jnadke

Another interesting question is whether they will decide to sell an officially unlocked US variant, and if so, what bands would such a device support?

Unless carriers want to pay for custom builds of the phone, mass-manufacturing typically makes it cheaper just to support all bands.

I'd expect the model numbers to be purely software / quality control differences.

This went live in SW Wisconsin. Picked up Extended LTE on my wife's iPhone.

Time to finally give up on my Galaxy S5. Is this limited to Sprint sold phones or does the MXPE/N6p support it?

Bad Deal for Sprint soldout too cheap!!

They had to.

Credit agencies were downgrading their credit and probably were going to again. Sprint was between a rock and a hard place, with an aging network, previously betting the farm on Nextel and Clearwire, and now Network Vision costing billions upon billions to right the ship.

Chances are, they would've eventually gone bankrupt if they continued the course. Or only half-finish Network Vision and their customers leave in droves.

Sprint hasn't been at $5 per share in 4 years. Softbank is paying a 50% premium over the 4-year high.

I expect this acquisition to go off seamlessly without any lawsuits.