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States are looking to jam T-Mobile and Sprint’s proposed $26.5B merger

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Re: States are looking to jam T-Mobile and Sprint’s proposed $26.5B merger

#11
post #4

The problems facing the US in competing with China are structural. No Amount of mergers between giant monopolies is gong to fix structural problems. On a cynical level, it maybe that "China" is used as an excuse to push through a merger for profits, but lets assume some innocence. The execs. realize how costly 5G is going to be, and the only way they know to borrow that amount of money is increasing their underlying…

Let's not forget that our government is mostly run by people with law degrees while china has a large amount of technocrats. Making it much harder to get state-scale large engineering and software projects going in the U.S..

We have had a leader being a technocrat/rich businessman only once before in US history. That was Herbert Hoover. Now Trump. Neither have done anything amazing for business and/or innovation.

Re: States are looking to jam T-Mobile and Sprint’s proposed $26.5B merger

#14
While I'm usually wary of giant corporate mergers like this, the fact that they are 3rd and 4th leads me to believe it would actually position them to better compete against Verizon and AT&T in a way that would be good for consumers.

Re: States are looking to jam T-Mobile and Sprint’s proposed $26.5B merger

#15

This makes no sense to me. There is no reasonable reality where Sprint becomes a healthy competitive force in the US as a standalone business.

Instead of approving this merger, is there another way the government could encourage competition? Perhaps break up the larger carriers or some how promote new upstart competition?

Your statement sounds correct but I don’t exactly like the reality.

Re: States are looking to jam T-Mobile and Sprint’s proposed $26.5B merger

#18

This makes no sense to me. There is no reasonable reality where Sprint becomes a healthy competitive force in the US as a standalone business.

Instead of approving this merger, is there another way the government could encourage competition? Perhaps break up the larger carriers or some how promote new upstart competition? Your statement sounds correct but I don’t exactly like the reality.

Manage the cell tower infrastructure and spectrum themselves through a non profit GSE (government sponsored entity) (think ISO grid operators for electric grids) and make every commercial provider an MVNO stakeholder. Similar to a municipality owning the last mile fiber to the house, and any provider can provide you service with a quick patch cable or VLAN change at the central office/colo facility.

Running a nationwide cellular network is expensive and complicated AF. You have to provide a level playing field if you want to enable competition without needing hundreds of millions of dollars to start up.

Re: States are looking to jam T-Mobile and Sprint’s proposed $26.5B merger

#19

This makes no sense to me. There is no reasonable reality where Sprint becomes a healthy competitive force in the US as a standalone business.

T-Mobile was going to crap before its failed merger to ATT. It would be stupid to think Sprint can't turn itself around either.

Re: States are looking to jam T-Mobile and Sprint’s proposed $26.5B merger

#20

This makes no sense to me. There is no reasonable reality where Sprint becomes a healthy competitive force in the US as a standalone business.

Instead of approving this merger, is there another way the government could encourage competition? Perhaps break up the larger carriers or some how promote new upstart competition? Your statement sounds correct but I don’t exactly like the reality.

I don’t see how. Most of the small carriers piggyback off the big 4 networks anyways.
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