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

Fastrack CDMA's demise

[ArhcAngel]

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?

Less Competition Means higher Prices

[SmaryJerry]

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.

Re:I think it will

[SvnLyrBrto]

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.

Every GSM phone uses CDMA

[Solandri]

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.

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

Blocked

[DaMattster]

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.