Mr.Nuke

Hence their name change to Softcard this week. http://www.pcworld.com/article/2601980/isis-wallet-mobile-payment-service-changes-its-name-to-softcard.html

You are basically correct from your memory. It is 80 million in their bylaws. That may have been what they were going for, but it is a hard number in their documentation.

Lincoln is by-and-large fully upgraded by NV 1.0 standards. Band 41 8T8R antennas have been spotted on several sites in city recently as well. Consider becoming a sponsor for access to the map sites and their current statuses.

CenturyLink has being using West Omaha as a large-scale FTTH 1 GB/s testbed for about a year now. Fierce Article on their current deployments from last month

Not to continue to beat a dead horse, but I too have a couple of issues here. According to the shareholder theory of business the goal of a publicly traded company is to maximize value for all shareholders. The vast majority of the time what is beneficial for what you call "premium" shareholders is proportionally beneficial to any shareholder based on their ownership stake. If a company is more profitable, raises a dividend, etc every shareholder benefits; some just more so than others due to how many shares they own. Secondly, I too think your notion of public vs. private is misguided. The goal of almost any private company/partnership/sole proprietorship is also to maximize profit. Much like a publicly traded company there are still ownership percentages: be it a family controlling it, employee ownership, or an outside entity, distributions of profit occur in some manner, and management incentives are still present. Irev210's point about ADM verus Cargill illustrates this. Kiewit, a large employee owned company in Omaha is notorious for having employees retire as millionaires due to having to cash in shares of the company at retirement. There really isn't the difference you are trying to make. Whether or not a company is publicly traded or not, there are owners and they want to make money. I'd argue some of the things you seem to concern about are actually more prevalent in privately held companies. The reporting requirements are less than the scrutiny a publicly held company is held to. Ownership stakes tend to be more concentrated (A publicly held traded company may be lucky to have one person/institution holding more than 10% of the company). Thus from a management perspective in a privately held company there is just as much if not more temptation than to run things to benefit the owners than a publicly held corporation. Your sales experience has little to do with publicly versus privately held companies. I'm not a stock analyst, but I do hold a degree in Business Administration, concentrating in Finance, with an emphasis in financial analysis (basically a degree for an analyst). That said, I don't think an analyst would agree with your comments. I also think an analyst would point out that a "preferred stock holder" in finance has a completely different meaning than what you are using. Preferred stock, like common stock, is a form of equity. However it tends to have a lot more similarities to debt instruments than common stock. A preferred stockholder typically has no voting rights. To compensate this they are typically guaranteed a fixed dividend payment (hence the similarity to debt instruments like bonds) that must be paid before common stockholders receive a dividend. So what you call preferred stockholders, most would call concentrated investors, corporate raiders, etc. Basically an individual or group that makes a significant investment in a company to gain ownership to benefit them. I'd contend such investors are not the norm in publicly traded companies. The big problem with your argument here is particularly in many of the companies in the wireless industry is there isn't the dilution of ownership that is present in other publicly traded companies. Softbank owns 79% of Sprint. DT owns 67% of T-Mobile. While both of those companies are publicly traded, the concentrated ownerships by the "parent" companies effectively moot any outside investor from doing anything. Furthermore, there aren't any corporate raiders in the wireless market making any tirade against said corporate raiders and publicly held companies irrelevant to the topic at hand. That said, I'm with you to an extent. Large concentrates owners can influence companies in such a manner that is beneficial to them and not the company/other shareholders (It isn't the norm). I think a large part of T-Mobile's current strategy over the past 12-18 months has been to prepare for DT's exit. Some of those moves aren't necessarily the best for the company in the long-term or the other shareholders. But if T-Mobile were a privately held company looking to sell themselves, DT's strategy would've been the exact same. Make the company look better in the short-run to sell. That is where I fundamentally disagree with you in the public vs. private debate.

We'll see how long that sticks around if DT sells their T-Mobile stake.

Yeah I misread his post.

Virgin Mobile and Boost are pretty much directly affiliated with Sprint as both are wholly owned subsidiaries....

