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FCC Approves Sprint-Nextel Merger
Luke writes "Sprint and Nextel received approval from the Federal Communications Commission to merge to form the number three wireless company on Wednesday. FCC commissioners gave the companies unanimous support for the merger. The companies, which announced the merger on Dec. 14, 2004, expect to finalize the merger soon."
which is it gonna be? ;)
first post!
As we usher in a new era of reduced costs and consumer savings!!!!1!1
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
I can't wait to buy my first Sextent phone.
So does this mean that people who work for Nextel are no longer allowed to fraternize with those who work for Sprint after the merger if that new labor law proposal passes? Or do they get some sort of grandfathered in "friendship/buddy" clause that allows them to still retain friendships and acquaintances in such an occurrence?
Maybe the shittiness of Nextel and Sprint will cancel eachother out?
Ugh. Just what we need. This is like when your huge, fat, impotent, blubbering idiot of a third cousin marries your bitchy, chain-smoking, slut of a first cousin. Nothing can result from the union except terrible, retarded things.
... if this is what passes for "News for nerds."
So now we'll have lousy customer service (sprint) combined with that fabulous redneck mating call:
{bee-deep} "Billy!"
{bee-deep} "Yeah!"
{bee-deep} "Where ya at?"
{bee-deep} "At lunch!"
{bee-deep} "What?"
{bee-deep} "At luunncchh!"
{bee-deep} "Where?" (...)
I can't believe that a great company like Nextel wants to merge with a crappy company like Sprint. It kind of reminds me when Sears merged with K-mart. The sad thing is that it's usually the weaker partner that wins out.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
Spritel? Nexint? Vista?
....so much for me switching my carrier to Nextel
Sextel?
Does anyone out there know what will happen from a network technology perspective? It seems to me that Nextel's iDen "standard" is entirely incompatible with Sprint. Will Spring just send Nextel customers new Sprint units? Then what happens to Push to Talk?
Would they have to privide dual chipset phones to take advantage of all the Nextel infrastructure? I suspect Motorola will lose out, because CDMA seems to be better suited for the future and is used more widely. Nextel will probably be converted to CDMA and Sprint will get the huge Nextel corporate contracts as soon as it can implement the local "walkie-talkie" feature that Nextel customers love so much.
Verizon wants is in attempts to purchase MCI. Got it in a postcard from the state regulators yesterday...
Based on the press release, it appears that Nextel will be dropping their iDen network in favor of CDMA (or rather migrating)... raising the somewhat stupid question of "why?" I would have expected them to migrate Sprint over to iDen.
Can someone explain what sense this makes? Wouldn't Nextel have some interest in keeping the iDen network going instead of paying royalties over CDMA? Or is the cost of continuing to build out the iDen network more than the royalties? Or am I misunderstanding the whole thing?
I'm very confused.
The FCC should have mandated the removal of the "Push To Talk Feature" as part of the agreement. When you live in a society that has lost all concept of manners (and don't say the South is still some shining example, because I just lived there for 3 years and it is becoming just as vapid and rude as any place else) something that basically enables people to be even bigger assholes in public is the last thing we need.
Inevitably, you have soccer moms and ghetto thugs (or wannabes) blasting their conversations across the entire room, and for some reason they feel the need to shout even louder than they normally would on a cell phone. (another thing that drives me nuts)
Broadband Mobile Wi-Fi Enabled cars on the highway sound nice.
Sextel
All the execs are moving to Nextel's Reston, VA location, making the massive, expensive Sprint campus a waste of time.
Oh wait, sorry, it's still used for "operations".
When two sucky cellular providers merge is that bad because you've got one double sucky provider, or is it better because you've got one less sucky provider?
Yes, yes, yes. But what does this mean for the men in his parent's basement?
I don't think I can get all psyched up for the NASCAR Sprint Cup. NASCAR Nextel Cup rolls off the tongue so much better.
What will the NASCAR championship be called now?
