SoftBank Is Willing To Cede Control of Sprint To Get T-Mobile Merger Done, Says Report (phonedog.com) 28
According to Reuters, SoftBank is willing to cede control of Sprint to make a T-Mobile-Sprint merger happen. The company controls 83 percent of Sprint, but it'd reportedly be willing to surrender control of Sprint and retain a minority stake in a merger with T-Mobile. PhoneDog reports: It's said that SoftBank is growing frustrated with Sprint's lack of major growth in the U.S. market, and so it wants to merge with T-Mobile in order to better compete with Verizon and ATT. No talks between SoftBank and Deutsche Telekom are currently happening because of the FCC's 600MHz spectrum auction that prevents collusion between competing companies. Once the auction ends in April, though, it's expected that SoftBank will approached Deutsche Telekom about a deal.
Makes perfect sense to me. (Score:2, Insightful)
It all comes down to two things - who has the most network bandwidth, and who has the most cellular bandwidth. Or just one thing - who can deliver the most bandwidth?
FCC allocates cellular (radio frequency) bandwidth in the US. Backbone (network) bandwidth? That's strictly a matter of investing in infrastructure, so . . . who owns (or is owned by) how many politico's in power?
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Sprint has FAR more spectrum than T-Mobile...especially since the acquisition of the 2500mhz spectrum from Clear. What they lack is customers.
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What they lack is customers.
That is because they're an awful anti-consumer organization from a bygone era. Why do you think T-Mobile has been pounding them in the dirt ever since they started this whole "Uncarrier" thing?
If T-Mobile is allowed to be absorbed by some monolithic giant disconnected from its consumer base then I'm cancelling my subscription with T-Mobile. Should this happen it'll be a huge step backward for the cellular market, but heh if you can't beat 'em then just buy 'em out with an offer they can't refuse, right?
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No, it comes down to why T-Mobile would freaking want Sprint and the baggage Sprint brings.
Sprint doesn't attract customers because, aside from bandwidth, they haven't been able to beat T-Mobile on anything enough for people to move to them. People generally with T-Mobile are actually happy with T-Mobile; they put up with the lack of bandwidth because T-Mobile is perceived as a better customer service and having better plans and policies company.
And T-Mobile needs to be careful. Sure, they'll get Sprint's
CDMA or not? (Score:2)
Question is - for the pre-4G stuff - like when one is travelling in areas that don't have 4G, which standard will the phones follow - CDMA or GSM?
funny Japanese SoftBank mascot (Score:2)
Welp. (Score:2)
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Growth Mania (Score:4, Insightful)
"SoftBank is growing frustrated with Sprint's lack of major growth in the U.S. market"
What is wrong is a stable successful profitable company? It seems that everyone thinks that a company that isn't growing every year is not a good company. There's plenty of wealth and resources on this planet for everyone. The end goal is not to have one winner who owns everything.
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No (Score:2)
Sprint needs to sell spectrum, not F up T-Mobile (Score:5, Insightful)
T-Mobile doesn't need to be contaminated with a wireless carrier STD, which is what Sprint is these days. Sure the booty may be cheap but you don't want it.
Taking some of Sprint's spectrum might be nice.
But T-Mobile seems to be doing well with the spectrum they have and the customers they have, and gain, every quarter. All T-Mobile has to do to be successful is stay on the path. Buying Sprint would take them off that path and put them on a new one where they have two networks to deal with and two probably very different customer bases and two sets of retail stores and all the other overlap. It is a huge risk to T-Mobile that this will derail their success and instead saddle them with Sprint's mess.
See what happened to Time Warner after it bought AOL. Two valued and successful companies now both worth a fraction of their prior values. They didn't sum. They subtracted.
Where are the choices? (Score:1)
No different than AT&T/T-Mobile merger... (Score:2)
The reason this should not happen are exactly the same as when AT&T wanted to buy T-Mobile -- there would be one less cell phone company, meaning less choice for consumers and competition among carriers.
The recent activity on "Unlimited" plans (T-Mobile makes one with some dumb restrictions, Verizon makes another that's a little more expensive, but without those limitations, T-Mobile comes back with less restrictions than before to compete, Sprint comes out with a new plan, AT&T says "me too" becaus
Good way to eliminate a ton of jobs... (Score:2)
You know what ALWAYS comes after a merger? Massive lay-offs. There's no reason to merge two companies if they have just as high costs as when they were operating separately, so eliminating now-redundant jobs is the key reason mergers happen. Approving that is going to make Trump look very, very bad.
The merger was always an idiotic idea... Sprint and T-Mobile have no technology in common, nor do their services complement each other in ANY way... Nearly all the company's towers are deployed in proximity