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Sprint, T-Mobile Aiming To Reach Merger Deal Next Week (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. wireless carriers T-Mobile and Sprint have made progress in negotiating merger terms and are aiming to successfully complete deal talks as early as next week. The combined company would have more than 127 million customers and could create more formidable competition for the No.1 and No.2 wireless players, Verizon and AT&T, amid a race to expand offerings in 5G, the next generation of wireless technology. T-Mobile majority-owner Deutsche Telekom and Japan's SoftBank, which controls Sprint, are considering an agreement that would dictate how they exercise voting control over the combined company. This could allow Deutsche Telekom to consolidate the combined company on its books, even without owning a majority stake. Deutsche Telekom owns more than 63 percent of T-Mobile, while SoftBank owns 84.7 percent of Sprint. Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile are also in the process of finalizing the debt financing package they will use to fund the deal, the sources said. There is no certainty that a deal will be reached, the sources cautioned.
This could allow Deutsche Telekom to consolidate the combined company on its books...
Does that mean that the new joined company will keep T-Mobile's management?
Because I'll tell you what, I'm a T-Mobile customer, and I'm pretty happy. The coverage may not be quite as good as Verizon, but there are no hidden fees, no mysterious extra charges, no vague limitations. They don't really do market segmentation with deceptive pricing. They don't try to fight me if I just want to buy an unlocked phone, forgo their subsidy, and have a lower monthly price. The terms of their international roaming are pretty awesome. In the US, they pretty much set the standard for what a cell carrier should be.
Meanwhile, Sprint has been a disaster for years. Even setting aside all the public well-known stuff, I used to have a job that involved dealing with all the major carriers, and Sprint was the worst. They were disorganized. The people who worked there were awful. Their internal systems were poorly designed. That was several years ago, and maybe it got better, but I have no faith in that company.
So if the deal is that T-Mobile gets Sprint's infrastructure to add on to their own, to improve coverage, cool. Great. But if people from Sprint are going to be running anything, then this is very sad news.
We need to organize a letter writing campaign to the governmental authority (whoever that is. The FTC?) to block this. We don't need to drop from 4 wireless carriers to 3.
Sprint is migrating to the LTE variant of GSM, so their cdmaOne/cdma2000 network is increasingly a legacy/gap filler rather than their primary means to providing service, and would eventually be turned off. So that would be happening anyway, albeit more slowly than will happen if T-Mo takes control.
That said, T-Mobile being in control is pretty much a foregone conclusion. T-Mobile is well run and is growing. Sprint PCS has been beleaguered for a longer period than Apple was. It's always been poorly run, with no sense of direction. They botched the NEXTEL merger, initially went for WiMAX instead of LTE, and recently their "iPhone only" thing showed a complete lack of understanding of the market.
T-Mo has its faults, but it's almost always (with the exception of the period starting a year or two before they tried to merge with AT&T until Legere's takeover) been an extremely well run company with a focus on respecting their customers, building their network on quality open standards. (I sound like a shill, but I honestly have a high level of respect for them that I just don't have for the others, and it's based upon personal experience. That period I mention that included the AT&T merger was a bitter experience, proof any company can go to pot.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
It begs the question, could telecoms get much worse?
The answer is: hell yes it could get worse. The bar is so high to get investment capital that even LEO satellites with WiFi or whatever goofy next-gen GSM/LTE/gigglyBS arrives to cover the USA will be insanely expensive. Less carriers is not more.
Everyone wants a payday. The newly merged organization won't be any smarter than the old one, just more bosses and fewer actual workers. The CSRs won't get brighter, coverage won't get better, services won't be finer.
But as stated up-thread, what you or I want will make no difference. Public policy be damned, it's the campaign contribution or allies in the closet that financially benefit closest to the decision makers who will call the tune, and we'll continue to pay the piper.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Sprint using WiMax basically killed that technology. It would have been a great way to get last mile access to people who weren't near towns or main internet connectivity. Sprint screwed up trying to use it for mobile data. I wish someone would pick it up and run with it where it should have been used. Even slow service is better than dial up that many rural homes are stuck with.
I've lost count... how many times has T-Mobile tried to merge with another carrier? And so far, hasn't each and every attempt been rebuffed by antitrust concerns?
Why are we hearing about this, yet again?
CDMA was a superior (and much newer) standard to GSM, but that is a moot point as everyone is moving to voice-over-LTE. Of all the carriers, Sprint is the one lagging behind in this transition. The company itself doesn't appear to be well managed, seemingly having never recovered from that disastrous Nextel merger.
Sprint uses CDMA while T-Mobile uses GSM...
