Sprint, T-Mobile Agree To Combine in a $26.5 Billion Merger (bloomberg.com) 105
T-Mobile and Sprint said on Sunday that they have agreed to combine in a $26.5 billion merger, creating a wireless giant to compete against industry leaders AT&T and Verizon. From a report: Deutsche Telekom AG, the Bonn, Germany-based company that controls T-Mobile, and SoftBank Group, the Tokyo-based owner of Sprint, agreed to a combination that values each Sprint share at 0.10256 of a T-Mobile share, the companies said in a statement Sunday. That ratio values Sprint at $6.62 a share based on T-Mobile's Friday closing price of $64.52. The new company will use the T-Mobile name, with T-Mobile's John Legere as chief executive officer and Mike Sievert at chief operating officer. The German company's chairman, Tim Hoettges, will serve in that role at the combined company, and the board will include SoftBank Chief Executive Officer Masayoshi Son. The companies said they expect synergies of about $43 billion, with more than $6.5 billion on a run-rate basis.
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That argument ignores the possibility that we would have had more advancement and price control with more options. It's also much less stable than with more competitors. In the server market, the market share for AMD is very low right now to the point of being practically non-existent. Similarly, there aren't many options in terms of AMD based laptops.
AMD has outdone Intel on several occasions over the least 20 years, but even when they do manage it, they don't get much benefit out of it. Intel paid systems
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3 party competition is enough for advances and price control. look at amd vs intel and how they keep each other growing and they are the only 2 major players.
REAL and meaningful competition? No. (Score:4, Interesting)
I knew that was the kind of "reasoning" to expect on today's Slashdot, but it still saddens me. Shallow is the kindest adjective I can think of.
Think of competition from the other side. The choice and freedom side. Zero choices or one choice is not really any choice at all. Two is the minimal potentially meaningful choice, but in the cited example Intel and AMD offer two flavors of the same architecture, which is scarcely meaningful and we certainly don't know that it's the best one because Intel and Intel's accomplices have succeeded in crushing the alternative choices. (Well, actually TRON is still out there, but not competing in the same space. Ditto smartphone CPUs.) Research into short-term memory indicates we can actually handle 3 to 7 options at a time, and I have concluded that the optimum locus of choice for maximizing freedom is probably around 5 options. When you get way up there with too many options in play, the choice again becomes meaningless because it's too confusing and you're more likely to be manipulated than to find the best option. (See the "Paradox of Choice" and related work.)
Seems I better include the full form of my sig without the Slashdot-imposed limitation:
#1 Freedom = (Meaningful + Truthful - Coerced) Choice{~5} != (Beer^4 | Speech | Trade)
Solution time: Progressive profits tax based on market share. If the objective is to insure the market has 5 choices, then that works out around 20% each, but because the objective is to encourage change and new ideas, you have to allow quite a bit of wiggle room, so say the higher tax rates start around 30% of the market. If a merger (in this specific example) pushes market share way up there, then the tax rate on the profits should rise so high that the two companies won't even consider it unless there really is a natural monopoly of an overwhelming sort--and in that case the government needs that tax money to regulate the heck out of the dominant company, while supporting research to break the monopoly.
Profit is less important than freedom. Corporate cancers can NEVER solve their FAKE problems of insufficient profit.
DSAuPR, atAJG.
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Oh, there is competing architectures! Just go get an Itanium computer. No problemo at all. It'll run everything just fine!!
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Oh, there is competing architectures! Just go get an Itanium computer. No problemo at all. It'll run everything just fine!!
Thanks for proving my point? But that doesn't seem to be the point of your reply? Or are you just incoherent?
If you don't understand, perhaps you should ask for clarification? I acknowledge that I did write rather tersely, primarily because of time considerations and because I cannot guess what prior knowledge you have. If any.
If you can't understand what I wrote, then why did you say nothing? "Go away, son, you're bothering me." (At least in the sense of wasting time.)
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Obvious sarcasm post. WHOOSH. https://xkcd.com/1627/ [xkcd.com]
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I think you [darkain] are saying that your previous reply was intended to be taken as sarcasm? Some sort of sarcastic form of agreement?
Now the "obligatory" XKCD reference? I actually had an interesting email discussion with him about using fake satellites within buildings to provide more widely useful GPS locations without requiring new user-side hardware. You make me want to revive that discussion to consider signal echos and reflections... So the conclusion is that we need a really useful search engine t
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AMD goes in waves. Beating Intel to the x86-64 market put AMD and Intel at virtually 50% marketshare each. But after Intel started pumping out x86-64 chips to compete, AMD just couldn't keep up the fight. But finally they're swinging things back around again!