That seems to be the popular excuse, but if that is really the reason, it is about to go out the window. Omaha is adding a second area code in the near future. I suspect a bigger part of it has to do with Omaha being arguably the one-time CDMA 2000 capital in the world. AT&T was late to the game in building out Omaha as well. They've done a really good job here though in the post iPhone era.

Mississippi State fan I assume? Since you've been up here Sprint now has LTE on both band 25 and 26 at TD 8T8R Band 41 soon hopefully). I was pulling 4-12 mb/s down during the CWS this year. The site almost directly across the street from Brother Sebastian's has both 25/26 LTE as well. T-Mobile does have a site in close proximity to the stadium that to their credit has been upgraded to LTE, but again they're only running a protection network here that by-and-large solely covers Omaha's interstate system to keep their customers from roaming. If you plug in Omaha zip code into T-Mobile's website it literally tells you "Please enter a valid U.S. ZIP Code." Really glad to know we (almost 1 million of us) in the Omaha metro don't exist Mr. Legere.

Yep they're terrible in Nebraska and Iowa and that is the point. We have several members that continue to extrapolate Carrier X, Y, or Z's performance in City 1,2,3 to make broad generalizations about carriers national networks. That needs to quit. I think it is crazy that T-Mobile didn't build out Omaha, but I don't carry over any assumptions based on that to their network in other places.

And I live in a 925,000 person metro that T-Mobile only serves via a protection network...

You are borderline derailing this thread at this point over an odd obsession with Easy Pay on old plans. We get (sort of) your position. Move on.

You upgrade on your subsidized plan just as you always have. I fail to see how one equates not being able to upgrade via Easy Pay on a plan that was never designed for Easy Pay equates to Sprint getting rid of the plan.

Technically speaking you have to go to the StratCom (SAC successor) bunker to answer the red telephone and push the button so I think I'm covered.

It does require the $5 add on. And more FAQ's are answered here. http://support.sprint.com/support/article/FAQs_about_Sprint_60_Unlimited_Plan/e8bc59f3-1893-4482-895a-38b7ed69ab65?INTNAV=SU:SprintFamilyunlimited:Wired:08182014:Learnmore

I now have full control over the W.O.P.R.

Here is the Sprint Individual Plan we've been waiting on. $60 unlimited plan. Available to both new and existing Sprint Subscribers http://newsroom.sprint.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=11517

And that is ultimately the predicament with advertising the network right now, although I do like your idea posted above. While the NV equipment backbone is present at nearly all of Sprint's sites right now, LTE is obviously lagging behind. It is difficult if not foolish to center your marketing around a network that at this point is still a work in progress (obviously one that is improving daily, but still a WIP). If they hit the 100 million POPs goal for 2.5 coverage by the end of the year I wouldn't be surprised to see them start taking a more aggressive marketing approach with the network.

How does someone become one of these staff members and what is the pay scale, did you get a raise?

I'm guessing 5:30 or 6:00 Eastern based on increased twitter chatter. Edit: This was a device launch event solely. Discussion of the Sharp Aquos Crystal can be found here. General Sprint discussions can continue here.

I don't think these plans were designed for people on this board by-and-large. The stock is still somewhat supported by the rejected Iliad offer. John also only made a quarterly profit last quarter due to a one off spectrum sale to Verizon. T-Mobile's EBITDA margin has plummeted. The strategy of adding subscribers at next to 0 margins is great to get a company ready to sell. I'm yet to be convinced what he is doing is sustainable. Thus, I hesitate to see Sprint throw their hat in the "Race to the Bottom."

Yes but not for the reason you are thinking. Investors don't like the company they are investing in slashing their margins, in this case offering significantly lower priced plans...

This was specifically their Omaha report. http://www.rootmetrics.com/us/rsr/omaha-ne/2014/1H Sprint is pretty much up there with the Big 2 on every metric but speed and that will change when 8T8R is deployed.

The new plan will be available Friday and it looks like the individual plan announcement will likely be on Thursday per the WSJ. http://online.wsj.com/articles/sprint-dives-into-wireless-industrys-price-war-1408401673