bigsnake49

While as a greedy consumer you may want to keep them at 4 with a weak Sprint competing strictly on price because they cannot afford to expand their network, as an objective observer you have to admit that this is a highly capital incentive industry and the more customers you can spread capex over the better. I do believe that a third strong competitor will be better for consumers than two large ones and two weaker ones. A combined t-mobile/Sprint can compete on network quality and not just price

Charter is raising prices because of the content providers. Nothing new, every cable co is raising prices. All I can speak for is my area and they have kept the internet prices the same as Brighthouse Networks which they acquired. In our area, their cable prices are very reasonable. Their internet speeds are better than what I pay for by a good 10-15Mbps. TWC was the troubled franchise and were despised in pretty much all of their areas with the exception of NYC. It will take a little while for them to straighten everything out. Just like it will take a little while for T-Mobile to straighten Sprint out, although Sprint is on its way.

Where did you see that Charter is doing horribly?

I meant their spectrum mainly but Verizon could buy Dish with no anti-trust problems.

From the graph above it is evident that contrary to popular belief, T-Mobile has been cannibalizing Sprint mainly. That's not really competing against the big 2 now, is it?

If AT&T or Verizon want spectrum they can buy Dish.

With or without the merger, prices will go back up. Right now price is what Sprint competes on. After they expand their network and have a network that can compete with others, they'll no longer have to compete on price.

T-Mobile raised theirs already.

No, I don't think so!

If Sprint and T-mobile do not merge, I hope that Sprint, once they are on their feet financially and have their network in order, enters into some kind of agreement with Dish with respect to some of their spectrum, namely their 600Mhz spectrum. It would not hurt if they sign an agreement for a discount on Dish's Sling service.

I think that Sprint's customers will be migrated to WCDMA and VOLTE. CDMA will go away pretty soon and WCDMA will follow in a bit.

Actually the combined company will be the least leveraged of the Big 3. Something tells me that the Newco will keep unlimited plans as a pressure point to the other two. And if they keep their plans to match Verizon in coverage, Verizon can no longer use coverage as a differentiator.

For me that's what makes T-mobile attractive. I don't think they will have to divest some spectrum. The resulting combo will have some great spectrum assets. Now if I am the FCC and FTC, as a condition of the merger, I will force them to match or exceed Verizon's coverage.

No, why?

Just a note related to Hurricane Irma. T-Mobile has fared pretty well in my area. There was a brief interval of about 2-3 hours when the site battery back up failed but then it roared back up. The speeds have been excellent. Severely disappointed with AT&T which had a very bogged down network. I suspect that AT&T lost the site nearest to me during the storm although that site is both battery and generator protected. Both data and voice were iffy on AT&T. I have no idea how Sprint faired since I no longer have Project Fi.

If you are having signal or congestion problems, I have not problem. But if you are already getting 60Mbps from the macro network, I don't see how a single channel B41-relayed MB will improve your signal.

People that are getting 60Mbits per second on the macro network should probably not get them. Just saying...

All of you that are getting lower upload and downloads from the MB than from the macros please send them back. They are not intended for you. You did not need them in the first place. Sprint should do a better job screening candidates for these MBs so that Sprint's coverage is increased and speeds are also increased.

Sprint should intersperse Magic Boxes and their bigger brothers at apartment complexes, big box stores, large businesses, etc where their coverage is less than optimal. They do pretty well out in the streets but not inside. If there is a gap, stand mount femptocells work really well. If there should be something coming out of the talks with cable cos, it should be an agreement for discounted fiber prices and strand mounts in exchange for bandwidth.

Actually with their newest spectrum purchases, their debt is pretty close to Spint's although it may have later due dates or better terms.

Level 3 has a lot of metro fiber and so does Zayo.

There's fiber to the nodes in DSL deployments.

That should be Zayo

Softbank will do well to acquire Level 3 and Zaya for backhaul/fronthaul.

Congrats to Sprint in getting its financial house in order. That being said, I am still in favor of T-Mobile and Sprint merging because of the tremendous fixed cost investment it takes to have a nationwide network. I hope that Softbank at some point or another invests in acquiring the 600Mhz spectrum from Dish, Comcast and some smaller companies and then lease it to Sprint. 7Mhz is not enough to compete with the other three.