bigsnake49

34 minutes ago, RedSpark said:

T-Mobile was als in a position to execute on that spectrum. It had Fiber backhaul running to its tower sites... whereas Sprint pre-Network Vision did not on a substantial number of them. It had T-1's or bundled T-1's if I recall correctly.

The delays and costs of getting backhaul to the sites (and the substantial number of customers fleeing while this went on as part of Network Vision) played an integral role as to where we are today.

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.

1 hour ago, Mr.Nuke said:

http://s21.q4cdn.com/487940486/files/doc_financials/quarterly/2017/q4/Fiscal-4Q17-Earnings-Release-FINAL.pdf

 

Final 2017 Capex was $3.3 billion narrowly missing the $3.5-$4 billion guidance.

FY 2018 Capex guidance remains $5-6 billion

 

Marcelo Claure is out as CEO, being transitioned  to "Executive Chairman." Michel Combes as the new CEO. Claure will also be COO of SoftBank and CEO of SoftBank International.

http://newsroom.sprint.com/sprint-elevates-marcelo-claure-to-executive-chairman-and-appoints-michel-combes-as-ceo.htm

 

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

6 minutes ago, twospirits said:

To add to the "what pisses me off" bandwagon, I really do not like that there isn't any break up fee from what I've seen. If the regulators from the FCC or Dept of Justice kill the merger Sprint gets nothing. Granted, Sprint will get $600 million if T-Mobile decides to not do the merger, but seriously, that's pennies compared to the $4 Billion breakup fee T-Mobile got from AT&T. And no matter what anyone tries to convince me otherwise, that $4 billion T-Mobile got from AT&T helped them quite a bit. 

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

36 minutes ago, SprintNYC said:

It means both managements were in cahoots. Sprint for years was fighting hard to secure a 30mhz spectrum reserve in that 600mhz auction just at the last minute to bounce of planning to participate in that said auction and let Tmobile alone go for all of it.  The whole merger thing was happening behind the scenes it just they needed to make it official to the public after a new administration was established. They are not stupid, they waited that a new antitrust chief was appointed in the DOJ.

 

Another reason to block this merger.

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.

41 minutes ago, Dkoellerwx said:

(At least 10,000)

OK, OK, at least 10,000 ?.

5 hours ago, Paynefanbro said:

My guess is Sprint will be focusing on colocated sites initially for massive MIMO and stick to expanding and densifying within their urban/suburban footprint instead of rural expansion.

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

16 minutes ago, RedSpark said:

Sprint was on its way out of business when Masa bought it. Unfortunately, he kept it in purgatory for years, while he spent billions on other investments like ARM, Boston Robotics, etc.

I don't want this merger to go through. There need to be 4 major carriers to preserve competition.

I think Guenther saw the writing on the wall. Perhaps he knew there wasn't a place for him down the road.

Sprint was capable of doing this without T-Mobile. It had finally hit its stride... and then suddenly this happens.

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

4 hours ago, dnicekid said:

Son just wanted out.  I keep hearing about debt, if Sprint has 34billion and vzw $120bil in debt what’s the problem? Sprint has the spectrum to get better whereas vzw can only buy more then deploy.  My point is in comparison they all have about the same amount of debt in relation to the size of their companies. -Son just wanted out because it’s a long term investment not a quick turnaround in the American market like he thought.

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. 

44 minutes ago, dro1984 said:

As long as we get some of T-Mob's 600mHz.    I'm sure the companies will utilize all their spectrum with what-ever the Government ends up letting them keep.     

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? 

8 minutes ago, Mr.Nuke said:

This one will be a little more like all of the other ones just to get something up on the wall. We'll start to delve deeper technically later when we 1) have more time and 2) know more. Everything on that end has been pretty vague so far.

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

1 hour ago, Mr.Nuke said:

We are working on ours (sorry for the delay).

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

52 minutes ago, Arysyn said:

120,000 sites is a great amount. Be neat to have figures for the Chicago area. I remember reading some time ago the number of Sprint sites was over 1,000 -maybe around 1,200, is that right?

Also curious about the AT&T and Verizon numbers too.

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.

11 minutes ago, derrph said:

Wow! 

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.

