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US government approves T-Mobile/Sprint merger

arstechnica.com

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Re: US government approves T-Mobile/Sprint merger

#31

Post by jandrese »

eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #28
jandrese wrote: post #25

How are the towers going to be handled post merger? T-Mobile's GSM based service vs. Sprint's CDMA service means someone is going to have to win if they're serious about consolidating spectrum and towers.

Maybe they won’t bother until a 5G deployment in the future? The merger will probably take at least a year, probably longer, to fully integrate anyway.

Is 5G going to be fully converged? I thought the mmwave stuff was converged but the "4G with some touchups" part that most people will be using the majority of the time was going to keep the legacy GSM vs. CDMA nonsense?

Re: US government approves T-Mobile/Sprint merger

#32

Post by stonogo »

howard941 wrote: post #20
Aloha wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering I think the choice is Sprint going out of business, they are at risk of ceasing to be a 'going concern'.

What happened?? In 2018 they were near $2 EPS

They forgot how to make money. 2018 was an exception because they profited from a massive tax cut. They went right back to losing money.

Re: US government approves T-Mobile/Sprint merger

#33

Post by adventured »

koolba wrote: post #22

Assuming T-Mobile continues their multi-year policy of never raising prices on existing customers I'm all for this. One stronger competitor to AT&T and Verizon is much better than one almost competitor and an almost-dead-but-still-owns-bandwidth one.

I agree with the spirit of what you said, however I would upgrade T-Mobile in that analysis. They're a beast of a competitor without Sprint, and they're slow-stomping both AT&T and Verizon. Grinding gains persistently year after year.

They're adding millions of customers per year in the US, nearly all of which are being stolen from the competition. AT&T and Verizon are sitting on stagnant wireless businesses, while T-Mobile keeps getting bigger.

Operating income hit $5.4 billion last year (up 100% in three years).

$72 billion market cap, up from persistently losing money and worth just $10 billion seven years ago.

Without Sprint they're on their way to a $120-$150 billion market cap and $10 billion in operating income in the next five years or so. And there's nothing AT&T & Verizon could do to stop it.

Re: US government approves T-Mobile/Sprint merger

#34

Post by maxsilver »

rayiner wrote: post #10

Why do people think Sprint is so bad, and what does that say about our cellular market? It looks like I can get 5 lines for $150/month, with a 50GB soft-cap and 50GB of hotspot. That's less than half of what I pay for Verizon. Such a lower-cost alternative should be able to attract customers in droves. Why can't Sprint?

> Why do people think Sprint is so bad

Obviously every area is different, even on a block-to-block basis, but Sprint historically had the worst network density (lowest number of sites) in any area, while using the highest-band of spectrum (least propagation), while also having the least amount of backhaul (data speeds from the tower to the wider internet).

This generally resulted in them having the worst performing network in a majority of markets nationwide -- and worse by a wide margin. Think "I can't even get twitter.com to load" levels of bad performance. It was like that, in some places, for the better part of a decade straight. Sprint's cellular performance was so bad for so long, that sometimes callers couldn't even complete a single phone call. Sprint's service was so bad, it would regularly make the local evening news - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_kvT5qsi9c

Add to that, that they were later than all of their competitors in deploying broadband (which they weren't able to do themselves, and had outsourced to Clearwire to redo, who also botched the work and Sprint later aquired them and had to re-redo their work), add in that they completely botched their Nextel acquisition (which ironically had a better network than Sprint in many places -- a network Sprint promptly discarded with zero effort to reuse or recycle), add in that their phones had to have dual or even triple redundant radios for a while to handle all of their incompatible network systems (for a while there, Sprint literally sold phones that had to have CDMA + WiMAX + LTE radios running simultaneously just to get usable coverage -- which murdered battery life), add in that they were tied to legacy CDMA technology which, unlike Verizon, Sprint dragged their feet on modernizing, and you get a recipe for disaster.

The word "Sprint" is basically synonymous with "shit service" in the mind of most semi-involved cellular customer, for many of the reasons above. Even when Sprint finally started to fix some of their problems (around in 2017-2018 or so), so much damage had been done so thoroughly for so long, that the brand was basically toxic, regardless of fixes.

