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.

Comments

Re:Fastrack CDMA's demise

[SmaryJerry]

That is just wrong. Sprint's spectrum is at a worse/cheaper frequency. Sprint's spectrum requires more towers because it has less propagation and gives worse service because of worse building penetration. Their spectrum is essentially useless except for big cities and ever in big cities it has horrible penetration so you even if one skyscraper gets in between you and the cell site then you get bad service.

Re:Every GSM phone uses CDMA

[squiggleslash]

CDMA won the CDMA vs GSM war.

No, it didn't.

GSM is a family of standards. The term CDMA either refers to a rival family of standards, developed by Qualcomm, or a air interface method. If your sentence is to make any sense, then you're saying Qualcomm's standards beat GSM. They didn't. Qualcomm discontinued further development of IS-95/IS-136 (cdmaOne/cdma2000), and is encouraging its partners to switch to the fourth generation of GSM, LTE.

Fourth generation GSM uses an OFDMA air interface system.

Every GSM phone includes a wideband CDMA radio for 3G service.

Technically correct, but you're no longer referring to CDMA the family of standards, you're referring to an air interface method. GSM v3 (UMTS) supports CDMA-the-air-interface-method.

Almost all GSM phones, with the exception of a handful designed to work on Sprint or Verizon's network, do not have chipsets capable of supporting IS-95/IS-2000.

The only parts of GSM which still follow the original GSM spec are voice and the SIM card

If by this you mean there is now a fourth version of GSM, which is more advanced than the first version of GSM, then this is true, but what does that have to do with anything at all? GSM is a full stack that's under it's third revision (v4, because they started at 2.) You would expect each successive version to include many features from previous standards, drop some, and add new features.

GSM is still being developed. Qualcomm has completely discontinued further development of CDMA.

You see, GSM was originally based on TDMA

You should probably clarify that GSM originally exclusively used an air interface method called TDMA. There's also a set of standards called TDMA which are unrelated.

This worked fine for low-bandwidth communications like voice, but was horribly inefficient when cellular data service began to become important

OK, let's stop this now, because you are one very confused person.

GSM now supports a set of air interface methods, including TDMA, CDMA, and OFDMA. TDMA provides extremely reliable voice and fixed-low-bandwidth data, as you point out. CDMA is somewhat better at high bandwidth data (though TDMA's limits were never tested), but was not picked for 3G because of any technical reason: Qualcomm lobbied politicians across the globe and pretty much made it politically impossible for ETSI to include a non-CDMA air interface in 3G GSM (UMTS.)

Unfortunately, this was a disaster. Yes, I said it. It turns out CDMA is actually very shitty. It's power hungry, and to provide the high bandwidth applications UMTS was envisaged to support, UMTS's implementation required 5MHz spectrum blocks, which were difficult to overlay or combine with 2G GSM.

Now, you're about to argue with me about that, but here's the thing, and the bottom line:

Even Qualcomm knew CDMA-the-air-interface was shitty and were planning to phase it out from the mid 2000s.

CDMA is so unbelievably shitty, that not only did ETSI members rebel against UMTS pretty much as soon as UMTS was released, but even at the time users of Qualcomm's standards were also at the end of their tethers. Both ETSI and Qualcomm independently came to the conclusion that it didn't scale properly, it was power hungry, and it didn't work well with variable bandwidth applications like data. Every "improvement" you've seen to UMTS and IS-2000 since has been a hack to try to cover up CDMA's flaws.

ETSI started work almost straight away on OFDMA based 4G GSM, known as LTE. And they pretty much rushed LTE into production. Almost all carriers started deploying it despite the fact they hadn't even standardized how to make phone calls on it. From their point of view, this was an emergency. UMTS's flaws were so bad that even if more efficient variants such