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SoftBank Is Willing To Cede Control of Sprint To Get T-Mobile Merger Done, Says Report (phonedog.com)
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.
belong apart!
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?
those funny Japanese. https://www.dramafever.com/new...
There goes my dream of sexy Japanese phones.like more Sharp Aquos phones or Fujitsu Arrows.
Fuckheads!
"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.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
the whole point is competition. You're still effectively (and massively) reducing competition. What's more, this leaves them open to an AT&T style buy back scheme where they skirt around the rules.
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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.
Sig for hire.
Where's the competition if everyone is buddies with each other? Doesn't this kill innovation?
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" because they are looking like a bunch of douches now) -- this is a prime example of what competition does. Competition that wouldn't be happening with fewer players.
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?
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 to the other's, so they're redundant and most would just have to go. At best, it would be like the MetroPCS buyout... T-Mobile would be buying the brand, stores, and customers, telling them all they need to replace their phones in short order, and shutting off the foreign network they don't want or need to bother maintaining. It really only serves as a legal way to kill-off a competitor.
Of course Sprint just LOVES idiotic ideas. Nextel, WiMax, Clearwire, Tidal, etc. The more obviously idiot the idea, the quicker Sprint is going to jump at it, so they can start burning money even faster.
They clearly think a merger with T-Mobile is a foregone conclusion, because they've completely given-up on improving their network. They announce upgrades, then cut the budget to not just a fraction of what they need to catch-up, but a fraction of what is needed to just maintain parity and avoid falling further behind their competitors. So Sprint's network keeps getting slower and slower.
Some people have been saying it looks like SoftBank is spinning all their valuable assets off to subsidiaries that they control, but which aren't under Sprint, so as the company fails from the lack of investment, the other investors will get nothing, while SoftBank gets to keep or sell-off everything of value. But I believe it's just more of a delaying strategy... Keep Sprint limping along, but perpetually on the edge of failure, in hopes regulators will fear a (too big to fail) bankruptcy, and go along with a merger no matter how bad it looks for every one of the stakeholders involved.
SoftBank made an idiotic investment. Sprint is worth rescuing, but they aren't interested or particularly capable of doing it. They deserve to lose their shirt. Then sell the company to somebody who's actually going to try to build it back up into a viable and competitive cellular carrier again.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I left Sprint when SoftBank purchased 75% (and of course, when the shareholders decided to cash in and sell my business to a Chinese firm).... and I became a T-Mobile customer.
Now I hear this news. Soon we won't be able to buy mobile service (or a smartphone, or a toothpick, or much of anything) without being a customer of China.