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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.
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 really have nothing much negative to say about Sprint. True their coverage isn't the best and their website is very annoying but that's about it. I've been with them with over 10 years, and I have no data cap, no roaming charges and even free international roaming.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Well... I can't think of any reason to dislike T-Mobile. In fact, I have them as my carrier now. I've been nothing but happy since switching. And I'm very much dismayed at the prospect now of going back to AT&T. Sprint, on the other hand; if you don't yet hate them with a burning passion... their network, their choice of available phone hardware, their billing system, their customer service people, their CEO, the whole shebang (Hell, even their HQ campus in Overland Park is rage-inducing.)... it's all but certainly only because you've really just not gotten the chance to know them.
I'm really, Really, REALLY hoping for this one to be blocked.
Imagine all the people...
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.
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.
Unless T-Mobile is nearly 100% in control, I hope it gets blocked. I was a Sprint customer for over 16 years and finally dropped them for T-Mobile 4 years ago and the different is absolutely staggering. Usually lower prices, MUCH more stable network, activation takes seconds- just insert a REAL sim card and done, fantastic customer service, great stores and people in them. I have brought over many family and friends to T-Mobile from Sprint and not a single one has been disappointed. I am terrified this new merged company will be "infected" by Sprint poor planning, customer service, and technology.