet something, or use MLB At the Ballpark, or whatever. They keep saying "network vision is going to be awesome!" but I got tired of years of that promise never materializing and jumped to TMobile. And I have a close rel
Give them spectrum (Score:3)
If increased competition is the goal, then give the smaller companies preference in spectrum auctions.
Multi-billion dollar spectrum auctions are a scam anyway, just a hidden tax that we all pay through higher cellular bills.
I don't get it (Score:2)
Can someone explain that to me? They're giving up a 67% share in a company that's about to not exist in order to have a 15% share in a company that is about to be themselves that they'd effectively own 100% of, because it is them.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
The T-mobile that sprint wants to buy is "T-Mobile US", the T-Mobile that is trading stakes is Deutsche Telekom and their T-Mobile International AG holding company.
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Right now Deutsche Telekom currently owns 67% of T-mobile USA.
After the deal, Deutsche Telekom will have $32 billion and 15% of the merged company.
Why is this hard?
Because no one fucking mentioned T-Mobile USA, or Deutsche Telekom, or T-Mobile International AG, or T-Mobile US Inc.which is the actual fucking name of the piece of T-Mobile in question.
Public frequencies (Score:2)
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it's the Federal Communications Commission, not the Federal Radio Commission.
You're a bit late... (Score:2)
Actually, new Sprint phones use both CDMA and TDMA at the same time... oops, that's called GSM!
CDMA2000 (Score:2)
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Sprint has, for years, used a different type of CDMA than Verizon
Wikipedia's article about Sprint [wikipedia.org] mentions that Sprint uses "1xRTT" and "EVDO", which I know are parts of CDMA2000. How exactly does Sprint's implementation differ from that of Verizon other than by being on different frequency bands?
Unspecified: (Score:3)
Anyone have any idea what this will do for Sprint-based MVNOs? I am quite fond of the one I use (Ting), and am curious whether this will change anything, either good or bad. (Bad would be their service getting crappier or prices being forced upwards; good would be, for instance, Sprint phones being sold that allow swapping out sim cards because they support GSM. That'd be cool.)
Anybody remeber Nextel? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Nextel merger worked out pretty poorly for Sprint. Remember why? Because their two networks were incompatible, yet Sprint was required to keep it operating. It didn't get 3G upgrades, yet they had to keep operating until quite recently. There was a massive customer exodus, and Sprint was left holding the bag.
T-Mobile, similarly uses a different and incompatible 3G cellular standard than Sprint, and on entirely different frequencies. Yet Sprint is out to do this all again.
Seems like they've been planning this for some time, and are absolutely dependent on the merger going through, because Sprint has been a complete laggard with LTE deployments, despite their massive modernization effort, and doesn't seem to be trying AT ALL.
Frankly, the Nextel merger could have given Sprint the best network and LTE coverage around, as a happy-accident... Nextel, with their 800MHz spectrum had great coverage, on-par with Verizon's, particularly in mountains, valley, indoors, etc. AT&T and Verizon spent their 800MHz spectrum on 3G networks and have none left. They're using 1900MHz spectrum for their LTE networks, with a resultant reduction in coverage depth.
Sprint wasn't allowed to touch Nextel's spectrum, in the 3G days, so they only freed up their big block of 800MHz when LTE was first being deployed. With a little foresight, they could have put 800MHz LTE radios on their towers, and immediately boasted the best LTE coverage. With great LTE coverage, they could save money by neglecting their 3G network, and pretty quickly stop selling phones that are able to fall-back to anything other than 800MHz LTE. After all, LTE can do simultaneous voice and data, even if AT&T and Verizon have been slow to use it, perhaps for the above reasons.
But Sprint was half-hearted about their great opportunity... first saying they'd use some of that 800MHz band to improve 3G coverage, then later retracting that incredibly stupid idea. And while they've promoted their "Network Vision" upgrades for a couple years, they've still only very slowly expanded their LTE coverage to more than the very biggest urban areas, even skipping some major ones.
And they didn't ever leverage the WiMax network they spent so much money deploying. Sure, it's not LTE, but by just releasing a dual WiMax/LTE phone, Sprint could have boasted the biggest "4G" network from day #1, and they could have begun LTE deployments everywhere they didn't have WiMax, giving wider coverage, quicker. Instead, there's no WiMax/LTE phones to be found, and their LTE deployment simply overlapped their early WiMax deployment, resulting in no net-gain of extra coverage area.
