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Sprint, T-Mobile Could Announce a Merger By Month's End (androidpolice.com)
Last month, it was reported that T-Mobile is close to agreeing tentative terms on a deal to merge with Sprint. Now, it appears that negotiations between the two companies are almost complete. Android Police reports: The report claims that Sprint and T-Mobile are putting the finishing touches on the merger, which will likely be announced at the quarterly earnings report at the end of this month. Some of the current discussion topics include Sprint's valuation (estimated to be around $29 billion), the location of the combined company's headquarters, and appointments to the executive management team. The merge is not expected to include a breakup/termination fee, meaning if one company backed out of the deal, there would be no financial penalty. This would align both companies to lobby government regulators for approval without any conflicts of interest. After AT&T called off its buyout of T-Mobile in 2011 due to government opposition, the company paid a $4 billion breakup fee to T-Mobile, which helped strengthen T-Mobile as a competitor. The report notes that while T-Mobile and Sprint's quarterly earnings reports have not been set, T-Mobile's was on October 24 last year, and Sprint's was the next day.
Nextel used iDEN which was a technological dead end. Like GSM, it used TDMA - each phone is assigned a timeslice and they all take turns talking with the tower. This was fine for low-bandwidth applications like voice, but was disastrous for data. If you send data using TDMA, the total bandwidth gets split across all phones equally. Each phone gets its full communications timeslice even if it doesn't need all (or any) of it. And some bandwidth is lost for padding to avoid timeslice overlap due to the finite speed of light.
In contrast, CDMA allows all phones to transmit simultaneously. Each phone is assigned an orthogonal code which allows the tower to tell their transmissions apart - kinda like writing vertically and horizontally on the same sheet of paper. The letters overlap, but the shape of the letters is distinct enough (orthogonal) that you can tell which ones are vertical or horizontal, and you can clearly read both overlapping messages. In CDMA, each phone sees the transmissions of the other phones as noise. And the bandwidth each phone gets is the signal to noise ratio. So bandwidth is instantly allocated automatically between all transmitting phones. If a bunch of phones stop transmitting, the noise floor drops, and the phones which are still transmitting get the bandwidth released by the non-transmitting phones.
GSM threw in the towel within a year and amended the GSM spec to add UMTS for 3G data. UMTS used wideband CDMA for data. Yes that's right. CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA war. This was why CDMA got 3G data about a year before GSM. And why GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time (they had a TDMA radio for voice and a CDMA radio for data, whereas CDMA phones only had a single radio which couldn't do both at once). If Sprint hadn't acquired and subsumed Nextel, Nextel would've run into the same problem as GSM and been forced to either adopt CDMA (same as if they'd merged with Sprint), or hemorrhaged customers due to lack of 3G data until they went bankrupt.
That's not entirely true. My Sprint iPhone can roam onto T-Mobile's network just fine (and occasionally does in the very rare spots where T-Mobile has coverage and Sprint doesn't). And even T-Mobile cell phones can use Sprint's LTE network, assuming they support the right bands. They just can't use their 3G network (for lack of a CDMA radio). In urban areas where LTE is readily available, the networks could complement each other nicely.
I still don't like the idea of consolidation, though. We have way too few nationwide cellular networks as it is. We need about ten more, not fewer.
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There are actually tens if not hundreds of companies to purchase cellular phone service through in the US at rates much cheaper than the main companies. They are called MVNO's and basically purchase service from the 4 big companies and resell it. I am a fairly light cell phone user and use a company whom I pay on average less than $1 a month. These types of companies don't tend to do a good job of advertising themselves though--most people have never heard of any of them.
But as for the towers themselves, they are all owned by a handful of companies. It's just not econimically feasible for anyone else to enter that market, and try to set up new towers all over the entire country.