Official Tmobile-Sprint merger discussion thread

[danlodish345]

4 hours ago, S4GRU said:

And if Tmo doesn't go with Sprint and their 2.5GHz spectrum, remember their next 5G play is 39GHz.  If you think 2.5 doesn't penetrate...

39 GHZ doesnt even penetrate... T-Mobile better be smart and take the 2.5GHz Band...otherwise they will have a serious set back...lets hope T-Mobile doesnt act a fool...

[bigsnake49]

1 hour ago, danlodish345 said:

39 GHZ doesnt even penetrate... T-Mobile better be smart and take the 2.5GHz Band...otherwise they will have a serious set back...lets hope T-Mobile doesnt act a fool...

I think that the next step is LAA on the way to 5G. But remember it is shared spectrum but then it is 150Mhz wide. 

 

What I don't understand is the business case for 5G. What are the business needs. Don't tell me ioT because a single 5MHz slice will satisfy most uses. The only use for me is possibly cable/fiber replacement for video. Except for that, what is it good for?

Edited October 4, 2017 by bigsnake49

[RedSpark]

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/04/t-mobile-sprint-deal-moving-forward-but-some-not-happy-with-price.html

Talks between T-Mobile and Sprint for a stock-for-stock deal that makes Deutsche Telekom the controlling owner are moving forward, sources tell CNBC's David Faber.

However, some T-Mobile shareholders are frustrated with the deal price, these sources said.

On and on it goes....

[danlodish345]

27 minutes ago, bigsnake49 said:

I think that the next step is LAA on the way to 5G. But remember it is shared spectrum but then it is 150Mhz wide. 

 

What I don't understand is the business case for 5G. What are the business needs. Don't tell me ioT because a single 5MHz slice will satisfy most uses. The only use for me is possibly cable/fiber replacement for video. Her the that, what is it good for?

Think you need spectrum that travels far enough and can penetrate buildings. And if you have spectrum that has very little penetration power into buildings that spectrum is pretty much useless unless you use it Outdoors.

[cletus]

20 hours ago, happyGuy said:

I want to start off by saying I really don't know much about this stuff... but other than Sprint customers, what exactly would tmobile get from this merger?

Is that high band sprint spectrum really desirable? for example say they merge with Dish instead... tmobile could double their midband and add 22mhz more to their low band (vs just 14 with sprint).

I'm just not sure about being saddled with tens of billions in debt via sprint would be worth it. sprint coverage is almost the same as tmobile so merging with Sprint would not expand their coverage very much vs what it is now... 

 and if they would have to divest some of their spectrum, then add the cost of converting all those sprint towers and replacing people's phones.. seems like it would be a lot more cost effective to go after dish (unless tmobile was mostly interested in gaining sprint's customer base).

I also think if sprint and tmobile merge it might force verizon's hand and they go after Dish. Then again it seems that nobody likes dealing with Charlie...

 

Well, as I stated above: even growing at 3 mil subscribers a year, it would take T-Mobile 20 YEARS to catch up to AT&T. Simply put this is the only way for them to get to the same scale as AT&T and Verizon. Economy of scale is HUGE when considering that if you have DOUBLE the customers in an area that is immediately HALF the cost per customer to justify a build out/expansion. 

On the spectrum side, T-Mobile would get access to the very wideband B41 spectrum to use as mass capacity for the expected future needs that customers will have for ever increasing bandwidth requirements. I think it is a better fit than adding low-band/midband to what T-Mobile has currently . Don't forget that with Sprint, T-Mobile gets it all: Lowband 800 MHz, Midband 1900 MHz and Highband 2500 Mhz.

 

So they would end up with 600 mhz, 700 mhz, 800 mhz. A GREAT way to build out and have more and more coverage to compete with AT&T and Verizon. Lets not forget the reason that it is cheaper for AT&T and Verizon to put up towers is BECAUSE of the low band reach that they have @ 700 MHz and 800 MHz. See Verizon's own image:

[cletus]

6 hours ago, dro1984 said:

Snake... I think Sprint has approached them... for what every reason, Dish's CEO, Charlie Ergen , doesn't seem to like Sprint.   It usually is rejection.     Sprint has always wanted to host other's spectrum... Dan Hesse tried many players... Never really panned out. 

Here's a snippet from October 7, 2011... from Egaget: " Sprint finally went public with plans to "simplify its network" by converting its 1900MHz holdings and LightSquared's 1600MHz spectrum ("pending FCC approval") to LTE, an industry favorite.  "     

Does anyone know what ever happened to Lightsquared and their unusable spectrum (it affected GPS) but I thought they found a way around it...?

