bigsnake49

8 minutes ago, Tengen31 said:

The are actually doing 10x10 no much difference in know

Sent from my SM-G975U1 using Tapatalk
 

Where they have it.

2 hours ago, Flompholph said:

Looks like there is still another month+ left for this judge. 

 

I am curious how the judge is going to view T mobiles ads about nationwide 5g deployments without the merger and how the merger will help them go faster. Tmobile is in a tough position to talk in to different direction and hope they don't look at the other. 

5x5 of 5G does not a usable 5G network make. They need Sprint's spectrum to deploy 5G to its full glory.

It seems that the Justice Department and FCC filed an amicus brief supporting the merger:

"In their filing, the Justice Department and FCC argued that if the states, led by New York and California, succeed in killing the deal the end result will be that rural areas of the United States will be slower to get access to 5G, the next generation of wireless."

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/u-justice-department-fcc-fight-152453519.html

17 minutes ago, S4GRU said:

No.  Because he is allowed to decide to merge his company with another, even for profit.  It is our form of government that decides that is a long process that costs lots of money.  And that's probably a good thing.  But it is what it is.  We don't have Pre-Approval Commissions who decide whether companies should be allowed to start a merger.  It doesn't work that way.  Not even in India, which is considered the most Bureaucratic country on earth.

Masayoshi Son didn't do anything wrong.  It's just not what we wanted him to do.  With his money.  Go figure.

Robert

Thank you Robert for enlightening some of these guys on what capitalism is all about. It is for investor to make money. It is not to bring you, the public, lower prices. Lower prices only come about only when the cost of labor goes down (imports), you have achieved great efficiencies and you want to steal customers from your competitors, you have too much merchandise in your warehouse or you can't compete in any other way. Unfortunately Sprint cannot compete in any other way. Between lower prices and having to pay your debt, there is not enough money to invest in your network. Lowering prices in the short term is fine but as a long term strategy leads to a spiral of death.

43 minutes ago, RedSpark said:

https://www.advfn.com/stock-market/NASDAQ/DISH/stock-news/81387856/softbank-offered-to-help-fund-dish-wireless-networ
 

“SoftBank Group Corp. offered to help finance Dish Network Corp.'s construction of a new cellphone network intended to shore up competition if the merger of the nation's No. 3 and No. 4 wireless carriers closes, Dish's chairman said Wednesday”

It’s full on parody now. Straight up clown world. It was a lie. All of it.

Misleading headline as usual. From the article:

"JPMorgan, one of the banks lined up this month to lend Dish cash, was offering to back the company even earlier. A June 27 email from a JPMorgan banker displayed in court Wednesday arranged for financing of Dish's purchase of Sprint prepaid brand Boost Mobile with SoftBank's support. 

Mr. Ergen said the company was seeking a $1 billion general-purpose loan at the time and thought the SoftBank assistance "would give us margin" because the Japanese investment company can borrow at a "much lower rate" that could save Dish $70 million to $100 million. The Justice Department also approved the funding arrangement, which remains contingent on the T-Mobile purchase of Sprint closing, Mr. Ergen added."

It's like somebody cosigning for you (your parents) so you can get a lower rate. Or taking out a loan for you because they have a better credit score and then loaning you the money for the same rate they got it. Softbank has been loaning Sprint money at a lower rates so they can refinance their debt so the interest payments can be lower.

There was a time when I was driving on a Farm-To-Market road outside of Austin TX. Nothing but farmland for miles around. Yet I had Sprint signal, enough to make a phone call to my wife. And I thought how can Sprint make any money, not enough subscribers and there are 2 other companies here (T-Mobile did not cover this particular FTM road). I still have the same question.

48 minutes ago, dkyeager said:

$10 billion a reasonable start, but much more would be needed.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dishs-ergen-says-banks-lined-up-to-loan-10-billion-for-wireless-network-11576627114

 

I could see them actually spending a little bit less since they don't need to put an enodeB or the equivalent in 5G parlance at every site. They could implement a C-RAN architecture with only the RRHs at each site. They also don't need to be a nationwide competitor, just nail the cities and larger towns.

9 hours ago, RedSpark said:

Sprint can retrench if it wants to. A merger shouldn’t be granted to keep that from happening, especially given that Masa has always had the means to bail Sprint out on his own. If Masa wants to let Sprint retrench, I’m fine with that. I may have to take my business of 8 lines elsewhere, but so it goes.

If Masa had adequately supported Sprint by offsetting or completely negating its debt, it could have without a doubt been competitive with Verizon/AT&T, even with the comparatively low revenue flow it has versus the big two. Look what it’s been able to accomplish on “fuel vapors”.

