laqn1283

All the talks about Sprint wants to merger with Charter based on Charter's fiber footprints. If that is truly the case, would CenturyLink and Level 3 offer similar assets as Charter but Masa can buy them for a lot less than what he would have to pay for Charter?

Because of covenants of how much softbank can spend on Sprint, I believe that is the real reason why Masa is talking to Buffet and Malone. One scenario I can think of is for Malone and buffet to buy each 1/3 of the Sprint shares from Softbank. With roughly 20 billions Masa receives from that exchange, he can replace most of the bonds that carry 7 to 9 percent interest rate with 3 to 4 coupon bonds. This moves alone will save sprint 1.2 billions in interest expense yearly which can be used for capex.

That is not what I meant. Let's say you are working in a Manhattan building. It is going to be awkward if you place this magic box near a window that is not even close to your desk.

Logistically, I think sprint will encounter more problems with buildings that do not have as many sprint customers. There is really no incentives for building owners to have these on their windows.

unbiased experience of magic box

Why is sprint using its 2.5 to provide backhaul to these magic boxes? I heard sprint has been using microwave backhaul for many of its cell sites, why can't they do the same thing for these magic boxes instead of using 2.5?

http://investorplace.com/2017/03/t-mobile-us-inc-tmus-needs-merge-sprint-corp-s/2/#.WRYPu9Tytkg I posted link to this article because there is a paragraph in there that mentions that tmobile is not prepared for 5g because they lack the fiber necessary for I guess for small cell backhaul. Whereas, verizon and att are way ahead of tmobile and sprint in term of fibers. But Sprint has a way around this problem mainly because of the amount of spectrum it has but also sprint has been installing massive mimo. Can anyone confirm if any of this is true?

Some rumor the mysterious bidder for straight path is SoftBank. If that is true that It will be interesting. They did not spend anything at all on low band but willing to blow at least 3 billions for the microwave.

I read mm wave can provide 10 gigabytes of backhaul. Cisco estimate by 2020 65 percent of backhaul provided by mm wave. So fiber is not really the only solution

I guess my concern is: will Sprint be at a disadvantage in term of cost when it comes to 5g because they will need lots of fibers since verizon and att have been laying fibers for years?

With all these small cells popping up, how will sprint handle the backhaul? fibers will be expensive. Verizon and att have large network of fibers installed already. Sprint and Tmobile will be not able to compete when 5g arrive. Even the cable companies have more fibers close to premise than Sprint or tmobile. Any idea how Sprint approaches this problem?

nexgencpu summed up precisely what I had in mind regarding wiseguy321 comments. In the era of capacity, high band spectrum and lots of it matters. None of the other carriers have the enough spectrum to set aside for backhaul for small cells both indoors and outdoors.

I realized a lot of people looking at the stock performance yesterday and concluded that sprint must have done terribly last quarter. That is far from the truth. This is the first time in a very long time that service revenue increased sequentially from previous quarter. And this shows that even with very low capex, Sprint was able to add postpaid phones and increase revenue. On top of that, looking at the recent rootmetrics reports, there are quite a few cities where lte speeds increase significantly. But the most promising aspect of all this is that we are still in early inning, and sprint still has many tools which they just begin to utilize to increase its network performance such as hpue, magic box and small cells and these are not really available to other carriers.

Just need some clarification: are the magic boxes the same as small cells but instead of outdoors now they are in doors? If they are the same as the outdoor small cells then why does sprint need millions of them? Did they said they need to build only 50 to 60 thousand outdoor small cells?

conference call at 830 AM eastern time. Here is an interesting note: last year same time, total postpaid add for the 4 carriers was almost 2 million. For the 3 carriers that already reported this year, total net postpaid add is about 0. If we extrapolate, then sprint should add about 2 million postpaid phones. However analysts only predict 50K