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Big Telecom: Terms Set For Sprint To Buy T-Mobile For $32B
First time accepted submitter Randy Davis (3683081) writes 'A report from Forbes says that Sprint buying T-mobile for $32 billion is almost done. This will clearly rock the top two telecommunication companies in the U.S., Verizon and AT&T. The news report also said that T-mobile will give up 67% share in exchange of 15% share of the merged company. Officials of both Sprint and T-Mobile are confident that FCC will approve this deal since AT&T's $48.5 billion acquisition of DirecTV got approved.' One reason for that confidence: "The predominant feeling is that combined T-Mobile and Sprint will be able to offer greater competition to Verizon and AT&T , ranked first and second respectively in the U.S. market. It will also give Sprint greater might in the upcoming 600 megahertz spectrum auction, especially since part of it excludes both Verizon and AT&T from bidding."
InforWorld puts the potential price even higher, and points out that the deal could still fall apart.
InforWorld puts the potential price even higher, and points out that the deal could still fall apart.
Also, AT&T's acquisition of DirecTV has not yet been approved. Huge factual error in the summary.
No, fuck you. This is exactly the opposite of introducing competition. It's an extremely shitty company with incredibly shitty service (Sprint) buying a smaller competitor with far better service (T-Mobile) in order to make a much more massive, shittier company than before possible.
This is an anti-trust violation, so fuck these guys!
But they would have to give back some spectrum which would go back for sale to someone else.
Aren't the two using two different cell technologies? How are they to be combined? Do tmobile users need to get new phones?
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Now I know that Sprint and T-Mobile don't have the best wireless coverage, but you're going to have to try a little harder to justify the claim they have the worst customer service. I was under the impression it was just a universally accepted fact that Verizon's customer service is the worst in the industry despite their otherwise excellent network service. As I've heard someone say, Verizon is the hottest girl at the prom, and worse, she knows it.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
It's all relative. I had Verizon and bailed to T-Mobile a few months ago. Both had okay customer service, though I did have a Verizon person intentionally hang up on me. I had to call T-Mobile on Monday to make changes to my plan - I couldn't make the changes via the web site, nor could I go to a store to do it - I had to call. The person I spoke with was pleasent enough and made the changes quickly.
As you say, they have the best network, highest prices, confusing and awful plans, and terrible ETF/subsidy policies.
If increased competition is the goal, then give the smaller companies preference in spectrum auctions.
Multi-billion dollar spectrum auctions are a scam anyway, just a hidden tax that we all pay through higher cellular bills.
Both are moving to LTE. By the time it gets approved and implemented we'll have VoLTE and it'll become even less of an issue.
"'A report from Forbes says that Sprint buying T-mobile for $32 billion is almost done."
Who talks like that? It's grammatically incorrect.
I'd think most people talk like that. Few would use the grammatically correct "A report from Forbes says that Sprint's buying T-Mobile for $32 billion is almost done."
"The news report also said that T-mobile will give up 67% share in exchange of 15% share of the merged company"
Can someone explain that to me? They're giving up a 67% share in a company that's about to not exist in order to have a 15% share in a company that is about to be themselves that they'd effectively own 100% of, because it is them.
My guess is that Sprint has seen the writing on the wall, and wants T-Mobile precisely for GSM. By offering GSM, they can now sell and support phones they couldn't before, especially international models that will all be GSM-based, and Sprint has to pay good money to get manufacturers to make CDMA models.
If the FCC doesn't have power to regulate the internet, then it shouldn't have power to prohibit people from transmitting on any crazy frequency they want.
Actually, new Sprint phones use both CDMA and TDMA at the same time... oops, that's called GSM!
Sounds just like the GTE / Bell Atlantic merger that created Verizon.
In C++, your friends can see your privates.
Naw, I'd put Sprint as dead last both from my friends, coworkers and family with T-mobile slightly ahead of them them in terms of customer service. I had Sprint for years, disconnected calls, no network access, slow network and then 3 years ago I cancelled. After 6 years with them they sent a $400 nasty gram saying I had 10 days to pay or they'd turn it over to collections even though my bill was current. The $400 was for a smartphone and early termination of that. I then went with T-Mobile who I'd been with before Sprint. When T-Mobile filed for bankruptcy it really went south from there. Although the network performance was better customer service sucked badly, so instead of dealing with that I switched to Simple Mobile which uses T-Mobile's network and I don't have all the bullshit. So consumers will have the worst coverage unless your in major metro areas and with spending $32 billion for T-Mobile I doubt Sprint will have the resources to build out the network further, much like when they acquired Nextel.
Verizon's problem is, well they're Verizon and you're not. Their terms and conditions/business practices are recognized as the worst but their customer service and network are top notch. For my business accounts I use Verizon, personal stuff SimpleMobile.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
until a few months ago, I was working at a cell phone tech company (android software and server back-end stuff) and we had to be able to test our stuff with all the local carriers.
we moved our site and wouldn't you know, we could not get any t-mobile reception (and I have a t-mo phone). stepping out of the building didn't help much. putting a real antenna/repeater on the roof and repeating to the bottom floors didn't help!
we had to rent hotel rooms nearby, for days and weeks at a time to do our testing. our corporate headquarters just did not have good cellphone reception (pretty much across the board but tmo was the most useless). if I got an EDGE connection, I felt lucky (sigh). if you can imagine a cell phone company not doing a check of the RF reachability before picking a new HQ, maybe its good for a laugh or two right now. was not very funny at the time, though.
