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Sprint, T-Mobile Agree To Combine in a $26.5 Billion Merger (bloomberg.com)
T-Mobile and Sprint said on Sunday that they have agreed to combine in a $26.5 billion merger, creating a wireless giant to compete against industry leaders AT&T and Verizon. From a report: Deutsche Telekom AG, the Bonn, Germany-based company that controls T-Mobile, and SoftBank Group, the Tokyo-based owner of Sprint, agreed to a combination that values each Sprint share at 0.10256 of a T-Mobile share, the companies said in a statement Sunday. That ratio values Sprint at $6.62 a share based on T-Mobile's Friday closing price of $64.52. The new company will use the T-Mobile name, with T-Mobile's John Legere as chief executive officer and Mike Sievert at chief operating officer. The German company's chairman, Tim Hoettges, will serve in that role at the combined company, and the board will include SoftBank Chief Executive Officer Masayoshi Son. The companies said they expect synergies of about $43 billion, with more than $6.5 billion on a run-rate basis.
They just cede Sprint over?
3 party competition is enough for advances and price control. look at amd vs intel and how they keep each other growing and they are the only 2 major players.
I wonder whether this merger will meet with regulatory approval. The current administration doesn't appear to hold a favorable opinion of anything German.
I remember when T-Mobile in the UK merged with Orange and became EE. They don't respect net neutrality over there by injecting Javascript into web pages and have strict data caps.
Of all the reasons I switched from Sprint to T-Mobile years back the most important was CDMA. If my phone of choice won't work on your network then why do I want to use it? I'm curious if Sprint is bringing anything to the party other than subscribers?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
That's my prediction
I was worried that we had too many choices and too much competition for most-hated phone carrier company. Once they all merge, and/or buy each other, and there is no meaningful competition, things will be SOO much better. (But for whooommmmm?)
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
The companies said they expect synergies of about $43 billion...
Even for corporatespeak I don't think this is correct usage of this word. If they were investing $43 bil, maybe, but "synergy" is generally defined as shared effort in an area or towards a goal.
I really hope this gets blocked. Not only because basically the number of carriers drops by 25% but because Sprint is a horrible company and I'm afraid they will infect T-mobile with their poor service, customer service, hidden fees, and more.
One less carrier with shitty coverage.
VPN with its own DNS solves that problem.
the Comcast AT&T merger got derailed because absolutely everybody, rich or poor, has a reason to hate those too companies. They treat everybody equally awful.
The current administration's pretty pro corporate (supports TPP, work visa programs and guest worker programs, massive tax cuts for corps, deregulation, backing off on enforcement, still full of Goldman Sachs people, the list goes on). Without pressure from folks hating on one or both companies this'll sail through.
Sucks, I'm sure it means my bills going to go up and I'll probably end up with data overrage fees again.
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I knew that was the kind of "reasoning" to expect on today's Slashdot, but it still saddens me. Shallow is the kindest adjective I can think of.
Think of competition from the other side. The choice and freedom side. Zero choices or one choice is not really any choice at all. Two is the minimal potentially meaningful choice, but in the cited example Intel and AMD offer two flavors of the same architecture, which is scarcely meaningful and we certainly don't know that it's the best one because Intel and Intel's accomplices have succeeded in crushing the alternative choices. (Well, actually TRON is still out there, but not competing in the same space. Ditto smartphone CPUs.) Research into short-term memory indicates we can actually handle 3 to 7 options at a time, and I have concluded that the optimum locus of choice for maximizing freedom is probably around 5 options. When you get way up there with too many options in play, the choice again becomes meaningless because it's too confusing and you're more likely to be manipulated than to find the best option. (See the "Paradox of Choice" and related work.)