I'm a Sprint customer right now, and I can honestly say Sprint sucks. Granted, everyone has horror stories about any one particular wireless provider (none are perfect), but the issues I've had with Sprint have been insane.
It's not so much the service itself (which is not great, I still get dropped calls from time to time, but it's acceptable). It's their crummy customer service and problem resolution system. They disconnected my service 'accidentally', claiming I hadn't paid my bill when I had, despite the fact their customer service reps told me their computers showed a credit on my account followed by a "I don't understand why this happened. Don't worry, we'll fix it. Your service will be on within four hours." Four hours would pass, no service, I'd call again, same response with a "oh, this time it will be different". This lasted 3 ½ days. To make matters worse, every time I'd call their "customer care" number and punch in my phone number, they'd bump me to their collections department, where I'd wait on hold before getting to speak with somebody who would insist I hadn't paid my bill until I convinced them to look at their computer, then transfer me back into the queue for their regular customer service. To make matters worse, about one out of every three calls I made connected me with such a thick accent I couldn't understand them, and they had real trouble understanding me.
There's a lot more; this is just the problem I've had in the last week. I'm stuck in this contract with them for another 11 months and to date fully expect to ditch them as soon as my contract is up.
So my question is this: with Nextel, can I expect things to get any better?
The Internet is generally stupid
Obligitory:
I for one, welcome our new Sextellian overlords.
If you just took anything I said seriously, read it again.
Corporate power is anathema to small business formation as the overaccumulation of capital in the hands of a small group of people who are more likely to hoard assets than invest them, makes it really hard for anyone who is not born with a silver spoon in their mouth to create a new business.
Right now only five software companies create 75% of the revenues in the software industry here in the United States, and people wonder why the tech-job market is exploding in India and China, while laws like Sarbanes-Oxley which are ironically intended to curb corporate corruption, only enhance its power at the expense of small and medium sized businesses.
I mean, at this rate the entire telecommunications industry will just be a monopoly in the very near future, or at the very least, a colluding duopoly like Visa and Mastercard which is arguably just as bad since it gives the false impression to the public that there is competition in the marketplace.
And why does our government allow these kind of mergers to take place without even thinking twice about the long-term consequences? Oh yah, it is the mistaken premise by the leaders of both political parties that corporations need to get fatter in order to compete in the "World Economy" with largely state owned businesses in China and India as well as the oligarchy oriented super-massive corporations of old Europe and Japan.
Until the United States (and the rest of the world for that matter) has a graduated corporate tax on revenues (not profits but revenues), things are going to get worse and worse for the worker as they will be stuck in a state of inertia slaving away in some cubicle at a super-massive corporation with no option of finding another job because no new jobs will be created due to small businesses getting the shaft by their own theoretically democratic government which constantly creates unnecessary laws which add relatively major costs of compliance to small businesses, while leaving large corporations relatively unscathed.
How are small businesses so supposed to compete against large corporations if all their capital is being drained by their government while large corporations can use their political influence to get tax breaks and sweet heart deals to add to their bottom line.
I mean seriously, when will the American public get the drift that corporate mergers are not some special unification to be joyous about as if corporate mergers should be treated as some kind of state wedding.
if phones start having video then what would happen to the many phone sex companies...where fat ugly women with sexy voices tell u that they are 36-24-36???
Aside from having shittier coverage in cities, these providers are better about embracing technology and opening their networks.
I can't help but to wonder what this means for customers. Nextel has been pushing mobile devices as business tools for a long time (walkie-talkie feature, sophisticated pager-like functionality, etc.) whereas Sprint seems to focus more on casual use (they provide the dialtone for Virgin Mobile). Hopefully they continue to build on these areas instead of chip away at them...
Consolidation in this area is kind of disturbing since these companies are already gigantic and impersonal, but if it leads to some standardization, perhaps ISVs can start rolling out useful content/functionality for mobile devices instead of just selling Britney Spears and N'SYNC ringtones.
boring.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The new company will keep the last three letters of each name and will be known as Int-Tel. They will be dropping the low end service plans and low end phones.
