“Sprint Corp. (S) plans to push forward with a bid for T-Mobile US Inc. (TMUS) after meeting with banks last month to make debt arrangements for that offer, people with knowledge of the situation said,” Alex Sherman reports for Bloomberg.
“Sprint Chief Financial Officer Joe Euteneuer and Treasurer Greg Block met with six banks to ensure the lenders would be ready with financing structures when Sprint decides to pursue a takeover, said three of the people, asking not to named because the discussions are private. T-Mobile US has a market value of $23.5 billion,” Sherman reports. “Masayoshi Son, chief executive officer of SoftBank Corp. (9984), which owns about 80 percent of Sprint, is expected to make a formal bid in June or July, one of the people said. While regulators have consistently expressed concerns about a combination of the third- and fourth-largest wireless carriers in the U.S., Son and his advisers are building an argument they hope will convince the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice about the long-term health of the U.S. wireless industry.”
“Sprint wants to pursue a deal while the Justice Department and FCC are also reviewing Comcast Corp.’s acquisition of Time Warner Cable Inc., with the hope that regulators will see both deals as changing the telecommunications industry, three of the people said. The regulators blocked AT&T Inc.’s effort to acquire T-Mobile in 2011,” Sherman reports. “Son’s team believes AT&T was unprepared when it attempted to convince regulators a deal was in the public’s interest in 2011, three of the people said. Sprint is working to ensure it will have a detailed case to put in front of regulators, the people said.”
Read more in the full article here.
Once that happens Sprint and T-Mo become SoftBank. Both brands will go away and become a big third player who can challenge ATT and Verizon. SoftBank is already being to soft brand the new company.
I’m curious, what are going to do with the mutually incompatible technology (GSM vs. CDMA). You cannot bring an unlocked phone to Sprint — there is no such thing as Sprint SIM card. To get a phone to a CDMA carrier, you have to call the carrier and activate that phone on their network, and that only if they let you do this.
With T-Mobile (and other GSM carriers), if you have their SIM card (either as a contract subscriber, or a pre-paid user), you can take that SIM card out of your current phone and stick it into any unlocked phone without ever having to deal with the carrier. Practically every carrier in every country in Europe uses GSM exclusively, and there are people who have several phones, and they just move the SIM card from one to the other (women who like their phone to match their outfit). I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard of anyone in America doing this. With CDMA, this is impossible anyway.
The GSM and CDMA issue becomes moot as the companies move to LTE. Unfortunately, I think even their LTE technologies are incompatible. I’m not essentially against the merge, and I think they may have an easier time than AT&T did, but as a consumer I don’t think I’m going to see any improvement where I want to see it; the service.
The main obstacle remains: SIM-less Sprint phones (and the underlying network) vs SIM-enabled T-Mobile devices (and the network). With Sprint, you must activate the phone, which permanently ties it to the specific phone number (and the associated mobile plan); with T-Mobile, you activate the SIM card (and the associated plan), and you stick that card into any phone you want. With Sprint, every change of phone requires activation / deactivation / transferring of number. With T-Mobile, you just take the SIM out and put in into another device and it works.
Many American consumers who never tried AT&T or T-Mobile have never experienced this SIM-enabled freedom. I’m not sure what the Sprint acquisition would to to this.
Use of LTE requires a SIM, and the objective for all of the carriers is to have 100% LTE deployment; once this happens, they can drop the current voice/data separation and go 100% VoLTE (voice over LTE) which will save amazing amounts of bandwidth.
Changing most current LTE-compatible phones to VoLTE is just a firmware update. Yes, including iPhone. (It will, however, obsolete older phones as much as the switch from analog to digital did.)
I hope they can never make it. T Mobile is the only us telco company right now that pushes the others to compete and lower the price of their services. We Americans still pay a lot in competition to what Europeans pay for comparable services.
wojtylo – you are so right! It was T-Mobile that pushed AT&T to provide bring your own phone plans. It was T-Mobile that is forcing change on the industry, not Sprint. I hope this deal is not allowed and that T-Mobile continues to push the industry and that AT&T and Verizon loose more of their strangle hold on the industry. I so want T-Mobile to expand their network into my area. I would switch in a heart-beat. (OK maybe I would wait a little, this take-over bid needs to be hashed out.)
Now AT&T is trying to buy Dish. I guess they don’t want to be that dumb pipe.
This sucks. I just escaped the dismal clutches of Sprint and their terrible network. Had T-Mo since january and have loved every minute of it. The best decision I’ve made all year, and now they want to ruin TMo with their crappy network and management.
Agreed, the minute T-Mo is taken over by Sprint is the second that I go back to AT&T.