RedSpark

One good meme deserves another.

New T-Mobile is going to be a force to be reckoned with going forward. I don't think Verizon and AT&T realize it yet.

Yup. Throw in a good dash of proper capex and management as well.

That was quick. Wow.

Progress!

Damn, that article was depressing. Feel good PR?

T-Mobile says Sprint saw 502,000 postpaid net additions in March quarter despite phone losses

Oh definitely. Thou who hath the spectrum can spit hot fire. He’s watched T-Mobile throw out the snark for years against “dumb and dumber”, not even mentioning Sprint some of the time. He’s also seen their customer adds quarter after quarter, combined with their savvy marketing. Combine that with Masa’s incompetence and lack of support. It must have been infuriating. Now he’s gone from this: to this... Love it.

Give it time. Lowband 5G is meant to be complemented by additional 5G spectrum.

🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥 Saw's been waiting to say this his whole career... He's in his element now post-merger.

Great write-up about how they did it.

Between March 11th, when COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, and March 31st, T-Mobile was able to move nearly its entire customer care workforce out of its call centers across the US and into a work from home operation. That's almost 14,000 employees in just 20 days. That's incredible. They've now got all 17 of their internal call centers working from home along with over 92% of the Sprint care teams. Now that they've made these moves to have people work remotely, I wonder if they'll keep it this way? Saves on the commute time/expense for the employees, and T-Mobile could save quite a bit of money as well if it doesn't renew the leases on (or sells) its call center properties. Proof of concept that it can work for the long term? Thoughts?

Oh that's certainly true. T-Mobile had low-band 5G (which has great propagation but doesn't have the speeds of 2.5 GHz 5G) and MMwave (for which the economics of widespread deployment for 2.5 GHz compare poorly with 2.5 GHz for 5G). What T-Mobile did have going for it was competent management and network deployment, quarter after quarter of customer additions and a tremendously successful social media presence. All it had to do was wait for Sprint to flame out and to grab its spectrum assets through the merger... and it did. Now you'll have T-Mobile's competent management and engineers managing and building out Sprints network assets that were tremendously underutilized when they were held by Sprint. T-Mobile properly managed the windfall of Spectrum/Cash it got from the breakup fee when AT&T failed to acquired it. It also was successful in efficiently integrating MetroPCS into its core network. If this merger had failed, Sprint would have continued to stagnate without billions of capital from Masa... and even then, the network wouldn't come close to what this combined network will be.

I hope so too! I think we will. The S20 devices are going to go through the teething process on this more than Apple launching this Fall devices will. I expect the networks to be in a very different place come this Fall. I'm not sure if we have MMwave here yet.

We'll see what they're offering this Fall. They said we could keep our plans/pricing for 3 years (5 in the case of CA apparently). I don't think they'd mandate a plan switch to upgrade devices. Even so, T-Mobile's plans may be better, especially with taxes/fees included.

If we weren't doing iPhone leases through Sprint, we'd be doing the iPhone Annual Upgrade Program. That being said, I hope they keep the lease program the way it is. I don't want to have to pay off the entire device and do a trade-in/sell-back to upgrade.

I completely agree and I'm glad it's finally over.

"One brand" in time for the annual iPhone upgrade cycle... and the adoption rate should be huge given that it's expected to be 5G this year. T-Mobile is showing us how things are done when you have real capex and effective, competent management. Sprint never had a chance with the clowns it had running things. Shame on you Masa/Marcelo.

I haven't seen a "Sprint-side" announcement about this (unless I missed it), but perhaps T-Mobile is speaking for both brands here?

https://rootmetrics.com/en-US/content/att-early-2020-performance-review Although this is primarily about AT&T, there are some nuggets about where Sprint stood pre-merger.

I anticipate doing annual upgrades for the three lines of ours with iPhone 11 Pro's to the 5G iPhone when it comes out this Fall. I'm hoping that Apple doesn't increase prices any further as Samsung has done. I guess we'll see whether that upgrade is processed through Sprint's or T-Mobile's systems.

https://www.cnet.com/news/former-t-mobile-ceo-john-legere-leaves-board-weeks-earlier-than-expected/ Legere left the Board earlier than expected. Wonder what he'll do next.

Nice video! Many people are working hard to keep us connected and move the network integration process forward.

Oh I definitely agree it's possible. I think T-Mobile wants to wind down the Sprint brand as quickly as possible. At this point, keeping the Sprint brand/assets afloat eats into the synergies and cost savings that it wanted to realize through the merger. 8/2 comes to I think ~120 days from 4/1.... That timeframe sure fits into a Powerpoint strategy deck nicely.

We'll see if there's any corroboration of or further clarification to this...