Also, phone numbers will now be big-endian.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
WARNING ---- CENSORSHIP!!!!
###########
FFII Web site taken down
Ingrid Marson
ZDNet UK
August 02, 2005, 15:40 BST
Talkback
Tell us your opinion
Legal troubles have led to the anti-patent group's hosting company pulling the plug on FFII.org
The FFII Web site has been taken offline, after a German software company obtained a court order against the anti-patent campaign group.
The software company, called Nutzwerk, has been issued five provisional court orders and one preliminary injunction against the FFII, about allegedly false information that has been posted on the campaign group's Web site.
René Holzer, the chief executive of Nutzwerk, said on Tuesday that when the FFII did not respond to these court orders, it asked the organisation's hosting company to take the FFII Web site offline. A spokesman for the hosting company, Teamware, admitted that it had turned off the site, but was unable to provide any additional details.
The FFII did not say what if any changes it would make to its Web content, but claimed that Nutzwerk is trying to "cleanse the Net of critical reporting".
It is unclear what information the FFII was asked to remove by the Hamburg court injunction. Holzer claimed there are "more than a dozen" things that are untrue on the FFII Web site, but was unwilling to go into more detail about particular claims made by the FFII.
The FFII said on Monday that it has already found another hosting company, but the transfer of the FFII.org domain could take "up to 3 days". It advised visitors to go to nosoftwarepatents.com instead.
This is not the only such case that Nutzwerk is tied up in; it is also pursuing a case against German news Web site Heise.de over an article the site published in October last year.
After reading all of these comments about Nextel and Sprint I have to wonder if ANYBODY with a cell phone in the US is happy with their service. And let's not even talk about Cingular's new slogan. A guy I know on IRC recently got a job with Cingular. The catch-line lately has been "Hey Ted? Whatcha been up to? Busy raising the bar, I'll bet." He still doesn't get it. That's what makes it so beautiful.
doesn't it require a real girl to work?
Nextel uses SIMs, CDMA providers do not. From a corporate standpoint, SIMs give a phone a lower TCO because you can easily reuse handsets. Bob want's Joe's phone and Joe wants Bob's phone. A simple SIM swap is all it takes. For Sprint or Verizon, it's practically a week long process. Where I work, if someone gets fired or quits or turns in their phone. We just call Nextel or Tmobile and cancel the account then the phone (usually a Blackberry) gets put in a box. Then Joe Newguy, gets hired, we just put a working SIM from whoever most recently turned in a phone, in the phone and give it to him. Changing numbers is a snap with SIMs, just call up the provider and they can issue you a new number in 2 minutes. Verizon wanted me to key in a bunch of stuff in the phone to make it work.
From what I read while helping to build a case to defend a former customer from their bullying collection tactics (You shouldn't cash peoples checks, and not provide service.. then try to charge termination fees, when you were the one that turned off the customers phones even when the bills were paid.)
Sprint PCS is a DBA name for Ubiqicom (sp?), apperently they licensed the Sprint name from the 'real' Sprint.
Kinda like that "Lawnmower Man" movie, based on "The Story by Stephen King", which sucked so bad.
Careful who you let use your business name.