The only time a merger should not be approved is if the resulting entity has too much power in the market place. Nothing else. The new T-Mobile will not have too much power it will barely have as many subs as Verizon and its revenue will fall far short of the big two since it does not have as many postpaid subs. All this bellyaching about prices is just that, bellyaching. Plus they did promise that they will not raise prices for three years.

1 hour ago, tommym65 said:

If . . .  Could have  . . .  Would have . . .  Should have . . .

Sprint, Softbank, and Son could have and should have done many things differently.  If they had, Sprint would have become a different company than it is today.

But they did not do things differently.  So here we are.  Whatever we wish had happened, it did not.

And realistically, there is no practical reason to think that all of these positive things envisioned in this thread will happen if the merger fails.

From the shareholders' point of view, the best thing that could happen today is for Sprint to be absorbed by T-Mobile:  That result will optimize their return-on-investment in the shortest reasonable time.  Otherwise, Sprint will have to spend years trying to recover from its self-made mess, if Softbank will let it recover at all rather than just dumping it. 

And, quite frankly, the fiduciary obligation of Sprint as a corporation is to its shareholders, not to its customers, not to its employees, and not to 1 district and 13 state attorneys general.  So if the merger fails, we should not expect some sort of magical resurgence of Sprint as a viable competitor to the Big 2.  It will not happen, at least in any reasonable time frame.  The shareholders (84% of whom are, in fact, Softbank) will seek some sort of short-term recourse, and we will almost certainly say bye-bye to Sprint as we know it.

People don't realize that Sprint and T-Mobile don't owe anybody low prices. Their obligation is to their shareholders. There is no magic formula that says that 3 carriers + MVNOs are going to lead to higher prices or lower prices. Remember that the states did not present any anti-trust evidence (how could they), they just presented evidence that it might need to higher prices.

33 minutes ago, RedSpark said:

This strikes me as deliberate FUD by Claure.

None of this would be necessary if Masa properly funded and adequately capitalized Sprint from the outset.

This merger is a total farce, and it should fail because it’s clearly not necessary based on the disclosed communications.

Masa: Time to reach for that checkbook.

He could have agreed with John Legere and told the judge that it could lead to bankruptcy. But he did not. Instead he and Coombes said that there is a plan B. Instead of bankruptcy, retrenchment. It totally makes economic sense not just for Sprint but also for T-Mobile. Let the big two and maybe the rural co-ops fight for the rural customers.

11 minutes ago, BlueAngel said:

This further forces me to go with another carrier if the merger doesn't go through.

Yep and that's why this merger is needed. If they have to retrench to only large cities and towns, they will probably concentrate in serving those towns and cities well and abandon the rest. They can probably lease their spectrum in those smaller towns to other providers and get roaming in return. But they will no longer offer service in those little towns.

Also from the same article:

Under questioning by the states’ lawyer, Combes said there was a “Plan B” for Sprint in the event the merger with T-Mobile failed to go though. Under that plan, Sprint would focus on fewer markets than it currently does, though its network would still cover about three quarters of the U.S. population.

“Sprint two years from now would be a very different from Sprint today, because we would cease to be a national competitor,” Claure said, adding the company would likely have to borrow money and raise prices.

Read more at: https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/sprint-can-survive-without-t-mobile-ex-ceo-claure-testifies
Copyright © BloombergQuint

So be careful what you wish for. Maybe your market will be the one that they pull back from. Maybe they won't be in as many rural and small town markets. Or they have to stop having such liberal roaming policies. They will probably have to sell Boost and close the stores in the markets they abandon. Yeah New York and California will probably still be served. 

27 minutes ago, red_dog007 said:

If they don't get Sprint, they will go all in with C-Band like VZW. VZW wants this merger to go through as TMobile will be a huge bidder if they don't.  They would walk away with 60 to 160MHz of spectrum depending on licensed area. Not considering the subscriber base you get with the merger, dealing with the infrastructure seems like it would be a hell of a lot easier to just buy C-Band, deploy that, DSS and SA 600MHz 5G in 2020.

The cable cos will also be huge bidders for C-Band and CBRS. 

Prices will go up no matter what, whether they buy Sprint or not. T-Mobile no longer needs to compete on price. At least if they acquire Sprint prices will not go up for what 3-5 years. Of course they could increase prices in other ways like not giving you as much of a break on the handsets.

47 minutes ago, red_dog007 said:

What also solves the problem, the licenses lapse and the FCC get to auction off old Dish spectrum that will fetch billions. FCC wins. The people win. Purchasers win. Sprint has been spending capex so that problem is solved already.

