Japan's Softbank Buying Sprint, Creating Third-Largest Global Carrier

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."

Comments

MVNO

[vlm]

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.

Re:MVNO

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

I'm with Credo, which uses Sprint's network. They aren't the cheapest around, but they have good service and the biggest selling point is that they aren't evil. They give to a lot of progressive charities (in fact they give the option of rounding up your bill to the next dollar or five to donate) and they stood up to the government a few months back when they demanded customer information without a warrant (at least everyone was pretty sure it was Credo, the company was being kept secret but some people were able to narrow it down).

Re:MVNO

[MachineShedFred]

Sprint has always made more money selling to operators than to end users. This goes all the way back to the company's creation, when they were part of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Little known fact: Sprint is an acronym (Southern Pacific Railroad Intercontinental Network Telecommunications).

They started with selling long distance service to corporations as "private lines" in competition to AT&T using the microwave network and fiber the railroad built on their right-of-way. With a court decision allowing them to have a switched network rather than just private lines, they got into retail sales.

Will this somehow cause Sprint to stop sucking?

[pecosdave]

Been a customer of theirs going on my third year. When I get a great signal there's often very little back-haul. I really feel screwed over the way they lured me in with the promise of WiMax, and their LTE is lacking most of the time. Not to mention now that I've upgraded my phone I pay more every month, but they took away my unlimited tethering data plan - they still charge the same.

Re:Will this somehow cause Sprint to stop sucking?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry--SoftBank is the suckiest carrier in Japan--terrible signal quality, despite a lot of advertisements about how they've "improved." They used to attract switchers as the sole provider of the iPhone, but as they no longer have exclusivity, their gain in market share has slowed to a trickle. A lot of SB customers in Japan are gnashing their teeth over this acquisition, in which SB effectively invested its profits into a totally new market rather than re-investing into their core customer base.

Having said all that, SB is a wet dream compared to the clusterf*ck that is AT&T Wireless. (Don't know about Sprint)

Could be worse

[GeneralTurgidson]

CenturyLink could have bought them.

Explains my crappy signal strength

[sl4shd0rk]

Sprint has apparently already moved it's towers to Japan

Re:Explains my crappy signal strength

[LifeIs0x2A]

Actually Softbank is the carrier with the shittiest signal in Japan..

Re:Explains my crappy signal strength

[Pikoro]

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.

Re:Explains my crappy signal strength

[TheNinjaroach]

Great! They're a perfect match.

Re:Gleat

[rubycodez]

the japanese do have an 'r' sound distinct from 'l', but it is pronounced in a manner halfway between the english 'l' and 'r' sound. an english speaker could start to make the 'l' sound, but make the tongue stop short of the roof of the mouth, almost in the position for the letter 'd'

Who are we?

[CCarrot]

"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. ..."

We're number three! We're number three!

Should be a great move...

[evilviper]

What Sprint desperately needs, right now, is a huge influx of capital. They've got some extremely valuable frequencies, which they are freeing-up in just a few months as they kick people off iDEN/Nextel. These lower frequencies are the difference between Sprint having piss-poor coverage outside of the most dense cities, and them having deep coverage that can really compete with AT&T and Verizon. Sprint's poor cellular coverage is directly related to using the 1.9GHz spectrum, and needing more towers to get equivalent coverage.

Combine those lower frequencies with LTE, and start on a building-spree, and Sprint could put together a respectable LTE network pretty quickly. Consumers haven't really embraced 4G in a big-way, for whatever reason (cost, coverage, power-sucking chipsets, etc), so Sprint isn't terribly disadvantaged just yet.

What's more, they COULD have a huge advantage over AT&T/Verizon right now, if they would leverage WiMax during the LTE build-out... Just start selling CDMA+WiMax+LTE handsets, and let them use the fastest service available, and doing the LTE build-out FIRST in areas that currently lack WiMax. Sprint could have an impressive "4G" coverage map right away, if dual WiMax/LTE phones existed, and Sprint leveraged both to good effect from the start (ie. NOW). Their status as the only carrier who is NOT capping or throttling customers due to data usage would make their 4G service an even bigger selling point.

They could also double-down on this strategy, by using WiMax/LTE for their dumb phones as well, if in a bandwidth-limited form, moving people off of 3G/CDMA that much faster, and putting an end to the need to spend resources to continue expanding their current 3G network, which will soon be getting far less use, no matter what.