Slashdot Mirror
Sprint 'Betting Big On Trump,' Could Merge With T-Mobile Or Comcast (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Speculation that Sprint will merge with T-Mobile USA or another competitor has ramped up since the inauguration of President Donald Trump. That continued Friday when a report from The New York Times suggested that Sprint could be combined with either T-Mobile or Comcast, the nation's largest cable company. Masayoshi Son, founder and CEO of Sprint owner SoftBank, "and his financial advisers are weighing several major possible deals for Sprint," the Times wrote. "Be it a tie-up with T-Mobile U.S., Sprint's closest competitor, or a more ambitious marriage with the cable colossus Comcast, a transaction would allow Mr. Son to fulfill a long-held ambition to invest aggressively in wireless networks in the United States and enable next-generation mobile technology." Titled "The World's Top Tech Investor Is Betting Big on Trump," the Times report says that "the Trump administration's push for lighter regulation and lower taxes has been a powerful lure for cash-rich investors the world over." SoftBank, which is based in Japan, had several of its executives "spen[d] a day in Washington talking to senior members of Mr. Trump's economic team" last month, according to bankers who were briefed on the meetings, the Times report said. U.S. regulators opposed wireless consolidation during the Obama administration, preventing potential mergers between AT&T and T-Mobile and later between Sprint and T-Mobile. With four major nationwide carriers, U.S. wireless competition recently led to an expansion of unlimited data plans.
Soon, we will have fewer choices again.
What this country needs when it comes to cable and broadband providers is less competition and higher prices. Let's fall even further behind the rest of the industrialized world.
By my understanding of mobile phone technology and protocols those are the two least compatible networks in the USA at the present time. All the customers of one would eventually be stuck buying phones running the protocol of the other. Wouldn't a Sprint / Verizon merger make a lot more sense from a technology standpoint?
Merging with Comcast might make some sense, but I don't recall hearing Comcast ever express a previous interest in going into the mobile market.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Yes. There were transcripts of Flynn talking to the Russian ambassador, so there were wiretaps done on foreign communications. Nobody is questioning whether or not some monitoring of Trump campaign officials was happening.
Nowhere does that say Obama ordered it. Nowhere does it say it was Trump himself that was monitored. It was part of an investigation and done based on evidence with court approval, not some fiat declaration from the dictator-in-chief, which is apparently what Trump supporters think the president is.
The presidency is not a monarchical position. The POTUS does not have king-like powers. One of the things he cannot do, since the Nixon administration, is order a wiretap. Only a court can approve that (including the FISA secret court) and only after an active investigation provides enough evidence to get a warrant.
Get that? Do you have a tape of Obama ordering the tap? No? Then you have nothing. Nor does Trump, by the looks of it.
That's why Comey is out there asking for the Justice Department to repudiate Trump's claim, because it's a bigger lie about the way our formerly stable republic works than it is about Obama. Trump isn't undermining Obama, he's undermining his own government. He is acting like a fifth-columnist, hopefully not wittingly.