If Dish looses half their spectrum, they might have to settle for cheap leasing agreements, so leasees win. 

People like to harp on Sprint for bad numbers, no growth, and small and weak network.  Going from 2 big 2 small players to 3 big 1 non player sounds like great competition!  With the previous history of inaction, doing minimal, spending money to push deadlines vs taking action, Dish will likely do just enough to pump their numbers, pump their evaluation, then sell out. Buildout extensions. 8 million new customers on the cheap.  More spectrum on the cheap. MVNO status. Their evaluation will go through the roof.  They will buildout 'just enough' i.e. protection sites and call it a day.  Unless Dish gets 10s of billions of capex running through them, how in the world are they supposed to compete with 3 large, 100+ million sub companies?

For Dish to have a chance, and for them to be taken serious, imo, they need to buy Sprint's physical network.

I would not be surprised if the merger goes through, we get a reverse takeover from Dish of the New-TMobile in a few short years. Sure they have spectrum, but without a network there is no way for them to survive.  To build a nationwide network from scratch, that is very not Ergen, and likely cheaper to just buy New-TMobile.

Who is going to finance such a large merger of Dish swallowing T-Mobile? 

I am sure that Dish will ride on New T-Mobile's network for as long as they can. But New T-Mobile will not touch AWS-4. They will host AWS-3 and 600MHZ and continue hosting 800MHz but Dish needs to pony up for AWS-4 deployment whether they do it themselves or T-Mobile hosts it. I have no problem if they never develop their own network but there is a maximum of 5 years of being an MVNO per the merger agreement, I think, but that can be changed. I think that offering video on mobile devices for free if you join their network will attract the younger generation. Dish already has content licenses.

Lest we forget, the cable cos will be major players in the CBRS/C band spectrum. They can offload the rural/highway coverage to Verizon and use their own small cell based networks to service the rest. They can also play the video on mobile devices game since they have content agreements as well. 

48 minutes ago, Grabber5.0 said:

Makes it that much more obvious they were just buying it to squat and try to sell for big profit. Unbelievable that it was allowed to go on this long.

No, Ergen wanted to sell the whole Dish, nobody wants to buy all of it. After what Dish pulled at the AWS-3 auction to pump up the value of their spectrum nobody wanted to deal with them. The FCC does not want to deal with taking spectrum back particularly spectrum bought in auction. I am sure that Dish could tie them up in court for many many years. 

7 minutes ago, ingenium said:

I think some Samsung phones support it, but it's disabled in the US at the request of the carriers.

For a single connection, it would need to utilize Multipath TCP. And the destination server would also need to support it (which is rare). The only major deployment that I'm aware of is Apple using it for I think FaceTime, and maybe other Apple services. It's done so that when connectivity changes (for example going from wifi to LTE) there is no interruption. I don't know if they actually aggregate the connections otherwise.

It's possible that Sprint also does it for VoLTE -> Vowifi hand-off. I know that Vowifi uses an ipsec tunnel (UDP), but within that tunnel the SIP connection uses TCP, which surprised me. This could be a valid reason for using TCP I guess, to allow seamless transitions.

Sent from my Pixel 4 XL using Tapatalk
 

Thanks! 

9 minutes ago, ingenium said:

The MB maxes out at about 85-90 Mbps, regardless of backhaul. It seems to be some kind of hardware limit, either on the LTE eNB or on the ipsec tunnel. The Airave 4 is exactly the same.

Both my Airave and MB are connected via Ethernet on a gigabit connection and max out at that.

Sent from my Pixel 4 XL using Tapatalk
 

I was thinking about the device side. If there is a setting that will aggregate the two data streams, the LTE stream and the WiFi stream.

18 hours ago, red_dog007 said:

A solution to what exactly?  anti-competitive? 

Well when it is to buy or not to buy, the only answer is not to buy. I guess the judge is considering Dish's prospective. Will they get the job done.  I think, with deadlines so near, and them owning spectrum for so long, we have to look at intent.  So far, with the lack of building anything, that shows pretty solid intent right there. 

As soon as the carriers get spectrum, they toss that stuff up on towers asap. Look how much has been deployed for B66, B71, B14. Look how much 5G is already deployed.  Dish, in the last year before deadlines annouced 1, maybe 1.5billion for an IoT network. 

 

I was actually kinda thinking about this. Dish needs to be willing to buy Sprint's entire network. Sprint essentially stays as is, minus spectrum licenses and postpaid customers. 