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So ARM doesn't exist then? Desktop computers are not the only thing running processors. ARM has entirely dominated the mobile space, and is currently making inroads into other markets, especially severs.
Regulatory approval? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Regulatory approval? (Score:2, Insightful)
You are truly delusional to the point of mental illness if you actually believe Trump is a literal Nazi.
I think it will (Score:4, Insightful)
The current administration's pretty pro corporate (supports TPP, work visa programs and guest worker programs, massive tax cuts for corps, deregulation, backing off on enforcement, still full of Goldman Sachs people, the list goes on). Without pressure from folks hating on one or both companies this'll sail through.
Sucks, I'm sure it means my bills going to go up and I'll probably end up with data overrage fees again.
Re:I think it will (Score:5, Interesting)
Well... I can't think of any reason to dislike T-Mobile. In fact, I have them as my carrier now. I've been nothing but happy since switching. And I'm very much dismayed at the prospect now of going back to AT&T. Sprint, on the other hand; if you don't yet hate them with a burning passion... their network, their choice of available phone hardware, their billing system, their customer service people, their CEO, the whole shebang (Hell, even their HQ campus in Overland Park is rage-inducing.)... it's all but certainly only because you've really just not gotten the chance to know them.
I'm really, Really, REALLY hoping for this one to be blocked.
Re: I think it will (Score:1)
I agree. I left Sprint for reasons you state for tmobile 15+ years ago and have little interest in this merger.
T-Mobile was on the verge of dying (Score:2)
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and then they did all that 'uncarrier' stuff. Mostly they stopped overcharging for data and stopped with the roaming changes. But it was a major shift in the cell phone industry and cut data and roaming charges across the board. I'm guessing with this merger we'll see them bring back all the old practices. The only reason they stopped them is they were getting squeezed out by AT&T, Sprint & Verizon. With the merger that won't happen.
It was a major shift in the industry BECAUSE T-Mobile did it first and the others had no choice but to follow as they started losing customers in droves.
TMO can't go backwards on all that. They'd quickly give up all the customers they won over right back to VZW and ATT if they did. But I don't think Legere is nearly that stupid. Instead they're much more likely to use their new weight to push for even better details, service, and coverage which will grow their customer base even further.
Legere is one of
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Or, instead, they take those poor customers and move them over to the happy shiny TMO world.
And TMO (well, now the combined) gets all the sprint spectrum. All the towers. And so on...TMO getting the spectrum from the previous, failed, acquisition of them is a huge portion of the reason they were able to fix their coverage and directly compete with the other carriers. Without that there's a good chance they would have become irrelevant by now.
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I wonder whether this merger will meet with regulatory approval. The current administration doesn't appear to hold a favorable opinion of anything German.
Trump might support it if he were told that they were East German.
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Oh, the current administration has a pretty high opinion of something German, just not anything that's been legal in Germany since 1945...
Fastrack CDMA's demise (Score:5, Insightful)
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My Wi-Fi calling experiences have been terrible in T-Mobile; the handoff between networks results in disconnects.
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T-Mobile has had mini-cell sites for homes for years now too. Back when I was a t-mo user, I was considering getting one, but ended up just not caring.
Also, the reason for wanting one? Wifi calling is often unreliable. Today? Not so much. But back when it was first introduced? it had massive connectivity issues and issues with handoff between wifi and cell. Walk out the front door? Call would be lost.
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No one cares about classic CDMA, GSM, or basically anything that isn't a flavor of LTE at this point. What remains of the 'burner' $10 prepaid flip phone market will be VoLTE in 12-18 months.
Sprint brings to the table a whole lot of bandwidth licenses at 2.5GHz. And (going back to Clearwire days) has finally gotten over most of the regulatory hurdles involved in deploying it. Not good for classic cell service, but okay for urban nanocells and also pretty good for playing in the last-mile broadband sector (
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Every GSM phone uses CDMA (Score:4, Interesting)
CDMA allows all phones to transmit at the same time, and uses orthogonal codes to tell their transmissions apart. Kinda like writing on a piece of paper, then turning it 90 degrees to write on it again. Even though the letters overlap, they're distinct enough (orthogonal) that you can tell which letters are horizontal and which are vertical, and ignore the ones not in the direction you're reading. All phones see other transmitting phones as noise, so more phones transmitting means a lower signal to noise ratio, and bandwidth to each phone is automatically reduced based on the number of transmitting phones. This means CDMA's bandwidth is automatically divided evenly between the number of phones which need it at any given moment.
