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Communications United States

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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Sprint, T-Mobile Agree To Combine in a $26.5 Billion Merger

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  • Regulatory approval? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by John.Banister ( 1291556 ) * on Sunday April 29, 2018 @12:39PM (#56524155) Homepage
    I wonder whether this merger will meet with regulatory approval. The current administration doesn't appear to hold a favorable opinion of anything German.
    • I think it will (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday April 29, 2018 @02:20PM (#56524707)
      the Comcast AT&T merger got derailed because absolutely everybody, rich or poor, has a reason to hate those too companies. They treat everybody equally awful.

      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)

        by SvnLyrBrto ( 62138 ) on Sunday April 29, 2018 @02:31PM (#56524743)

        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.

        • I agree. I left Sprint for reasons you state for tmobile 15+ years ago and have little interest in this merger.

        • 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.
          • by torkus ( 1133985 )

            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

        • by torkus ( 1133985 )

          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.

      • by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
        But but..it's a Japanese company (Softbank) and a German company (Deutsche Telekom)! They can't merge and unfairly compete! USA! USA! USA!
    • 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.

    • by santiago ( 42242 )

      Oh, the current administration has a pretty high opinion of something German, just not anything that's been legal in Germany since 1945...

  • by ArhcAngel ( 247594 ) on Sunday April 29, 2018 @12:50PM (#56524225)
    Of all the reasons I switched from Sprint to T-Mobile years back the most important was CDMA. If my phone of choice won't work on your network then why do I want to use it? I'm curious if Sprint is bringing anything to the party other than subscribers?
    • by Average ( 648 )

      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 (

      • Nothing would please me more than to have all the carriers move to VoLTE but everything I am seeing says complete robust LTE coverage is still a ways off so the carriers need the old networks as stopgaps voice can fall back on in poor LTE coverage areas. I've read Sprint is using some type of VOIP fallback but it still relies on their CDMA EVDO radios.
    • by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Sunday April 29, 2018 @02:56PM (#56524851)
      CDMA won the CDMA vs GSM war. Every GSM phone includes a wideband CDMA radio for 3G service. The only parts of GSM which still follow the original GSM spec are voice and the SIM card. You see, GSM was originally based on TDMA - each phone is assigned a timeslice and they take turns talking with the tower. This worked fine for low-bandwidth communications like voice, but was horribly inefficient when cellular data service began to become important. You ended up wasting bandwidth on phones which didn't need the bandwidth of their full timeslice, or didn't even need any bandwidth at all that particular timeslice. You also lost bandwidth to the padding added to the ends of each timeslice to compensate for the finite speed of lite (to insure the signal of a phone distant from the tower doesn't spill over into the next timeslice).

      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.
      • Thank you for the clarification. I was aware that CDMA was a superior technology but much like Betamax vs VHS, GSM won the war. Not being able to do voice/data simultaneously was one of my biggest gripes. Once AT&T was able to do both it was one of the things I would advise my clients about. It could be the reason GSM eventually supplanted CDMA. The market will shift to whoever solves the problem people care about most. History is replete with extraordinary ideas that got trampled by the masses rushing
        • . 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.

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday April 29, 2018 @05:06PM (#56525293)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • by _merlin ( 160982 )

            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.

      • 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.

      • by _merlin ( 160982 )

        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 ra

    • 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

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • 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.

  • by SmaryJerry ( 2759091 ) on Sunday April 29, 2018 @01:40PM (#56524513)
    I really hope this gets blocked. Not only because basically the number of carriers drops by 25% but because Sprint is a horrible company and I'm afraid they will infect T-mobile with their poor service, customer service, hidden fees, and more.
    • by Kazymyr ( 190114 ) on Sunday April 29, 2018 @02:26PM (#56524727) Journal

      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.

      • by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Sunday April 29, 2018 @03:22PM (#56524949)

        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.

    • 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)

    by DaMattster ( 977781 ) on Sunday April 29, 2018 @03:08PM (#56524899)
    I am hoping this will be blocked. I remember back in the day when I had NEXTEL and really loved it. NEXTEL worked fantastically up until the point Sprint bought and merged them. Both customer service and communications reliability took a nose dive after the "merger." T-Mobile is doing very well on its own and Sprint is a cancer to whatever it touches. Unless T-Mobile can manage to remain in control, we might as well given to the duopoly overlords because Sprint will be irrelevant if not die outright.
  • 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.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • 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

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