This whole thing is made worse by the fact that RS will stop carrying Verizon at the end of the year in favor of Cingular. So now they'll be carrying that along with Spring and Nextel. Radio Shack works on the Good, Better, Best principle. But what do they have now? Bad, Terrible, and Really Really Shitty? I'm only half-ticked. Sprint, contrary to what everyone else seems to think, has excellent phones and great service. Their customer support is the worst, though. They're perhaps the one company that would benefit from outsourcing their customer support. Their push-to-talk feature is hands down better than Nextels, too, fwiw. Cingular, imho, is terrible. Rollover minutes are nowhere near as useful as Sprint's Fair & Flexible plans. Sprint's network is everywhere (and to top it off, they roam on Verizon's network...if you don't get service with Sprint or Verizon, you won't get service ANYWHERE). Cingular tries to win people over by offering flashy phones that wouldn't get good reception if you were plugged in to a cell tower. And Nextel, well... Let's ignore the fact that business customers get prefferential treatment (find someone with a business accound and one with an individual account and see who gets better reception). 8 out of every 10 times I try to call a Nextel phone, it spends 5 minutes trying to locate it. And forget about the walkie-talkie. How many times do you have to push the button before it actually works? The Sprint-Nextel merger makes absolutely no sense to me. People are flocking from Nextel to Sprint on the premise that, once the merger goes through, the Nextel PTT with work with Sprint's. News Flash: Nextel plans on supporting their network until AT LEAST 2010. If I had to predict the future, I'd say that Nextel will be the business unit, and Sprint will be the individual consumer unit. I've heard it rumored that Nextel wanted to dump everyone but business accounts, anyway. I suppose we'll have to wait and see.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
If anyone doesn't think the US government has a role in ensuring American markets and American corporations are controlled to protect consumers, look into how China's CNOOC dropped its attempt to take over American Unocal. The Congressional opposition was, of course, only due to its unacceptability to so many Americans. Chinese money is just as green as American - and since so much of that CNOOC money is American dollars bought up by China as American debt (mostly real estate), it's all really Chinese money. But we get to keep Unocal, for now.
--
make install -not war
Business tools? Let's don't forget that revolutionary new division of Nextel, Boost Mobile.
Breakfast served all day!
As a general rule, GSM is usable places outside North America, while CDMA and iDEN aren't. A year ago, wandering around asking if phones worked anywhere else would result in three affirmative answers (from ATT Wireless, Cingular and T-Mobile), and three blank stares (from Verizon, Nextel and Sprint).
After the ATT-Cingular merger and the Nextel-Sprint merger, we'll only have two of each kind of answer. This will make shopping so much faster!
Ultimately we'll just have two monopolies: PhonesThatWork, Inc. and PhonesThatSuck, Inc. And they'll both charge an arm and a leg. Joy.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
So does this mean that people who work for Nextel are no longer allowed to fraternize with those who work for Sprint after the merger if that new labor law proposal passes?
No, it means they have to strip first. Take off the uniforms and put on street clothes and the recent ruling has no chance to apply make your time.
Nextel (and sprint) suck ass. If you could pick the to worst cell compainies, that would be them. Oh well, dumbasses keep paying outrageous rates to Nextel so they can have the redneck CB radio feature. Yeah, that will last long. Go Nextel!
Nextel was facing a multibillion technology upgrade to keep up with the other major carriers, plus mandatory costs in moving its customers off spectrum (near emergency bands) the FCC has de-allocated to Nextel (as a result of a deal). iDEN is a deadend. All carriers will be using CDMA technology in the near future because it is most spectrum efficient (greatest amount of information carried for a given bandwidth allocation). Even GSM will move to CDMA, though the details (WCDMA) will make it non-interoperable with current US CDMA carriers. But it will be a major technology overhaul for GSM carriers as well, whereas current CDMA carriers will face only incremental upgrades.
OTOH, it seems likely that all roads will probably also lead to VOIP, and wireless cell carriers will end up with wireless IP networks that carry voice and data via IP.
The only thing that Nextel brings to the table is a bunch of customers with high ARPU (average revenue per user) (business/corporate) that expect good PTT (DC). Although Sprint presently has a fair implementation of PTT over CDMA, it is expected that Sprint/Nextel will implement QCHAT, a much better form of PTT (also developed by Qualcomm), that Nextel owned the rights to. This will give Sprint/Nextel the path to wean DC customers to PTT over CDMA. iDEN/DC though a dead end, will remain alive through 2010, so they say...
The Sprint around the corners?
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Why is it that a de-facto monopoly is bad for operating systems, but wonderful for cell-phones?
