Japan's Softbank Buying Sprint, Creating Third-Largest Global Carrier 59
New submitter metallurge writes "Japan's third-largest wireless carrier intends to acquire Sprint, the third-largest U.S. carrier for 20.1 billion U.S. dollars, creating the third-largest global carrier. After the transaction is completed, Softbank will own 70% of the newly-created 'New Sprint,' which will maintain current Sprint CEO Dan Hesse in that role. How this will affect Deutsche Telekom/T-Mobile's attempt to merge with Sprint reseller MetroPCS is unclear."
MVNO (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't sprint like the king of MVNO operators in the USA, like they make more dough off MVNO's reselling them than via retail ops directly selling Sprint, or so I've heard? I wonder if softbank will change strategies. That would certainly shake things up. Hope the MVNO's have solid contracts and/or deep pockets.
Third largest? (Score:1, Interesting)
How does a 30 million subscriber operator in Japan combined with Sprint become the third-largest global carrier - it'll have well under 100 million subscribers, so well behind all of: China Mobile, Vodafone, Airtel, AMX, Telefonica, Orange, VimpelCom, China Unicom, MTN, Etisalata, Axiata, TeliaSonera, Telenor etc etc etc
Re:Explains my crappy signal strength (Score:4, Interesting)
So true. Only reason they were ever able to gain any kind of market share here is because they had the iphone. Now that it's available with any carrier, people are leaving them in droves for either au or docomo.