FCC wanted Dish to deploy its spectrum, Dish was hesitant to enter a 4 player market, making it a 5 player market. This merger solves couple of problems. It solves Sprint's capex problems, T-Mobile's spectrum problem and Dish's (and FCC's) spectrum deployment problem. Win, win, win!

I changed the backhaul to WiFi and did a speediest. I get about the same results as LTE backhaul. On the other hand if I leave WiFi on on the phone itself I get twice the performance. Is there a way to aggregate the links? LTE backhauled cellular + WiFi?

15 minutes ago, S4GRU said:

If there is no merger, it is not all gloom and doom.  Sprint is a healthier company now than it has been in the past.  It will really come down to how it would play the future competitive landscape and whether having too compete too low on price while building out an expensive new upgrade again ends up being too much in the long run.  There is no imminence of doom.  And there is no guarantee that the other will fare as well, either.

If Sprint keeps improving its network and keeps prices low, it steadily drains money from their competitors too.  Sprint does not have to be perfect to be a disruptor.  And soon there would be no Legere at Tmo.  Who knows how a post Legere Tmo works out in the long run?  No need for dire predictions at this point!  And as a Verizon and Tmo customer also, I can tell you it ain't all unicorns and fairy dust over on the other networks.  People are expecting a huge difference, and for the most part, they find a slight difference. 

We have seen a lot of people come back to Sprint in these forums the past 12-18 months, all saying the same thing.  They expected their digital life to come alive leaving Sprint, and then they just find they get poorer month over month.  Then come back and find the network is even better since they left.

Robert

Sprint has pretty much neglected our area. T-Mobile improved by leaps and bounds in this area when they acquired MetroPCS. Metro duplicated the Verizon network throughout Florida and had developed quite a following. Sprint's network actually went backwards in that they replaced some macro sites beach side with small cells + band 26. Not smart because small cells just don't have the coverage. Forced me to get an MB.

45 minutes ago, RedSpark said:

https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/t-mobile-feeling-very-good-after-first-day-trial
 

Guess T-Mobile feels good about things? I’m glad that the judge is hustling this along.

Same here, this merger has taken way too long to either complete or reject.

14 hours ago, dkyeager said:

On a capital raised basis Sprint does not look bankrupt at all.  The number of site improvements doing since the merger was announced is astounding.  Most of the sites in my market have been touched, most Clear sites tribanded, new sites made, small cells multiplied, Massive MIMO installed in dozens of places with more permits added just a few weeks ago.  They have more macro sites in my market than T-Mobile, a ton of small cells where T-Mobile has almost none.  Yet this work does not show in root metrics.  RF engineers from other firms have all said Sprint is short of backhaul as their key problem.  They blame management, which I believe is the key reason Masa wants this merger.

While I applaud all that work they have done lately, it was all borrowed money. Their debt load increased from all the capex spending. There's no magic in this. You spend money your network improves. You spend money you don't have, your debt increases.

27 minutes ago, RedSpark said:

Is Sprint really teetering that badly that this would happen that quickly?

I think they would probably declare Chapter 11 soon after the merger is not approved. 

1 hour ago, Flompholph said:

With how reporters are twisting things today(no matter what side of the coin you are on. The other side is twisting things.) no I don't trust them that is why I asked for source material. 

The "x days" is a reference to the judge setting a bench trial "A bench trial is scheduled before this Court from December 9 through December 20, 2019." It doesn't say I will have a written judgement by the 19th. If you want to tell yourself 9 days be my guess just don't give others hope this train wreck will be over any time soon. 

I am going to say 2 weeks max for this trial. The judge is my kind of judge: make your argument, make it quick, skip the bullshit. Defense, what do you have to counteract the plaintiffs argument. He does not want the lawyers pontificating from the podium. One thing that I have not seen addressed yet is one of standing. Which is to say, the states have no standing to sue, the feds are the interstate regulators and they have crafted a good agreement to save Sprint and create a new competitor. 

8 minutes ago, dro1984 said:

I agree.  It seems common sense disappears in all of this, especially the states attorney generals.  They know this.... but I'm afraid this is political driven.    Lets hope the judge see through this attempted control of free business.    They are in business to make money after all... the entire premise to keep prices low for 5-7 years is crap! (Price controls- Hello dictator Government)   You should not control free market business like this or we fail as a free market.  It's a nice guarantee but not one the government should buy into or put value on.   

Look I understand that Sprint customers value price over everything else, I do. I am one of them, I only signed up for one of those $15/month deals because it was so cheap. My main lines are through Spectrum. But I don't think that my $15/month will contribute much to Sprint's capex and debt repayment.