T-Mobile, Sprint Close To Agreeing Deal Terms (reuters.com) 85
From a report: T-Mobile US is close to agreeing tentative terms on a deal to merge with peer Sprint Corp, people familiar with the matter said on Friday, a major breakthrough in efforts to merge the third and fourth largest U.S. wireless carriers. The development follows more than four months of on-and-off talks this year between T-Mobile and Sprint, and comes as the U.S. telecommunications sector seeks ways to tackle investments in 5G technology that will greatly enhance wireless data transfer speeds.
eeew (Score:5, Insightful)
Eeek, I am not so sure I want my provider, T-Mobile, dragged down by Sprint.
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Deutsche Telekom will remain the majority shareholder of the combined entity. T-Mobile is essentially buying Sprint.
Think before you speak.
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some of us were around when the USA had a dozen or so cellular carriers. Back then you didn't have to go far to lose your carrier's signal and roam on someone else's network and run up huge bills. The reason they all merged was to give customers a national network with virtually no roaming
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Who is buying out whom? T-Mobile buying out Sprint is fine with me, but I really don't like the other way round, since I've not really been happy with Sprint's CS over the years.
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In rural Ohio you can find Sprint stores in most towns. The closest T-Mobile store to me is 45 minutes away.
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I had sprint for 7 years and all they wanted to do was nickle and dime me to death. $4 a month charge to make international calls. Went straight down to T-Mobile store, got a blackberry with them in 2007 and never had to deal with bizzare nickle and diming fees again, always treated me really well, even adjusted my bill because they quoted me a lower price for calls from peru than was advertised. Then they rolled out unlimited 2G international data. Finally I left T-Mobile simply because Project Fi was marg
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>"I have had Sprint for almost 13 years now and they have been great."
And I had Sprint for 16 years before they FINALLY pissed me off enough to make me leave. It wasn't just one thing- it was all kinds of technical and billing problems and truly horrible customer and technical support. But the pricing was always good. Trust me, I tried everything to see if they would be reasonable and they would not. After I went months reporting repeating text messages, lost text messages, and messages delayed somet
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Yeah, the no rings, 18 hours delay, then 6 messages at once thing ended my business with Sprint.
Trademarks (Score:1)
Re:If Sprint takes over ownership future is bleak (Score:5, Informative)
The reporting I read earlier today suggested that the positions have been swapped at the table, so T-Mobile's owner (Deutsche Telekom) would be the majority shareholder in a 60-40 merger with Sprint (owned by SoftBank). Likewise, the current T-Mobile CEO who has been leading a successful comeback for the carrier would be the CEO of the merged company.
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I had Boost phones for a few years. I was very happy then Sprint bought it. About 7 months after buying it they "upgraded" the towers. My phone ceased working where I lived. I called them and they suggested I switch to a CDMA phone. I did, but no joy although that one worked in some places. Now I'm on AT&T and was thinking of moving to T-Mobile. So glad I haven't switched yet. Nix on that.
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Can't wait until there's only one provider (Score:3)
they could also tout text capability. (Score:5, Funny)
This new company could be called American Telephone & Text.
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Don't forget about data.
American Telephone, Text, and TCP/IP.
All hail our new overlord, ATT&T!
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ATT&T-Mobile.
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Nope, not gonna happen. AT&T already tried to acquire T-Mobile a few years back, and it was essentially blocked by the U.S. Government. AT&T already had to pay T-Mobile a small bundle for that fiasco. Oh sure, they have friendly people in the White House and the Congress now, so who knows. But I really doubt they'll try again any time soon, especially after they just gobbled up DirecTV.
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Not necessarily a bad idea. The existence of MVNOs means that potential an unlimited number of companies could compete to resell access to a single cell network. Christ, I wish that model were brought to our landline ISPs. That could fix a bunch of problems.
Capitalism Tends Toward Monopoly (Score:3)
We should not be okay with this. Reduced choices leads to increased cost. Fewer companies means less competition, and a greater probability of collusion and price-fixing. We should be furious.
However, the people who actually run this country are quite okay with this, so it will almost certainly go through.
Re:Capitalism Tends Toward Monopoly (Score:5, Insightful)
Then there is shit like actively MITMing traffic which some telcos did, where they actively added in UIDH headers into HTTP traffic as a way to ID people. T-Mobile was one of the few that didn't do this.
I get no warm fuzzies about this merger unless Sprint is completely absorbed and Magenta's DNA stays the same.
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Nobody is that interested in selling ads to virgins though.
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4 is better than 3 isn't a basis for making a determination. We'll get more competition here as scale is key in this business. The costs for the smaller carriers to compete with VZW and ATT are pretty high. When you can spread out your network, ad and other costs over a bigger number of users you are more efficient and able to reduce prices even more aggressively. And those who looked at real coverage maps will tell you that every TMo and Sprint user will see improvements in coverage, etc. This is a go
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Sprint and T-Mobile are on different bands. Phones are frequency locked to one network or the other. In most places they are both renting space from the same tower owners.
The only possible reason to allow this is the assumption that Sprint is already 'walking dead'.
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A few of the new ones do, usually at the expense of international bands, a generic world phone multiband will work on T-mobile and ATT. Due diligence will get you prepaid SIMs on those networks, just like anywhere else in the world.
Verizon and Sprint are the odd ones.
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Also I don't think you mean 'subsidize'. Contracts aren't subsides, rather the opposite.
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No. Each plan pays for it's own phone. The excess profit, if you're stupid enough to stay on contract, is pure profit to the company.