I do like the unlimited plan and no-contract of tmo but letting giants merge to become bigger giants NEVER helps the consumer.
if this is allowed - and we all know it will be - its further proof of the utter detachment of those who make the laws and rules from those who are forced to live under them.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
actually if sprint and t-mobile combine their networks they might be able to compete with verizon, which is a good thing for everybody. right now each company only competes in certain markets.
Anyone have any idea what this will do for Sprint-based MVNOs? I am quite fond of the one I use (Ting), and am curious whether this will change anything, either good or bad. (Bad would be their service getting crappier or prices being forced upwards; good would be, for instance, Sprint phones being sold that allow swapping out sim cards because they support GSM. That'd be cool.)
Not that Sprint and T-Mobile aren't the worst already in customer service...
They aren't, or at least T-Mobiles not so bad. Verizon... boy, there's a company with some terrible customer service.
What worries me more is that Sprint is buying T-Mobile, and not the other way around. Though, I don't know why anyone would want to buy Sprint. My impression is that their customer service isn't so bad, but... boy, there's a company with some incompetent management.
I disagree. 1st. tier cellphone companies DO in fact have to be big .... The dollar amounts involved to roll out and maintain a cellular network across a whole country the size of the United States is steep enough that the little guys just can't accomplish it well.
What we do have room for are the 2nd. tier "regional carriers" -- and personally, I'm disappointed we haven't really seen more happening in that arena. If you're not big enough to compete with the likes of Verizon or AT&T in nationwide coverage, fine. How about focusing on providing top quality coverage and customer service, with good data performance, all within a few states?
For many years, I had an account with U.S. Cellular, in St. Louis, Missouri, and was very pleased with them. Their little marketing strategy of "all incoming calls are free" meant I didn't really need to buy a lot of cellular minutes on my plan. (It's relatively rare I place a call to someone vs. all the times I'm taking a call.) Signal strength and call quality were excellent too. Really, the only downside was a relative lack of choices in phones, because you had to select one designed to work on their network - and they didn't have as much pull as the top carriers to get the latest handsets first. Still, they'd typically manage to get at least 1 or 2 of the "hot" phones out there at any given time. (I had a Motorola Razr flip phone with them, when it was still the in thing.)
T-Mobile, IMO, has really gotten on a roll with upgrading its network to become something respectable. It has a lot of issues still, but as a current customer, I see evidence all the time that change is happening. (My phone has carrier updates pushed to it practically every week, as new towers come online.) Just last week, something changed where I live, too. For a couple days, all of us received "no service" or weak signals throughout the business day, but then suddenly, things came back up with a signal strength far superior to what we ever had before. (I used to use a signal booster in the house, but was able to turn it off after the upgrade.) Can't say if it was a new tower, or a modification or repair made to some existing one -- but it was a nice improvement.
I left AT&T's superior coverage for T-Mobile's superior customer service. I'm not going to say they're perfect because, let's face it, they're not; I've had billing issues with them, but nothing on the recurring-have-to-call-every-month-to-get-a-credit-because-they-refuse-to-fix-the-underlying-problem scale I had with AT&T. Strangely, my phone also seems to work in more places on T-Mobile than it did on AT the only place I have spotty coverage is in my office, where my AT&T phone only worked because I had a microcell (when that could get GPS signal).
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
The Nextel merger worked out pretty poorly for Sprint. Remember why? Because their two networks were incompatible, yet Sprint was required to keep it operating. It didn't get 3G upgrades, yet they had to keep operating until quite recently. There was a massive customer exodus, and Sprint was left holding the bag.
T-Mobile, similarly uses a different and incompatible 3G cellular standard than Sprint, and on entirely different frequencies. Yet Sprint is out to do this all again.
Seems like they've been planning this for some time, and are absolutely dependent on the merger going through, because Sprint has been a complete laggard with LTE deployments, despite their massive modernization effort, and doesn't seem to be trying AT ALL.
Frankly, the Nextel merger could have given Sprint the best network and LTE coverage around, as a happy-accident... Nextel, with their 800MHz spectrum had great coverage, on-par with Verizon's, particularly in mountains, valley, indoors, etc. AT&T and Verizon spent their 800MHz spectrum on 3G networks and have none left. They're using 1900MHz spectrum for their LTE networks, with a resultant reduction in coverage depth.
Sprint wasn't allowed to touch Nextel's spectrum, in the 3G days, so they only freed up their big block of 800MHz when LTE was first being deployed. With a little foresight, they could have put 800MHz LTE radios on their towers, and immediately boasted the best LTE coverage. With great LTE coverage, they could save money by neglecting their 3G network, and pretty quickly stop selling phones that are able to fall-back to anything other than 800MHz LTE. After all, LTE can do simultaneous voice and data, even if AT&T and Verizon have been slow to use it, perhaps for the above reasons.