You would prefer it if the whole world adopts a mediocre, rushed-out standard whose only advantage is its installed base (GSM), over a well-thought out, high-performance technology (CDMA) that beats it hands down in every conceivable technological aspect, like support for much larger cell sizes, coverage, battery life, ease of deployment, capacity, frequency reuse and inter-cell handoff?
Are you aware that the GSM community has been forced to adopt a CDMA-based technology (Wideband CDMA) as the basis for its third generation, at the expense of accumulating considerable amounts of egg on its face?
As for your comments about CDMA not working outside Northern America... please educate yourself before spouting such nonsense. CDMA is widely deployed in Brazil, India, China, Russia, Australia, and dozens of other non-American countries. It has tens of millions of subscribers outside North America. I have used my American CDMA phone in India and Brazil. It works as long as your service provider has roaming arrangements with the one in the visiting country. The only geographic area where CDMA does not have a foothold is Western Europe (big surprise), where the various governments have passed rules to ban non-GSM technologies! Various operators who would otherwise have gladly chosen CDMA have been FORCED to adopt GSM. But CDMA is making an entrance now, through the 450 MHz band, and various politicians in Western Europe are scurrying around trying to pass rules to ban it in that band also.
Or have you simply bought into the myth that "GSM is an open standard, CDMA is controlled by Qualcomm?" Let me educate you: if you are a small vendor trying to build a CDMA system, you indeed have to pay royalties to Qualcomm. If you want to build a GSM system, you have to pay royalties to more than one company (mostly Nokia and Ericsson), who collectively own patents that affect almost every aspect of GSM operation. This is because GSM is a "standards by committee" technology, adopted precisely because it enabled the dominant companies of the time to ensure that their patents were represented in the standard.
Magnus.
I laughed out loud when I read your sig, because I've seen firsthand how government inefficiently is helping Nextel prosper and grow.
I just quit my job at the county Parks and Recreation department, and everyone there has Nextels. We shared a building with the sheriffs, and they had Nextels too. Pretty much every county employee in the county uses Nextels, and from what I gather many of the neighboring counties use them too. This is because of the walkie-talkie feature, which theoretically saves a lot of money. It made sense, and I figured that Nextel must be offering them a pretty nice discount.
Then one day I actually saw the bill for one of those things, and I nearly shit myself. FORTY CENTS A MINUTE. No free minutes at all, just forty cents a minute, PLUS A CONNECTION CHARGE of $0.75.
Everyone in the county was on this same plan. So much for the discount. But hey, no big loss because we're all supposed to be using the walkie-talkie feature, right?
Hah. First, the walkie-talkie was billed at around $0.15 a minute. Just for reference, there are PREPAID phones out that offer ten cents a minute for REAL phone capability. Second, we used the walkie-talkie feature maybe 10% of the time at best. Often we were calling land lines, but mostly we were just too lazy to search through the address book for the (often cryptic) walkie-talkie phone ID when we could just dial the number by hand. Oh yeah, and there were personal calls, too. They'd did monitor your bill, but as long as you kept each call under ten minutes they didn't care. Under their wonderfully discounted Nextel plan, a one-minute call was a mere $1.15!
Incidentally, this is how I found out about the billing plan. I made a few hour-long calls to a girl I was interested in, figuring that it was worth the $10-$25 I'd have to pay (if I even had to pay at all... I assumed my plan had SOME free minutes.) Imagine my surprise when I was slapped with a bill that was well over $100...
Somebody SOMEWHERE has got to be watching the bottom line...I mean fuck, given the size of our county, it must be in the millions. Either they're terminally apathetic, or they just can't tear their eyes off of the free phones (and cars?) Nextel keeps sending them.
So um, yeah, if Nextel really isn't doing that well, I wouldn't be at all surprised if government inefficiency was to blame... maybe with a healthy dose of criminal activities on the side...
For all of the naysayers: Virgin Mobile gets the best ratings from its customers for its network over Verizon, Cingular, Sprint and Nextel. Guess who's network they use? Sprint. It's surprising that technical people get caught up in old hype about Sprint having a bad network.