I actually have visited the government anechoic chamber that did the GPS testing (White Sands) and work frequently with the group involved. Basically: Even at low power they were treading on the GPS bands and while Lightsquared blamed it on the "filter" (or lack thereof) on many devices, the reality is that they just had bad control of their signal and wanted broadcast at high power levels. They didn't properly take into account propagation and environmental effects (Swerling, etc), and multi-pathing that would often cause the signal to interfere. They refused to even curb signal on the edge to provide protection from this and argued that it was everyone else's fault. In the end they tried MANY different methods of testing and finally had to admit defeat and agree to not deploy AT ALL in 1545-1555 MHz because they could not solve the GPS L1 issues. 

I've heard they recently settled with Garmin and John Deere for how they can use the spectrum but my guess is that both those companies rightly told them to stay the hell away from their signals and in exchange lightsquared/ligado would maybe provide some kind of preamble signal or some kind of slight modulation that deere and garmin would be able to effectively filter. 

Additionally, the plans they have for the lower 1525 to 1559 mhz (I think?) block are for internet of things (LOW POWER) type of applications. My view of that is that they simply have given up on going near GPS signal with any type of power that could even come close to interfering. 

Lastly: It may be true that many GPS devices have insufficient filters on them.. especially legacy devices. So the Garmin/Deere agreement may make the commuters and farmers happy but there are MANY MANY legacy mil GPS devices that simply cannot be updated without huge cost to the government. Time will tell...

[Terrell352]

On 10/4/2017 at 1:12 PM, bigsnake49 said:

I think that the next step is LAA on the way to 5G. But remember it is shared spectrum but then it is 150Mhz wide. 

 

What I don't understand is the business case for 5G. What are the business needs. Don't tell me ioT because a single 5MHz slice will satisfy most uses. The only use for me is possibly cable/fiber replacement for video. Except for that, what is it good for?

5mhz in 2017 will not satisfy most people. If that was the case we would have dial up LTE nationwide. You tell me if people would be happy with 0.1-0.5 mbps LTE? Sprints problem now is that a lot of its network is only 5mhz. No capacity and capacity is everything in wireless. 

[Tengen31]

6 hours ago, Terrell352 said:

5mhz in 2017 will not satisfy most people. If that was the case we would have dial up LTE nationwide. You tell me if people would be happy with 0.1-0.5 mbps LTE? Sprints problem now is that a lot of its network is only 5mhz. No capacity and capacity is everything in wireless. 

That's why they need to work faster to get B41 deployed. Wish their was a way for Nationwide 20x20 FDD since they are the only ones without it. 

[WiWavelength]

30 minutes ago, Tengen31 said:

That's why they need to work faster to get B41 deployed. Wish their was a way for Nationwide 20x20 FDD since they are the only ones without it. 

VZW, AT&T, and T-Mobile do not have nationwide 20 MHz FDD.  In many markets, one, two, or all three lack the contiguous spectrum to deploy 20 MHz FDD.

AJ

[Tengen31]

11 hours ago, WiWavelength said:

VZW, AT&T, and T-Mobile do not have nationwide 20 MHz FDD.  In many markets, one, two, or all three lack the contiguous spectrum to deploy 20 MHz FDD.

AJ

True I should have said almost. You are right there are areas they don't. That's why vzw bought B66 in places they lack. I don't know if it contiguous or not. In my area TMobile has enough contigous for it on both B4 and B2. 

[bigsnake49]

18 hours ago, Terrell352 said:

5mhz in 2017 will not satisfy most people. If that was the case we would have dial up LTE nationwide. You tell me if people would be happy with 0.1-0.5 mbps LTE? Sprints problem now is that a lot of its network is only 5mhz. No capacity and capacity is everything in wireless. 

I am talking about IoT not anything else.

[bigsnake49]

19 minutes ago, Tengen31 said:

True I should have said almost. You are right there are areas they don't. That's why vzw bought B66 in places they lack. I don't know if it contiguous or not. In my area TMobile has enough contigous for it on both B4 and B2. 

If the merger goes through and they can horse trade with the others, the combined company can have a treasure trove of 1900Mhz spectrum.

[Tengen31]

Just now, bigsnake49 said:

If the merger goes through and they can horse trade with the others, the combined company can have a treasure trove of 1900Mhz spectrum.