I'm cautiously hopeful that this merger will be what they need, to finally compete. But each time before that they've gotten a big opportunity, they've squandered it. From the outside, Sprint seems to be deeply dysfunctional and lacking in any foresight or innovative ideas, copying the big two in the slowest and least efficient way, possible. The opportunity they have to merge the Sprint and T-Mobile LTE networks with dual-band phones, and quickly deprecate their 3G networks, seems just as likely to be squandered and bungled.
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This is wildly inaccurate.
Full disclosure: I'm a Sprint shareholder (at $2.70, back when people were predicting bankruptcy). I've been following them for some time.
Seems like they've been planning this for some time, and are absolutely dependent on the merger going through, because Sprint has been a complete laggard with LTE deployments, despite their massive modernization effort, and doesn't seem to be trying AT ALL.
Actually Sprint has engaged in a nationwide replacement of all their radios and base stations, including installing fiber to almost all of their towers and using gigabit microwave to connect the towers that can't get fiber to ones that can.
Sprint's major problem with 3G was the outdated backhaul. They were still using T1 lines everywhere, as they
But, you left out the biggest question: CDMA/GSM? (Score:2)
This is a lot of great info, but what I want to know is will Sprint move to GSM or T-Mobile to CDMA?
I have a Verizon CDMA phone, and *HATE* it. Call management (3-way or more, call waiting, etc) is a nightmare on CDMA. Plus, CDMA is not common outside North America.
I really hope to see Sprint drop CDMA, but will they, or will they remove features from their T-Mobile imports?
Re:Anybody remeber Nextel? (Score:4, Informative)
Funny, because I can't see where you actually disagree with much of what I've said. You just have the tone of a stockholder, and want to spin it to the positive, and paint all their problems and failures as minor issues that'll be fixed ANY DAY NOW...
I specifically mentioned the: "Network Vision" upgrades by name. What about it?
Pretty strange to "completely" rebuild everything, and yet come back without LTE everywhere. And even their 2G/3G coverage hasn't been improved the slightest bit in any areas where I frequently have problems.
It's not"massive" at all. Two years, and only a minor expansion of LTE. All other providers, including T-Mobile, have FAR, FAR better LTE coverage, and are also expanding it FASTER.
No, that was a minor problem. The MAJOR problem was depth of coverage. Theirs sucks. Their Nextel/iDEN coverage was VASTLY better than their CDMA.
That doesn't change the fact that they missed a huge opportunity to use their existing WiMax to get a lot of "4G" coverage quickly, and wasted lots of money duplicating effort, building out LTE, first, in the same areas that had WiMax.
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Entirely depends where they get their marching orders from.
Kansas? Or Tokyo?
What IS Sprint, now, exactly? They're just a brand name. They were bought out. "Sprint" is the color of the shell that the Softbank hermit crab moved into.
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That's what they're doing. Sprint's LTE bands are 26 (850 MHz - the old Nextel band), 25 (1900 MHz), and 41 (2500 MHz). You're proposing they should've put LTE radio gear on all their towers, then switched it on simultaneously when th
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Economics of a triopoly? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it's generally assumed that a poorly regulated monopoly is bad -- rent seeking, no innovation, etc. A duopoly isn't much better, even when it's not explicit you end up with defacto collusion on pricing and market segmentation.
Is a triopoly any better? Is there any economics that says how many vendors in a market are necessary to improve efficiency and consumer choice?
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Actually it can get worse, especially if they have a relatively even split. There are different reasons for it, but the most obvious way that works is that it 'looks' more like a free market situation, tricking people into believing they are paying a fair price, and making it hard for monopoly watchdogs to do something to a party that has a minority share.
Jesus Christ what a disaster (Score:2)
2 different systems on two different spectrums using 2 different technologies. Nextel II electric boogaloo. Just when you thought Sprint couldn't get any worse. Sprint is now the biggest reseller of AT&T minutes. Awesome. They will exit the branded retail market soon.
