Slashdot Mirror
T-Mobile, Sprint Close To Agreeing Deal Terms (reuters.com)
From a report: T-Mobile US is close to agreeing tentative terms on a deal to merge with peer Sprint Corp, people familiar with the matter said on Friday, a major breakthrough in efforts to merge the third and fourth largest U.S. wireless carriers. The development follows more than four months of on-and-off talks this year between T-Mobile and Sprint, and comes as the U.S. telecommunications sector seeks ways to tackle investments in 5G technology that will greatly enhance wireless data transfer speeds.
I imagine they will phase out the CDMA network. Most other CDMA carriers are dropping it. Verizon is slated to turn off theirs in 2019 and several Canadian carriers are moving away from it as well.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Sprint has a lot of spectrum that it isn't using because it can't afford to. After that, take the total number of subscribers from Sprint and T-Mobile and when it's still less than AT&T or Verizon there's so much spectrum left that T-Mobile could offer (very) much better coverage than either of the two titans.
When a new spectrum auction comes up, T-Mobile will not need to bid and therefore not raise rates to cover cost. Also, with all that new spectrum, 5G will be more realizable.
Finally, T-Moblie could start offering home broadband like Comcast or Charter. There would be lower caps than those but it's still a much more viable option at 5G.
Aside from the SIM card (which is used for LTE anyway), CDMA and GSM are only used for voice and 3G data (in fact GSM uses wideband CDMA for 3G data).
LTE uses OFDMA, with a few channels using dynamically assigned TDMA. These are compatible with both GSM and CDMA carriers as long as the phones aren't frequency-locked to a specific carrier's bands. So the networks would in fact be compatible if you made a phone with an OFDMA LTE radio, and both CDMA and GSM voice radios. My old Nexus 5 supports all those. So does the unlocked Samsung Galaxy 8/8+. If a combined Sprint/T-Mobile requested manufacturers to make such phones, I'm sure they would (except Sony, who seems to hate CDMA voice).
Sprint service is fine in most of the East coast and midwest. Their service has been hamstrung in the West coast because the company they hired to build their tower network there (which has since gone bankrupt) spaced the towers out the furthest apart the specifications allowed. You know, the time-honored tradition of fulfilling the exact letter of the contract while spending the least amount of money possible. This resulted in a cellular network which only worked well in open, flat terrain, and had lots of dead spots in urban and hilly areas. Sprint has tried to fix this by adding intermediate towers, but this is expensive and often results in towers being too close together.
The only true fix is to tear it all down and build all the towers again with proper spacing. Or to merge with another carrier with their own tower network, and to reallocate transmitting equipment to properly spaced towers, and shut down unnecessary towers. The extra cellular bandwidth wouldn't hurt either seeing as both companies predominantly operate in the 1.8-1.9 GHz bands (Verizon and AT&T have the advantage of 900 MHz voice bands).
Verizon's MARKETING of their technology is good. Their technology is awful. They're the only network I consistently have to ask everyone to repeat themselves three times or more if they call me. It's like listening to someone speaking through a garden hose that someone else is jumping on over and over again.
They've learned the secret to getting people to say they have a really good network is:
1. Marketing, marketing, marketing.
2. Maximize coverage, at the expense of everything else.
3. Focus on call drops and other unlikely events that tend to get used as objective metrics.
Do those three, and you can get away with anything, to the point your network is virtually unusable in practice. Why? Because if the objective metrics say it's good, people will rarely even realize the more difficult to measure but more critical attributes of a phone service are infinitely better with all the others. Even Sprint.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.