bigsnake49

Yeah, I remember talking about the 1x800 and the legacy equipment in 2012-2013. Yeah, age is my excuse too ?!

Yeah I forgot about the 800 1x or the legacy CDMA equipment.

T-Mobile did it. Verizon did it. No rip and replace.

I am not advocating LTE deployment without RRHs.

They might have had to eventually but they could have done it over 4-5 years without any disruption to the network, unlike Network Vision. They could have added the LTE cabinets/antennas/RRHs without disturbing the CDMA cabinets/antennas.

As a customer of Sprint with a compatible phone you will be much better off in the year it would take to close the merger. Meanwhile if the two companies are to be believed, they will expend a substantial amount of Capex to further improve their networks. Even in a year's time as a Sprint customer you will be better than if Sprint was going it alone.

I think that Network vision as a tear and rebuild process cost a lot more money and time than just adding LTE to the already existing infrastructure, the way T-Mobile did it. It sounded better than it was.

There is some discrepancy. On page 16 of the presentation, The Adjusted Fare Cash flow is given as -$240M. http://s21.q4cdn.com/487940486/files/doc_financials/quarterly/2017/q4/Fiscal-4Q17-Sprint-Quarterly-Investor-Update-FINAL.pdf

It's a total of $6B. Plus a $5B of debt forgiven by DT.

Negative cashflow for yet another quarter, negative income for yet another quarter, 44,000 net additions when T-Mobile added a million, yeah, Sprint is doing really well! They have been stuck at 55M customers for what, five years? Softbank's acquisition of Sprint has been a disaster.

OK, OK, at least 10,000 ?.

Colocated and the 10,000 of Sprint sites that T-Mobile will keep.

Then encourage the cable cos and Dish to jointly develop a 4G/5G network. Heck they can buy some of Sprint's network assets.

The problem is that Verizon can afford to pay off theirs, Sprint can't. Verizon can pay for 5G deployment out of cash flow, Sprint can't.

B25 and B26 will probably be added later since not a lot of t-Mobile phones support them. I am sure support will be added later to all T-Mobile phones going forward. There are a whole bunch of phones, particularly prepaid, on both sides the aisle that do not support both sets of frequencies.

So it looks like T-Mobile's network will be the surviving one. I think T-Mobile's network has about 65,000 macro sites. They will build another 10,000 sites if the merger goes through. So they will only keep 10,000 Sprint sites. Now here is my question. Will they use any of the 8T8R antennas? Any of the other network elements like the EPC, enodeB, etc.? Will Dish be interested in some of them? It would let them get a network up and running really quick. Will the cable cos be interested in going into a partnership with Dish to deploy the spectrum on Sprint's old network? I know that Sprint was doing a lot of work in the SDN/NFV area. Will T-Mobile adopt some of it?

That's where informed speculation and educated guesses come in. ?

I expect that it will have a little bit more technical detail and informed speculation :).

Well, to be more precise, right now they have a combined 110,000 sites. They will decommission 35,000 and build 10,000 new sites for a net of 85,000 sites. They will also add 40,000 small cells to their already existing 10,000.

Well, every media outlet and their brother has an article about the merger.

Yep, look at the table at the end of this article: https://www.fiercewireless.com/5g/it-s-official-t-mobile-and-sprint-announce-plans-to-merge

Even with the merger, the resulting company only will have 59M postpaid customers out of 127M. The new company will still have to compete on price for a while to snitch some postpaid customers.

Why can't T-mobile's 1900 be served by Sprint's 800/1900/2500? Also in certain areas Sprint has 20MHz band 25 spectrum all by itself. The other thing that the resulting company should look at is to deploy C-RAN (Centralized RAN) so they can centralize the base station functionality into a central facility per area. Of course that would require additional fiber bandwidth but it provides many pros than cons (fault tolerance/generic hardware/UPS)

Per sector, you mean. They might run against weight limits. I expect that would be the initial configuration but they probably want to save money on rent and the more antennas/RRHs the more your rent.

Not to mention Charter MVNO. I think between the two, Comcast and Charter they might cause some damage with strand and pole mounted small cells. I just might join the Charter MVNO when they offer it here if the deals are good.