Seems I better include the full form of my sig without the Slashdot-imposed limitation:
#1 Freedom = (Meaningful + Truthful - Coerced) Choice{~5} != (Beer^4 | Speech | Trade)
Solution time: Progressive profits tax based on market share. If the objective is to insure the market has 5 choices, then that works out around 20% each, but because the objective is to encourage change and new ideas, you have to allow quite a bit of wiggle room, so say the higher tax rates start around 30% of the market. If a merger (in this specific example) pushes market share way up there, then the tax rate on the profits should rise so high that the two companies won't even consider it unless there really is a natural monopoly of an overwhelming sort--and in that case the government needs that tax money to regulate the heck out of the dominant company, while supporting research to break the monopoly.
Profit is less important than freedom. Corporate cancers can NEVER solve their FAKE problems of insufficient profit.
DSAuPR, atAJG.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
According to other news outlets, only the US subsidiary is merging with a local competitor, but Slashdot seems to suggest all of T-Mobile is merging.
CDMA won the CDMA vs GSM war. Every GSM phone includes a wideband CDMA radio for 3G service. The only parts of GSM which still follow the original GSM spec are voice and the SIM card. You see, GSM was originally based on TDMA - each phone is assigned a timeslice and they take turns talking with the tower. This worked fine for low-bandwidth communications like voice, but was horribly inefficient when cellular data service began to become important. You ended up wasting bandwidth on phones which didn't need the bandwidth of their full timeslice, or didn't even need any bandwidth at all that particular timeslice. You also lost bandwidth to the padding added to the ends of each timeslice to compensate for the finite speed of lite (to insure the signal of a phone distant from the tower doesn't spill over into the next timeslice).
CDMA allows all phones to transmit at the same time, and uses orthogonal codes to tell their transmissions apart. Kinda like writing on a piece of paper, then turning it 90 degrees to write on it again. Even though the letters overlap, they're distinct enough (orthogonal) that you can tell which letters are horizontal and which are vertical, and ignore the ones not in the direction you're reading. All phones see other transmitting phones as noise, so more phones transmitting means a lower signal to noise ratio, and bandwidth to each phone is automatically reduced based on the number of transmitting phones. This means CDMA's bandwidth is automatically divided evenly between the number of phones which need it at any given moment.
This is why CDMA services got 3G data about a year before GSM services. GSM ended up throwing in the towel, licensing CDMA, and amended the GSM spec to include wideband CDMA for data service. And this is 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. CDMA phones only had a single CDMA radio which could do voice or data, but not both simultaneously. It wasn't because GSM was superior, it was because GSM was inferior and needed a second radio to compete.
LTE service is mostly based on OFDMA - similar to CDMA but using orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes. CDMA served as the proof of concept that this crazy orthogonal signaling idea where everyone transmits at the same time stomping over each others' signals actually worked when expanded out into a nationwide cellular network. If CDMA hadn't happened first, researchers and companies would've been much less confident about OFDMA, and it's possible we might've still been waiting for LTE to even roll out today. If the U.S. had gone along with the rest of the world and required GSM, then the global adoption of inferior TDMA technology would've meant that cellular data service today would probably be stuck down around 1 Mbps or slower. So you should be thanking CDMA for giving us the 50+ Mbps cellular data speeds we enjoy today.
I am hoping this will be blocked. I remember back in the day when I had NEXTEL and really loved it. NEXTEL worked fantastically up until the point Sprint bought and merged them. Both customer service and communications reliability took a nose dive after the "merger." T-Mobile is doing very well on its own and Sprint is a cancer to whatever it touches. Unless T-Mobile can manage to remain in control, we might as well given to the duopoly overlords because Sprint will be irrelevant if not die outright.
Block this merger pls
The joke is on them if they raise prices. I'll just go with either Cingular, Alltel, Suncomm or even McCaw.
I wonder how Google Fi will fare as this merges two of the larger carriers it uses, reducing the benefit of Fi as just having the new T-Mobile would be close to the service coverage you'd get with Fi (and T-Mobile supports wifi calling, you get benefits on Delta flights, their base One plans still get you near global data service bundled in with faster speeds available while over seas as an option, etc).