But Sprint was half-hearted about their great opportunity... first saying they'd use some of that 800MHz band to improve 3G coverage, then later retracting that incredibly stupid idea. And while they've promoted their "Network Vision" upgrades for a couple years, they've still only very slowly expanded their LTE coverage to more than the very biggest urban areas, even skipping some major ones.
And they didn't ever leverage the WiMax network they spent so much money deploying. Sure, it's not LTE, but by just releasing a dual WiMax/LTE phone, Sprint could have boasted the biggest "4G" network from day #1, and they could have begun LTE deployments everywhere they didn't have WiMax, giving wider coverage, quicker. Instead, there's no WiMax/LTE phones to be found, and their LTE deployment simply overlapped their early WiMax deployment, resulting in no net-gain of extra coverage area.
I'm cautiously hopeful that this merger will be what they need, to finally compete. But each time before that they've gotten a big opportunity, they've squandered it. From the outside, Sprint seems to be deeply dysfunctional and lacking in any foresight or innovative ideas, copying the big two in the slowest and least efficient way, possible. The opportunity they have to merge the Sprint and T-Mobile LTE networks with dual-band phones, and quickly deprecate their 3G networks, seems just as likely to be squandered and bungled.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
GSM and CDMA are both DEAD, the very second their LTE networks have equivalent coverage area.
And the market for international travelers, who want to keep using their cell phones, is positively MINUSCULE. I doubt practically ANYBODY other than Verizon Execs are signed-up for Verizon's "Global" service plans.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I've had nothing but good experience with T-Mobile customer service. I can't speak to Sprint's level of service, however.
CHOICE: 2 bowls of candy, and 2 bowls of steaming dog crap, isn't a lot of "consumer choice". If a merger turns that into 3 bowls of candy, then consumers will have MORE choice as a result of the merger. That's a big "IF," but both outcomes are possible.
PRICES: While prices could rise a bit, AT&T and Verizon are both desperate to get a foothold in the prepaid cellular market. To do so, they have dirt-cheap service plans that are nearly competitive with Sprint and T-Mobile, without that whole lousy coverage issue. I don't see how SprinTMobile will be able to raise their prices much, without losing all their customers to pre-paid plans from the big two.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I think it's generally assumed that a poorly regulated monopoly is bad -- rent seeking, no innovation, etc. A duopoly isn't much better, even when it's not explicit you end up with defacto collusion on pricing and market segmentation.
Is a triopoly any better? Is there any economics that says how many vendors in a market are necessary to improve efficiency and consumer choice?
And accounting actually believed that? Bravo. "No, really, we're, ummm, testing. Yes, that's right. Testing. No, the room service was necessary for the testing. And the champagne."
That's just what they tell us. In reality, it's supposed to help shareholders, and ultimately ensure executive bonuses.
Mr CEO, you've just axed 20,000 jobs, what now .... "I'm going to Disney to spend some of this huge bonus I got, and then I'm going to raise everybody's rates to increase revenue".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
2 different systems on two different spectrums using 2 different technologies. Nextel II electric boogaloo. Just when you thought Sprint couldn't get any worse. Sprint is now the biggest reseller of AT&T minutes. Awesome. They will exit the branded retail market soon.
That is the motivation, nothing more.
Sprint MVNOs offer some of the best deals in the US. I currently pay $10/mo for 400 Minutes, 400 Texts, and 300MB of data using RingPlus.
If they continue with the MVNO model and add T-Mobile towers to the network, that sounds pretty great to me.
So you're not just wrong, you are incredibly wrong. Every place I have ever worked, and every person I have met who travels internationally for work uses their work cell phone.
They don't buy a separate phone, they don't look for compatible SIMs to swap in or out, they MAY go so far as to notify their secretary or travel clerk that they expect to use their business phone while in XY country.
I'm a T-Mobile customer, specifically because I have a GSM phone (Sprint ditched/is ditching GSM last I heard) and because T-Mobile doesn't have any stupid contracts. I pay, they give me service, we're both happy. I LIKE T-Mobile. Sure, I don't always have great coverage. it's a minor distraction at worst. It works fine.
I have my own phone (I buy used Nexus S phones, and reflash them with the latest stock Android. No stupid carrier BS on my phone!). I LIKE paying $150 for a phone, and still getting the latest wiz bangs. I LIKE not having a contract. Yes, I even like feeling a little superior to the Morons that buy new phones every 2 years and shell out $ for something that's not really essentially any better than what I have.
Damn. I hope Sprint doesn't buy T-Mobile. If they do, I hope they don't F it up...
I would suggest "A report from Forbes says that Sprint buying T-Mobile for $32 billion is almost a done deal.", because this is what they fucking mean (not that it's true). Sprint buying T-Mobile is no where near done in terms of regulatory approval let alone execution. It is, however, a "done deal" since there fat cats have agreed and it's just a matter of time before the government allows some form of the deal through.