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Because a marketer calls something a subsidy doesn't make it so. 'Selling' a phone for less than list, than making it up on monthly charges is _not_ a subsidy. Unless you're a moron who can't add and can't see past today.
Sprint barely counts as competition (Score:1)
We should not be okay with this. Reduced choices leads to increased cost. Fewer companies means less competition
You're assuming that the market can support 4 major carriers. Sprint has been operating at negative net income for years now. That's why Softbank is interested in the merger, because it's unlikely that Sprint will be able to scale to be profitable.
What does T-Mobile get? (Score:3)
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Spectrum. That's what they get from Sprint.
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They'd need all new phones that could access all the bands. Generic 'world phones' can't use Sprint's spectrum.
Re:What does T-Mobile get? (Score:5, Interesting)
When a new spectrum auction comes up, T-Mobile will not need to bid and therefore not raise rates to cover cost. Also, with all that new spectrum, 5G will be more realizable.
Finally, T-Moblie could start offering home broadband like Comcast or Charter. There would be lower caps than those but it's still a much more viable option at 5G.
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NOooooo! (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is how godawful the rest are. ATTWS is still a pile of bailing wire pretending to be a premium carrier at top dollar. Verizon's technology is decent, but the customer service is incompetent at best, and the pricing schemes are draconian. And Sprint... oh Sprint... their customer service motto is "we don't care," their technical philosophy is based on lock-in, and their billing policies are designed by people who run those fitness gyms that you can't ever get to stop billing your card even after the service ends. By contrast, T-Mo is amazing, because they just keep being pretty good.
PLEASE, T-Mo, don't do this. Sprint's infrastructure is barely worth it, and the human capital over on the yellow side of the fence needs to be sent back to barista school, from top to bottom. Why trash a good thing for another
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I jumped my t-mo line over to Sprint to take advantage of the "One year of unlimited service for
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Me too, remember the Jamie Lee Curtis commercials. Anyway, I've always been quite happy with T-Mo. They have always undercut the majors pricing and weirdly, even lower prices on plans of old customers without asking. I've gone from limited minutes back under voice stream for I think it was 80/mo to unlimited everything for 50. All without threatening to leave. Their CS reps are knowledgeable in store and the 2 times I had to call in over 15 years has been resolved quickly. I pray they don't screw it up with
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merger (Score:1)
So two networks that are incompatible (CMDB vs GSM) are going to merge. Thats going to be fun.. Not to mention that stupid diddle ring tone t-mobile has.
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Network compatibility? (Score:3)
Re:Network compatibility? (Score:5, Informative)
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...and by the time they're really integrated it will be time to roll out 5G anyway, which is likely a big driver of this merger. Without it neither will be able to afford to roll out 5G networks until long after AT&T and VZ are mostly finished.
Re:Network compatibility? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Pretty much no different than when T-Mobile took over MetroPCS!
Re:Network compatibility? (Score:5, Interesting)
LTE uses OFDMA, with a few channels using dynamically assigned TDMA. These are compatible with both GSM and CDMA carriers as long as the phones aren't frequency-locked to a specific carrier's bands. So the networks would in fact be compatible if you made a phone with an OFDMA LTE radio, and both CDMA and GSM voice radios. My old Nexus 5 supports all those. So does the unlocked Samsung Galaxy 8/8+. If a combined Sprint/T-Mobile requested manufacturers to make such phones, I'm sure they would (except Sony, who seems to hate CDMA voice).
Sprint service is fine in most of the East coast and midwest. Their service has been hamstrung in the West coast because the company they hired to build their tower network there (which has since gone bankrupt) spaced the towers out the furthest apart the specifications allowed. You know, the time-honored tradition of fulfilling the exact letter of the contract while spending the least amount of money possible. This resulted in a cellular network which only worked well in open, flat terrain, and had lots of dead spots in urban and hilly areas. Sprint has tried to fix this by adding intermediate towers, but this is expensive and often results in towers being too close together.
The only true fix is to tear it all down and build all the towers again with proper spacing. Or to merge with another carrier with their own tower network, and to reallocate transmitting equipment to properly spaced towers, and shut down unnecessary towers. The extra cellular bandwidth wouldn't hurt either seeing as both companies predominantly operate in the 1.8-1.9 GHz bands (Verizon and AT&T have the advantage of 900 MHz voice bands).
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Sprint is CDMA. T-Mobile is GSM. How does a merger make sense when they can't even combine current customers onto the same network.
All the telco's are in the process of migrating traditional voice networks to VoLTE.
I wanted a blanket phase out of CDMA... (Score:2)
I wanted a blanket phase out of CDMA... not more Mergers. CDMA is inherently Anti-consumer. What I wanted to see is a compulsory switch from CDMA to GSM for Verizon and Sprint, and a break up of Qualcomm, This is the opposite of what I wanted.
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Sherman Antitrust Act (Score:2)
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Allowing companies to gain such huge market share is definitely anti-competitive and hurts consumers.
Sprint's share + TMUS's share is still less than the market share of either VZ or ATT.
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It seems that there is no appetite to enforce the Sherman Act as of late.
Sure, the U.S. Government effectively stalled the acquisition of T-Mobile by AT&T a few years ago. But more recently, if EVER there was a time to invoke the Sherman Act, it should have been when AT&T acquired DirecTV, especially since they already had their own subscription TV service (Uverse).
There was also the NBC/Universal acquisition by Comcast; they now own production, distribution and exhibition of a pretty big part of Am
Have some prices (Score:1)
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Quite happy to see the Estonia (my mother's birthplace) has tripled its per capita income in the 21st century. It's now about 30k$US.
Still half the income in the USA, so adjust prices accordingly.