This is why CDMA services got 3G data about a year before GSM services. GSM ended up throwing in the towel, licensing CDMA, and amended the GSM spec to include wideband CDMA for data service. And this is why GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time - they had a TDMA radio for voice, and a CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones only had a single CDMA radio which could do voice or data, but not both simultaneously. It wasn't because GSM was superior, it was because GSM was inferior and needed a second radio to compete.
LTE service is mostly based on OFDMA - similar to CDMA but using orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes. CDMA served as the proof of concept that this crazy orthogonal signaling idea where everyone transmits at the same time stomping over each others' signals actually worked when expanded out into a nationwide cellular network. If CDMA hadn't happened first, researchers and companies would've been much less confident about OFDMA, and it's possible we might've still been waiting for LTE to even roll out today. If the U.S. had gone along with the rest of the world and required GSM, then the global adoption of inferior TDMA technology would've meant that cellular data service today would probably be stuck down around 1 Mbps or slower. So you should be thanking CDMA for giving us the 50+ Mbps cellular data speeds we enjoy today.
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. I was aware that CDMA was a superior technology but much like Betamax vs VHS, GSM won the war.
You completely didn't understand his post. CDMA won the war completely, so utterly surpassing GSM that GSM switched to CDMA. If you have a so-called GSM phone right now, it uses CDMA technology.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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IS-136 is the successor to IS-54 "Digital AMPS" (D-AMPS, commonly referred to as "TDMA" in North America). IS-54 introduced multiplexed digital voice channels, providing three or six times the number of calls, while still using the same binary FSK control channels as AMPS. IS-136 switched to time division multiplexed control channels, and added support for text messages and circuit-switched data.
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Thanks for a post that's reminiscent of when /. really was for nerds. I didn't know that about GSM and CDMA data. I labored under the delusion (propoganda?) that GSM was superior.
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The spectrum and network which T-Mo doesn't have. Yes they just bought some spectrum but not enough and not enough new towers to run a real network now that the AT&T/Verizon sweetheart deal is over. They were about to get raped by the big two monsters to use there backbone.
As an enteral engineer I can say Sprint has an amazing backbone it's just not good at the front end which is about the only thing T-Mo has so it's not a bad fit. Better than the Nextel merger at least. Also moving from CDMA and du
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Synergies is not a financial term. (Score:2)
The companies said they expect synergies of about $43 billion...
Even for corporatespeak I don't think this is correct usage of this word. If they were investing $43 bil, maybe, but "synergy" is generally defined as shared effort in an area or towards a goal.
Re: Synergies is not a financial term. (Score:2, Insightful)
In this case, it means "layoffs."
Less Competition Means higher Prices (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Less Competition Means higher Prices (Score:4, Interesting)
I really have nothing much negative to say about Sprint. True their coverage isn't the best and their website is very annoying but that's about it. I've been with them with over 10 years, and I have no data cap, no roaming charges and even free international roaming.
Re: Less Competition Means higher Prices (Score:4, Interesting)
Unless T-Mobile is nearly 100% in control, I hope it gets blocked. I was a Sprint customer for over 16 years and finally dropped them for T-Mobile 4 years ago and the different is absolutely staggering. Usually lower prices, MUCH more stable network, activation takes seconds- just insert a REAL sim card and done, fantastic customer service, great stores and people in them. I have brought over many family and friends to T-Mobile from Sprint and not a single one has been disappointed. I am terrified this new merged company will be "infected" by Sprint poor planning, customer service, and technology.
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It could be that a market with three viable competitors is going to be better than one with 4 but 2 of them are too small to really make a play.
At the very least, it's not outside the bounds of possibility.
Blocked (Score:5, Insightful)
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Incoming flood of fucked cellphones (Score:2)
Wonder which system they're going to use, CDMA or GSM? One's gonna likely have to go, and with it, all those cellphones hooked up to that network.
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We'll have only three networks anyway... (Score:2)
I think they will get regulatory approval, because if they don't we will end up with only three wireless networks anyway. Sprint is only still surviving because Softbank has been pumping in money and failing to get the results they had hoped for. if the merger is blocked they're likely to just shut it down and sell off the pieces.
The most recent merger attempt between the companies failed because Softbank was unwilling to give up control; they wanted to run the combined companies. This time the deal involve
Sprint + T-Mobile == LOGO (Score:2)
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