As a SprintPCs customer all I can say is too bad for you. You can kiss any notion of service, carrier, coherent billing or being able to rectify any problem no matter how small, out the window. Plus as an added bonus, virtually 100% of the known universe is DIGITAL ROAMING so whatever your plan you will be raped by charges.
In customer satisfaction surveys SprintPCS usually comes out slightly above North Korean Prison Camps, but not always.
And how soon will it be before we only have one or two telecoms that control *everything*... except this time, they'll be unregulated.
Bring back Ma Bell!
Alternatively, let me propose an Act for Congress to promote free and fair competition:
1) in any interstate industry, including but not
limited to telecom, transportation, and
retail, if mergers result in less than
four companies controlling at least 85%
of the market, that industry becomes
a regulated monopoly.
2) in those same industries, if further
consolidation results in one company
controlling at least 85% of the market,
it will be nationalized.
The intent is, of course, to scare them into free and fair competition.
mark "and what's wrong with socialism?"
Was because the CEO's and board of directors from both companies wanted to make a killing from stock options from the merger.
Merging two large companies in no way benefits the consumers or the regular workers of those companies seeings that you are trying to combine two almost independendant organizations together in a larger less organized organization.
Also trying to combine two incompatible network protocols would be very painful for all involved... In reality the smart way to merge with have just joint board of directors and keep the companies two serpate enities reporting to one group.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I thought mergers of public companies had to be approved by the SEC, not the FCC. Do they need approval from both commissions because they are telecom companies?
As another SprintPCS customer, I don't feel the same as you. I have had them for 4 years or so and have never had any problems that I can remember. Also, in Maryland, I haven't noticed any holes in coverage. For some reason it just seems vogue to bash Sprint. Sprint also has their new fair and flexible plans, which I think are fairly nice in that they adjust the number of minutes you are purchasing each month (in 100 minute incretments) to the number of minutes you used that month so one doesn't have to worry about overage as much. Finally, after looking at other companies offerings, I like Sprints Vision service for wireless internet access (which allows unlimited downloads) better than other companies service where the users pays by the MB or whatever unit they select.
i'm still young..
best college pickem site ever: pickem.terrbear.org
If thats the case, then just call them up and tell them talk a lot of shit... 1) You were going to tell your friends to switch to sprint and now you are going to tell them that their service blows 2) You will refuse to pay your bill unless they resolve this issue, that they will have to spend more on collection agencies than the amount is worth. 3) You will report them to the BBB, 4) try to make them sympathize with you "what would you do if you were in my shoes??" 5) ask to speak to a supervisor.. keep escalating till you get what you want. 6) ask for the person that you are speaking with's name .. that makes them feel accountable if they fuck up.
some company tried to shaft me last year and I wouldnt let them off the phone till it got my issue resolved...
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the Intel CISC architecture is little-endian (unlike most RISC architectures, which are big-endian).
Actually it's kinda funny:
small instruction set = big endian
big instruction set = little endian
For Sprint or Verizon, it's practically a week long process. [...] Changing numbers is a snap with SIMs, just call up the provider and they can issue you a new number in 2 minutes. Verizon wanted me to key in a bunch of stuff in the phone to make it work.
:P
Are you saying it takes you a week to key in those numbers?
Swapping phones with Verizon is a piece of cake. I don't have experience with Sprint, but it's the same technology. All you need to do is go to their web site, type in the new phone's ESN, and then dial *228 on the phone to program it over the air. You don't need to type any programming information into modern CDMA phones.. it all happens over the air.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
In addition to a lucrative customer base, Nextel also brings radio spectrum to the table.
Nextel didn't have an upgrade path to mobile high speed data, at least in the air interface. As for the core network?
I have tried nearly every cell company out there and the only one I have been happy with so far is Metro PCS in South Florida, $55 a month unlimited local and LD in the whole region, for short trips just pay as you go, and the service is small enough and sound enough I rarely get dropped calls... When will one of the bigger companies give unlimited for a fee..