...is on par with a desktop CPU that's 15 years behind.
Just remember what happened the last time zee Germans and Japanese merged on an "axis" regarding America...
Wonder which system they're going to use, CDMA or GSM? One's gonna likely have to go, and with it, all those cellphones hooked up to that network.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
and then they did all that 'uncarrier' stuff. Mostly they stopped overcharging for data and stopped with the roaming changes. But it was a major shift in the cell phone industry and cut data and roaming charges across the board. I'm guessing with this merger we'll see them bring back all the old practices. The only reason they stopped them is they were getting squeezed out by AT&T, Sprint & Verizon. With the merger that won't happen.
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Feels lonely
then ink a cooperative tower sharing deal.. and *use compatible technologies** (i.e. sell handsets that work on each other's networks)
you don't need to combine into a megacorp. which will reduce competition and increase consumer prices despite what you might claim or promise.
In the world I see, you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower, and when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison in the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway. -Tyler Durden, Fight Club
What if telephony itself, and not computers, turned out to be the fad? Is it really all that critical to be able to talk to someone elsewhere, rather than sending a message?
In the world I see, you only talk to people who are close enough to you to hear your unamplified voice. You’ll communicate long-distance via email carried over VPNs. You’ll start writing letters again, and there will be a renaissance of writing in CURSIVE, and when you read a letter, you won’t feel twitchy about the fact that there’re no scroll-bars.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
Research among retarded people??
Normal is 6 to 9!
I myself do 8 in tests. You probably do too.
3 ... imagine someone who can't juggle more than 3 thinks in his mind at the same time! ... He'd hardly get through school!
BIND is quite tiny on a computer from nowadays. Don't use any forwarding and let it do all its own forwarding.
Get a good configuration that does full DNSSEC.
I run it on what is basically a Raspberry Pi. 24/7. So it has all the important replies cached.
As a bonus, you can have your own TLDs and do some name server magix.
I agree on teh VPN though. But get a good one. Most are not actually anonymizing anything and do log.
IPredator is a good one, by the PirateBay founders.
I think they will get regulatory approval, because if they don't we will end up with only three wireless networks anyway. Sprint is only still surviving because Softbank has been pumping in money and failing to get the results they had hoped for. if the merger is blocked they're likely to just shut it down and sell off the pieces.
The most recent merger attempt between the companies failed because Softbank was unwilling to give up control; they wanted to run the combined companies. This time the deal involves T-Mobile buying Sprint, and most of the Sprint management would be out the door. The change suggests that Softbank has given up on the US market and wants out.
For T-Mobile, the value is in the customers (who they hope to convert to T-Mobile customers, as they did years ago when they bought MetroPCS), the spectrum rights, and the tower leases. Sprint's other equipment may or may not be useful to T-Mobile, depending on whether it is sufficiently compatible with their network and software. Most of the customers will have to buy new phones (though it's not as bad as it might be because of Sprint's recent emphasis on iPhone sales; those are compatible with both GSM and CDMA networks), and given that necessity some will defect to other networks, but T-Mobile should be able to retain the majority of them.
I don't think we'll see a fourth network happen again, but the growth of multi-network MVNOs may help the competitive picture. MVNOs like Google Fi buy service from more than one of the big networks and offer phones that seamlessly work on all the networks they buy from. Another growth area will be MVNOs that combine cell service with extensive use of WiFi, like Republic Wireless and the newer Xfinity Mobile.
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Sprint's use of proprietary frequencies may very well be phased out now, which I sincerely hope is the case. Sprint's network technology has always been terrible, and T-Mobile's quite good. All those poor, poor sprint customers might be getting a substantial upgrade in network quality. So, I can't oppose this merger too much, simply because I hate Sprint, and I like seeing them get eaten. They were never real competition anyways, here in the USA, they're considered a bit of a laughing stock.