This all about bonus's for the top execs (Score:3)
noooooo! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a T-Mobile customer, specifically because I have a GSM phone (Sprint ditched/is ditching GSM last I heard) and because T-Mobile doesn't have any stupid contracts. I pay, they give me service, we're both happy. I LIKE T-Mobile. Sure, I don't always have great coverage. it's a minor distraction at worst. It works fine.
I have my own phone (I buy used Nexus S phones, and reflash them with the latest stock Android. No stupid carrier BS on my phone!). I LIKE paying $150 for a phone, and still getting the latest wiz bangs. I LIKE not having a contract. Yes, I even like feeling a little superior to the Morons that buy new phones every 2 years and shell out $ for something that's not really essentially any better than what I have.
Damn. I hope Sprint doesn't buy T-Mobile. If they do, I hope they don't F it up...
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Sprint has stopped doing contracts as well. They do have their Framily plan, but you can go with no contract and buy a phone outright, or subsidize the cost across 24 months. Same as TMobile. Sprint has always been CDMA, not GSM. However, they do offer "international phones" with SIM cards and gsm radios. My Sprint phone is a Motorola that can use either.
I, too, hope Sprint doesn't repeat the Nextel disaster...
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My wife and I just left sprint literally 2 weeks ago for T-Mobile for the same reasons. We can afford to buy the phones outright and only pay for monthly service. We get two lines for the price of her old sprint plan on T-mobile.
Not sure how I feel about this...
Whatever happened to 'competition?' (Score:2)
I'm looking forward to it (Score:2)
As a T-Mobile customer, I welcome our new overloards. Ever try using T-Mobile outside a metro area (Kansas, rural Texas, etc.)? Even in some some metro areas (Omaha, Austin suburbs) coverage is horrible. Anything that gives T-Mobile more towers is fine with me (as long as it's not AT&T).
Re:Competitition is good. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, fuck you. This is exactly the opposite of introducing competition. It's an extremely shitty company with incredibly shitty service (Sprint) buying a smaller competitor with far better service (T-Mobile) in order to make a much more massive, shittier company than before possible.
This is an anti-trust violation, so fuck these guys!
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It certainly is not anti-trust territory, but I did in fact leave Sprint because of their appalling customer service. I've been with T-Mobile for probably 10 years or so, though on prepay for the last 2.
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I've been on MetroPCS since 2006, which is now owned by T-Mobile. So I guess I will be under Sprint soon. If it changes my service for the worse, I will have to switch to one of the independents.
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Both are moving to LTE. By the time it gets approved and implemented we'll have VoLTE and it'll become even less of an issue.
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My guess is that Sprint has seen the writing on the wall, and wants T-Mobile precisely for GSM. By offering GSM, they can now sell and support phones they couldn't before, especially international models that will all be GSM-based, and Sprint has to pay good money to get manufacturers to make CDMA models.
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GSM and CDMA are both DEAD, the very second their LTE networks have equivalent coverage area.
And the market for international travelers, who want to keep using their cell phones, is positively MINUSCULE. I doubt practically ANYBODY other than Verizon Execs are signed-up for Verizon's "Global" service plans.
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So you're not just wrong, you are incredibly wrong. Every place I have ever worked, and every person I have met who travels internationally for work uses their work cell phone.
They don't buy a separate phone, they don't look for compatible SIMs to swap in or out, they MAY go so far as to notify their secretary or travel clerk that they expect to use their business phone while in XY country.
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Not to mention tourism, where visitors to the US will mostly have GSM phones, and don't especially like to be slapped with exorbitant roaming charges or no coverage at all outside the cities.
(I'm not mentioning US tourists with CDMA who won't get service abroad at all, because most Americans never travel outside their own state, let alone country.)
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I seriously doubt the first assertion is true. But even assuming it's true for a small majority of people, can you blame them? When a Western US state is the size of 3 European COUNTRIES, it takes a lot more effort and motivation to leave them.
And for the second, since the country in question, happens to be the size of a the continent, and has the two largest oceans on either side impeding travel, it's not comparable to leaving an EU "c
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Get your own city-wide WIFI system installed and running with decent coverage.
Some people travel from city-to-city and don't like to carry 2 phones (or rent phones for a different network when they get there)...
FWIW, that was part of the dream that was WiMax and VoLTE... Maybe we'll get there with VoLTE eventually, but WiMax part of the dream is certainly dead...
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