bigsnake49

I'm with jefbal99. If Sprint can consolidate on PCS and 800, it will be a great thing. Plenty of bandwidth on PCS with 800MHz thrown in for exurban coverage/penetration.

USCC has about 6M mostly postpaid customers. They are mostly in the midwest and some in the northeast. They are generally rural except for Chicago, St Louis and quite a few smaller markets.

I wonder if Dish/Direct TV would be interested in swapping their spectrum in the 2GHz/700Mhz bands for Sprint's interest in Clearwire?

Although, I'm all for this merger, I think it will be a bear to carry out. Much easier to integrate Cricket and Metro and or USCC.

Total service revenues of $4.4 billion in the second quarter of 2012 compared to $4.4 billion in the first quarter of 2012 and $4.6 billion in the second quarter of 2011, a decrease of 5.2% year-on-year Branded contract churn of 2.10% in the second quarter of 2012; 40 bps decrease quarter-over-quarter and 50 bps decrease year-on-year Net customer losses of 205,000 in the second quarter of 2012 compared to 50,000 net customer losses in the second quarter of 2011 Branded contract net customer losses of 557,000 in the second quarter of 2012, compared to 510,000 branded contract net customer losses in the first quarter of 2012 and 536,000 branded contract net customer losses in the second quarter of 2011 Strong branded prepaid net customer additions of 227,000 in the second quarter of 2012 compared to 71,000 branded prepaid net customer losses in the second quarter of 2011 and branded prepaid net customer additions of 249,000 in the first quarter of 2012 http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/09/t-mobile-usa-q2-2012-earnings/ I wonder how long the FCC and DOJ will object to a Sprint/T-Mobile merger if they keep losing that many customers.

It's definitely valuable for satellite companies if they ever wish to have a real video on demand option without depending on the cable companies to provide the bandwidth.

What you don't have one yet?

The best thing for Sprint to do is to acquire the spectrum and have Leap be another MVNO on top of Sprint's network.

I would like for Sprint to acquire both Leap and Metro. Leap now and Metro later.

Nice! I guess they are serious about their network.

I'm surprised that Sprint didn't buy them first, if only to force AT&T to trade spectrum.

Add to this that DirectTV is sniffing around Clearwire and I see some very interesting developments in the next 12 months. Both the satellite providers need to deploy some video on demand infrastructure.

http://www.engadget....twave-spectrum/

BTW AT&T has $62B worth of net debt. You don't hear much about that! I think that Sprint just needs to execute on its Vision plan and reduce its roaming bill to a manageable amount like $250M instead of the $1B that it had couple of years ago. If that means that it limits the amount of roaming minutes allowed so be it. If it means that it kicks people off that are in marginal areas, so be it. If it means that it develops its network in said marginal areas, then so be it. They need to improve their margins to match the big two.

Sprint's net debt is about $15B, so a suitor has to come up with $14B of equity and $15B of debt, so at least $29B. I assume at least 30% premium on top of current price so 1.3*$14B+$15B=$33.2B. Of course they should probably count on another $5B to finish Network Vision.

I live in a high rise condo building (7 floors). It's cement block outside with metal framing inside. Verizon has the best signal even though it's on 1900MHz and AT&T is on 850 and they're on the same tower. Sprint is great by the front door but starts fading quickly once you get inside. T-Mobile although on the same tower as Verizon and AT&T is weaker than any of them and Sprint.

I Have two sinology NAS, one the primary and one secondary that backups the first one (actually synchronizes to the primary). The primary is also backed up to Amazon's AWS. I can't say enough good words about them. They have been solid.

I'm impressed that they still had positive cash flow and still have a substantial amount of cash at hand.

No, private placement allows them to buy back their public shares. All shareholders then agree to take it private.

AJ, just to supplement what you said. 1X Advanced can be used to further reduce the amount of spectrum devoted to voice.

Maybe private placement?

Some apartment complexes allow it. The other thing that dish can do is to have one antenna for the whole complex. Highgain, high bandwidth antenna.

You and I are thinking along the same lines. I think the value of the spectrum that Clearwire has is in fixed broadband applications particularly as a delivery vehicle for video, but not necessarily for broadcast video, but video on demand. I would expect that Dish's spectrum would also be targeted for that. I think that Sprint's spectrum position is sufficient for mobile applications, but not for video delivery.

DirecTV Group Inc. (NYSE: DTV) wants Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK), Time Warner Cable Inc. (NYSE: TWC) and Bright House Networks to shed their investments in Clearwire LLC(Nasdaq: CLWR) as a condition of their proposed sale of Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum to Verizon Wireless . DirecTV's proposal, described in this Federal Communications Commission (FCC) filing, comes into play as the Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice review the proposed sales, which are valued at about $4 billion and also include Cox Communications Inc. 's AWS spectrum. T-Mobile USA is in line to gain some of that spectrum, but only if Verizon Wireless can get those deals done. (See VZ Wireless/T-Mobile Spectrum Deal Has a Catch.) "Allowing these MSOs to continue to hold minority ownership and management interests in Clearwire despite their new arrangement with Verizon Wireless would enable them to hamper further development of Clearwire's competing network and services, both by impeding new initiatives and by refusing to make additional investments," DirecTV argued in the filing. http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=223133&site=lr_cable& This is getting curiouser and curiouser. A grand DirectTV/Clearwire/Sprint tie-up?

Just a small correction: OS X and IOS are not linux based. They used the Mach microkernel, that was worked on at Carnegie Mellon by Avie Tevanian, one of the founders of NEXT, which apple acquired. The used land is a mashup of FreeBSD and NetBSD with some OpenBSD for good measure. Their kernel is called XNU. Whether or not Apple will fail, we will see. They have been written off many times since the 80's.