Re: US government approves T-Mobile/Sprint merger

#35

Post by fitzroy »

sjg007 wrote: post #11
gonehome wrote: post #5

To me this makes a lot more sense than the T-Mobile At&t merger that failed to go through. Sprint is a pretty dead brand and provider. They were actually giving away a year of free service without any obligation (you only had to pay $2 tax/fee) and people still would not switch to it. T-Mobile has pushed the other carriers to bring back unlimited plans and they've separated the phone cost from the plan itself (allowi…

I had the Sprint plan. I liked it. Hard for the average person to get on it though. You would have to pay full price for the phone and then activate it (while switching your old phone number over) and you couldn't do that in store. If you bought say a new Apple phone at full price and wanted to finance it through Apple/Citizen One, Apple would make you activate first which if you chose Sprint would invalidate your BY…

I also had the Sprint BYOD promo for a year since I had an unlocked iPhone 6+ at the time. The network was only very slightly worse than Verizon (mostly in and around NYC). I switched to Tello (Sprint MVNO, $17/mo for 3GB) when the promotion ended and the network quality has been the same. I only chose Tello because I already had the SIM and my plan was going to renew within 48. It's been fine.

I probably would've bought a new phone sooner but the terms were ambiguous as to whether or not switching phones (even one purchased separately and fully paid) would negate the promo or not.

Re: US government approves T-Mobile/Sprint merger

#36

Post by adventured »

howard941 wrote: post #20
Aloha wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering I think the choice is Sprint going out of business, they are at risk of ceasing to be a 'going concern'.

What happened?? In 2018 they were near $2 EPS

Sprint didn't actually earn $7.38 billion in net income from operations in 2018 (their operating income was $2.46 billion that year, their debt interest cost alone was $2.36 billion).

They got a one-time tax benefit in that fiscal year, for $7.1 billion, due to the tax law changes.

Their business is a disaster because of the debt. ~$9.5 billion in debt interest costs in the last four years.

Re: US government approves T-Mobile/Sprint merger

#37

Post by txcwpalpha »

Aloha wrote: post #15
misterprime wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is huge. It's hard to cover with mobile phone and data service. People fear their phones not working on road trips, or when they go visit a different part of town. Verizon and AT&T built trust that they will be good enough, and better than the others. T-Mobile did some great marketing with their 4G launch and follow up campaigns that built a lot of trust. T-Mobile's customer service is also extremely good. The…

Sprint has a really solid network in most metro areas. Both T-Mo and Sprint have huge issues with rural coverage, both have to leverage roaming partners to get real national coverages.

I have T-Mobile and travel for work frequently. A couple years ago I traveled to one of the largest metro areas in Iowa, only to get off the plane and have my TMo phone tell me that there was no service whatsoever. After a bit of research, I found out that TMo did not have any official coverage in the entire state of Iowa, and only had roaming coverage available through a partnership with Iowa Wireless (I think it's different now and there is actual coverage available in IA).

It ended up being fine (roaming was more than enough for my usage), but it did initially remind me of the feeling when I step off the plane in a foreign country and have to wait to find a WiFi hotspot to be connected again. It certainly wasn't what I expected when traveling to an area that's only ~200 miles away from one of the US's largest cities (Chicago).

edit to add: Ironically, TMobile has free roaming + data coverage in almost every single country around the world, which makes it seem a bit silly that I can take my TMo phone to rural Indonesia and get data service (which I have done, with that same phone and TMo plan) but struggle to get it in a place like metropolitan Iowa...

Re: US government approves T-Mobile/Sprint merger

#38

Post by mdasen »

jandrese wrote: post #25

How are the towers going to be handled post merger? T-Mobile's GSM based service vs. Sprint's CDMA service means someone is going to have to win if they're serious about consolidating spectrum and towers.

Both GSM and CDMA are going away. T-Mobile is a mostly-LTE carrier already. Both Sprint and T-Mobile use LTE and most Sprint customers will already have compatible handsets. Others will be given upgrade offers.

T-Mobile’s network will form the core of the new network because it’s significantly better, most Sprint devices will support GSM and UMTS 2G/3G standards (while the opposite isn’t true), T-Mobile’s network supports voice over LTE, T-Mobile’s network has significantly more cell sites, etc. Some Sprint sites will be added to the network and Sprint’s spectrum will be as well. Other sites will be divested to Dish.

The CDMA vs GSM divide just isn’t that important today given that carriers should be mostly LTE already.

Re: US government approves T-Mobile/Sprint merger

#39

Post by Allower »

gonehome wrote: post #5

To me this makes a lot more sense than the T-Mobile At&t merger that failed to go through. Sprint is a pretty dead brand and provider. They were actually giving away a year of free service without any obligation (you only had to pay $2 tax/fee) and people still would not switch to it. T-Mobile has pushed the other carriers to bring back unlimited plans and they've separated the phone cost from the plan itself (allowi…

You mean they completely redefined 'unlimited' to mean 'limited'..
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