19 minutes ago, RAvirani said:

Yes, I did mean per sector, which is not too bad. Almost all Verizon setups in Seattle use 3-4 antennas per sector and almost all AT&T setups use 2-4.

Since we are seeing 4x4 800 RRHs coming out soon, I’d guess most future deployments on 800/1900/2500 will only utilize 3 RRHs per sector. Additionally, T-Mobile heavily utilizes active antennas today (antennas with an RRU integrated), so that ought to help a lot too. I’d estimate a full joint T-Mobile and Sprint setup would only require 4-5 RRUs and 3 antennas per sector today.

If we see 2100 integrated into T-Mobile 600/700 antennas in the future, we could get all 6 bands into 2 antennas and 4 RRUs per sectors — that’s pretty manageable if you ask me. 

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)

4 minutes ago, RAvirani said:

Three antennas per tower easily: Sprint 800/1900/2500, T-Mobile 600/700, T-Mobile 1900/2100. 

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.

33 minutes ago, Paynefanbro said:

In the video that John and Marcelo made together, they mentioned that Comcast is growing extremely fast despite only being an MVNO on Verizon's network. Xfinity Mobile was announced in April 2017 and by March 2018, they had 577,000 postpaid subscribers.

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.

28 minutes ago, RAvirani said:

I don't really think that would be a smart idea...

I think the ideal network configuration for a combined company would probably be:

• ~20x20 NR600
• 5x5 L700
• 5x5 L800
• A single 1x800 carrier
• 20x20 L1900
• A single U1900 carrier
• 20x20 L2100
• LTE/NR on 2.5 GHz

There isn't much benefit to shutting down 1x800 because not much else can be done with that 1.25 MHz FDD slice of spectrum.  Additionally, 1x800 provides far greater range than LTE or NR will ever be capable of and would be very useful to keep for edge-of-cell rural cases.  

Too many bands to be supported on the towers. RRHs would be really complicated or they would have to double them. T-Mobile has both AWS-1 and AWS-3. I think they will try to consolidate their spectrum holdings. Look out for a lot of horse trading after the merger closes.

3 minutes ago, Thomas L. said:

So is this an accelerated death knell for CDMA in the US? Verizon will be shutting down CDMA by the end of next year. I can't see any reason a new T-Mobile would continue to use it. I imagine they'll start shuttering the network and refarming that spectrum for LTE and maybe HSPA+ (as backup) almost immediately in the same way they did when they bought MetroPCS. 

How easy will it be to allow devices that have hardware for both networks to use both networks? All Sprint devices support the primary T-Mobile bands, how quickly would they allow those devices to access T-Mobile's network? 

I think that Sprint devices will be able to roam free on T-Mobile's network almost immediately. Same with T-Mobile devices that have Sprint bands.

Again, what's to become of Sprint's 800MHz? Can they exchange Dish's 600Mhz for Sprint's 800MHz somewhere down the road? How flexible are the RRHs, can they be reprogrammed? I am very interested in the technical aspects  of the network integration.

Something tells me that they will try to consolidate their PCS holdings by swapping with Verizon and AT&T. Can they swap some AWS for PCS 1:1?

17 hours ago, WillM said:

There’s been a lot of positive momentum behind the T Mobile name the past few years. Why risk it with some name nobody knows? 

And dual HQ”s? Sounds dumb unless they just want to give Overland Park a false sense of security. 

It's to get it approved by the DOJ. I hope that the DOJ set as a condition that they need to match the coverage of at least AT&T within 3 years.

19 hours ago, Arysyn said:

$26 billion sounds pretty low. I would have expected it to be twice that cost.

Plus assumption of Sprint's debt, so let's say $65B merger.

2 hours ago, derrph said:

Bam there we go! The Friday news dump. It’s just kinda hard to think there’s a possible merger if they are using money and putting up MM on their towers that could possible be shut off if that tower is redundant in the area to what T-Mobile has. 

Even if the merger is agreed upon, they will probably coordinate where Sprint's expansion will take place. They will open both networks for roaming. I am pretty sure that 2.5GHz expansion will take place no matter what. I'm not sure about PCS and 800Mhz. I wonder what happens to the 800Mhz spectrum if the merger goes through? Could certain network elements be sold to Dish?