Mr.Nuke

That is not what your link says.

I don't think they need to match $40 necessarily. They do need to bid competitively. Hypothetically if they bid $39 on the entire 66.7% DT stake (remember their initial offer only covered 10% less than this) they'd be withing about $800 million of Softbank's bid. There is value in ease of regulatory approval. There is also fairly significant risk to DT if a merger fails. Two of the three largest wireless carriers have tried to buy you and failed. Verizon won't be able to even if they wanted. Dish? Maybe. Now with an absence of a competitive bidding process, Iliad loses quite a bit of incentive to alter their bid. That said, 1) I don't think Iliad can come up with the financing for such a bid and 2) If Masa is really interested he can go higher.

This site has a database of every Sprint site at the sponsor level and every Clear site at the premier sponsor level. We have a pretty darn good idea of how many sites there are.

The other part of that is sometimes getting overlooked is Softbank is offering to buy an additional 10.1% of the company (at the higher price as well). DT has been rumored to want out of the North American market. Softbank is offering that. Furthermore the finances in comparing deals come into play here as well. With the additional 10.1%, you either have $40 a share for another 81.5 million shares ($3.2 billion) in hard cash from Masa; or a 10.1% minority stake in a new t-mobile with promises from Iliad that those shares will be worth the same $40/share though "synergy's". Based on the current share price as of close at Friday, Softbank's offer on that 10.1% stake alone is a $536 million premium. Then of course you have the $3.2 billion difference ($33 vs. $40 for the 56.6% stake) in the actual Iliad offer.

In fairness, in either the Rising Sun or Froggy proposals, shareholders are pretty much irrelevent. Both Softbank and Iliad are talking about buying portions of DT's controlling stake in the company directly from DT. With DT owning 2/3 of the company, other shareholders are along for the ride. investment banker funny math to try and make DT's remaining stake in the company look more valuable.

Seriously though they'll make another offer. This was much like the idiot looking for a deal that makes an initial offer on a house 30% below market value.

That $5.6 billion long-term debt to affiliates is DT issued long term debt for the Metro PCS transaction. It absoluetely belongs in long-term debt and it would be assumed as part of any Softbank purchase. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-08/deutsche-telekom-said-to-plan-5-6-billion-of-t-mobile-debt-1-.html

Their 2013 Annual Report shows 17 issues and total long-term debt of $19.945 billion. That is also consistent with the reports of Softbank lining up financing to assume T-Mobile's $20 billion debt. Edit: Your numbers are from 2012. They took on a significant amount of additional debt the following year ($6.3 billion) by assuming the obligations of Metro PCS.

-Seth

Just to make this more explicit than what JimBob said (his description was accurate). APRU stands for Average Revenue Per Unit. In wireless industry terms, this is the amount of money the average user of a company spends per month per month on the service. Revenue is solely what the customer is paying.Thus unless a company is giving away services for free, ARPU is always going to be positive. In accounting terms Revenue or sales is the top line item, it doesn't include any expenses the company bears to generate the revenue. ---------------- And this is one of those financial analyst duh moments... If T-Mobile gains additional subscribers via a plan with a monthly cost less than their current ARPU, their ARPU will drop...

The even more curious thing here is that to my knowledge (and the coverage map) Sprint has not announced Seattle as a Spark market. Tacoma has both been announced and is on the coverage map, but Seattle is not. So he is essentially complaining based on faulty information.

If you can track down the site we'd take that information in the sponsor thread.

It may have improved with OM03IP491 being 1x800 accepted since the last time I've driven it, but that coverage gap between Sprint's West Iowa/Nebraska territory and the Swiftel sites in Sioux City has always struck me as odd.

In Chicago you live in a Samsung market where BSL locations on NV sites are broadcasting their true location. Other markets aren't as lucky. That site is broadcasting an offset location.

In an unlaunched Sprint market such as Las Vegas, representatives do not have access to or knowledge of LTE site information. Once a market is officially launched by Sprint, everything changes.

No they can't. Sprint supports LTE launched markets differently from a CS perspective than markets that haven't been launched as you've been told. I don't know what this has to do with anything. Any merger is all unconfirmed rumors at this point.

I was surprised with the overly positive tone in the comment section of the last Sprint related article I read there. The tide may indeed be starting to turn.

Maybe I set my expectations lower than others, but I'm honestly not sure what people were expecting. Someone guessed an announcement of HD voice in the 5th post in this thread. That made the most sense all along. The only other thing they could've really announced was they've made significant process on NV, but their is still work to do. And they did that as well in the press release.

They've said they are trying to deploy Spark in the Top 100 markets however you want to define that by the end of the year. Permits for 8T8R deployments have been popping up in places outside of that as well.

5 more acceptances for LTE today.

6.32% is T-Mobile's current weighted average cost of long-term debt. With softbank's current credit rating I'm guessing it will average to around 5% for the refinancing (they would probably be downgraded again if a deal goes through though). At $20 billion that is about $264,000,000 in savings. If Sprint is refinancing the deal it will cost more.

They have $19.945 billion in long-term debt on their balance sheet as of the fy 2013.

Yes, if Sprint was using the same backhaul provider in that market, and I'm sure they've benefited from this on some occasions. However, in some cases AT&T and Verizon are running their own fiber to their own sites.

3G...