Yeah. In my area their would be no swap. Att already has 20x20 with a 5x5 still on 3G. VZW only has 20mhz of it at 10x10. So the combined TMO Sprint would have ( on a all LTE Network) 3 carriers. 20x20,10x10 and, 5x5.

[bigsnake49]

9 minutes ago, Tengen31 said:

Yeah. In my area their would be no swap. Att already has 20x20 with a 5x5 still on 3G. VZW only has 20mhz of it at 10x10. So the combined TMO Sprint would have ( on a all LTE Network) 3 carriers. 20x20,10x10 and, 5x5.

You never know they could swap in your area because Sprint/T-mobile could do them a favor and swap them for contiguous spectrum in another area.

[SuzieTuesday]

Latest press from Bloomberg:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-06/sprint-t-mobile-are-said-to-be-ironing-out-final-deal-details

[RedSpark]

4 hours ago, SuzieTuesday said:

Latest press from Bloomberg:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-06/sprint-t-mobile-are-said-to-be-ironing-out-final-deal-details

This is starting to sound pretty real...

I really don’t want this to happen.

[Tengen31]

9 hours ago, RedSpark said:

This is starting to sound pretty real...

I really don’t want this to happen.

Same here.

[derrph]

11 hours ago, RedSpark said:

This is starting to sound pretty real...

I really don’t want this to happen.

I hear you on that I feel the same way.  But honestly we all saw this coming. Son wants to merge Sprint and we had a few years to mentally prepare for this. With the current state of the network and the minimum improvements we’ve seen, is it really enough that screams I’m going it on my own as a carrier? To me it looks like hey I’m just doing enough to maintain until we get scooped up. Sprint is not getting droves of people switching. Hell they’ve been giving away the service for free that lasts for a year. If that doesn’t tell you that Sprint has given up I don’t know what does. The brand as a whole is weak and just never recovered fully.  It’s a sad reality because we know that Sprint has the toolbox to bring serious competition. I hope no one takes this post as being anti Sprint but more so as a small retrospective that the writing was on the wall that Sprint was going to be folded into another company at some point. 

 

[greenbastard]

12 hours ago, RedSpark said:

This is starting to sound pretty real...

I really don’t want this to happen.

Even if they do announce a merger, there are still many hurdles to jump through.

I have a funny feeling thay this gets blocked by the justice department. This is a job killer, plain and simple.

[S4GRU]

9 minutes ago, greenbastard said:

Even if they do announce a merger, there are still many hurdles to jump through.

I have a funny feeling thay this gets blocked by the justice department. This is a job killer, plain and simple.

Yeah, people assume this is a foregone conclusion. I'm not so certain.  Govt approval may not be a slam dunk.

[danlodish345]

27 minutes ago, S4GRU said:

Yeah, people assume this is a foregone conclusion. I'm not so certain.  Govt approval may not be a slam dunk.

Yes I have a YouTube channel and I am posting videos on what’s going on with the merger and people are coming to me asking Oh is it already done? And I tell them don’t watch those other videos on YouTube those are all just a bunch of rumors. And I told them they could take a few months before his other denied or approved.

[utiz4321]

I don't think the DOJ or the FCC will block the merger.  If you look at the attitudes of the decision makers in both agencies, they are both free market guys, it seems very unlikily it will get blocked. 

[NYC126]

FCC and DOJ will approve this. Enjoy the last glorious months. The chain of events was setup when the board didn’t allow Hesse to buy Metro PCS. If T-Mobile never gets Metro they would be a weak company right now. Another stupid move before this was Att arrogance of cutting a deal with a breakup fee during an administration that was very anti big business.

 

I have been saying for three years this is why they never decided to invest in the network because they weren’t on it for the long run. Marcelo didn’t have a problem burning billions on promotions but when it came to network investments the debt bs excuse surfaced. Thanks to The massive band 41 Spectrum Legere and Ray will claim a  super fast Network. Now Neville will says Band 41 is a great Spectrum. Watch how he changes his tune.

[twospirits]

9 hours ago, S4GRU said:

Yeah, people assume this is a foregone conclusion. I'm not so certain.  Govt approval may not be a slam dunk.

True, but one never knows.  One thing that bugs me is that there is no mention of a breakup fee anywhere. If there was, I'll be more comfortable

[utiz4321]

33 minutes ago, twospirits said:

True, but one never knows.  One thing that bugs me is that there is no mention of a breakup fee anywhere. If there was, I'll be more comfortable

I read that there is not going to be a break up fee. At least that is the rumor.