Except that basically everybody is in the middle of transitioning to some variation of LTE, so it'll all be the same in the end, anyway.
The failed AT&T merger is what likely saved T-Mobile. It gave them the needed cash to buy the additional spectrum they needed to be competitive.
... it had better be T-mobile that runs the show.
My wife has long had Sprint, I have long had T-mobile. Sprint sucks, in every conceivable way. Super pricey, awful service.
Latest Sprint example; she finally got a new phone ... gave up waiting for any of the affordable phones to be "in stock" from Sprint (affordable models never "in stock", how believable is that?) and got an unlocked phone elsewhere. Got a SIM from Sprint, it took 2.5 hours on chat with Sprint support, literally, to get the stupid thing working.
Never had any problems with T-mobile. Sprint had better not screw them up.
Trump had nothing to do with it, and there's still no peace treaty signed. The two Koreas agreed that they should end the war and pledged to work toward it, but that's happened before and they're a long way from an actual treaty.
No, it's at 17-year lows. In 2000, the unemployment rate reached a record low of 3.8% in April, and had a four-month run of 3.9% from September to December.
Unemployment rates for blacks and Latinos are at record lows, but even then only by a tenth of a percent. For blacks, December 2017 has a 6.8% rate and February and March 2018 saw rates of 6.9% each. Compare to April 2000 when it was 7.0%. For Latinos, the record low of 4.8% was first achieved in October 2006 and duplicated in June, October, and November 2017.
Egypt, Syria, and Iraq would likely disagree. Egypt is dealing with ISIS in the Sinai Peninsula, Syria is still dealing with remnants, and Iraq is back to fighting them after some of the groups that fled Raqqa tried to take territory in Iraq again. Groups following or inspired by ISIS are still operating in Afghanistan, Libya, Nigeria, and the Philippines, and may be active in Pakistan, Chad, and Tunisia as well.
They said that after the first time he used cruise missiles after a chemical weapons attack, and that one actually did damage to real infrastructure and destroyed some aircraft. Many more chemical attacks happened.
Most people are only taking home a few extra dollars per week, and while a few companies have handed out raises and bonuses, they are by far the exception. Some of the bonuses, like those handed out by AT&T, were planned long before the tax cut was passed but played up as being made possible by it. Those bonuses totaled $200 million for 200,000 employees. Compare that to the $29.5 billion in profit it posted in 2017. They were crowing about sending 0.7% of their profits to the employees. Meanwhile, compensation for the top five executives in 2017 was more than $74 million.
The results so far are paper thin. It wouldn't take much to knock them down. Trump can do that by pushing a trade war, something he seems intent on doing. Even withdrawing from the Iran nuclear treaty could start stacking the deck against the economy given the significant sales that companies like Boeing have lined up with Tehran.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Wrong.
I encounter this on text based mailing lists as well.
Get off my lawn. :)
I think Trump is a reckless goofball, but experts and the South Korean Foreign Minister are crediting him for pressuring North Korea to come to the table. The fact that he's a reckless goofball means you have to take the threats he makes seriously, kinda like how North Korea has been playing the West all these decades. Anyhow, we'll see if it's different this time around, or if it'll be yet another round of North Korea collecting concessions from the West, then reneging on the deal (as happened with food and energy aid in the past).
The fact that North Korea is willing to talk to South Korea alone about a formal peace treaty is in and of itself a pretty big step. Previously, North Korea refused to recognize the legitimacy of the South Korean government, calling it a puppet state, and insisting on negotiating with the U.S. (and only the U.S.) directly. That's why in the past, the U.S. has insisted on 5-way negotiations between all major countries involved in the war - North and South Korea, the U.S., China, and Russia. North Korea agreeing to meet directly with only South Korea about ending the war is already a concession on their part. (So is Trump agreeing to meet Kim without South Korea present. This may be another Nixon-in-China moment, where only a staunch opponent can pull off overturning decades of established policy, because if anyone else did it, it would be seen as giving in.)
The company itself doesn't appear to be well managed, seemingly having never recovered from that disastrous Nextel merger.
Exactly why I don't want them merging with T-Mobile, and also a reason the last merger talks never went through. Sprints management wanted to be in control of the new company and the other side didn't want that. What's their new idea now, that is allowing these talks to start again is what I want to know. Unless it's pretty much "T-Mobile takes over Sprint" I'm not seeing any reason to support this merger -- in fact how 'bout they just not, and stay the course to save us any worrying. T-Mobile has been making good gains the last several years, gains that are benefiting their customers as well as their shareholders, without mergers being involved.