bigsnake49

Why do you think Son is letting Trump take credit for the $100B/50,000 jobs and now the 8,000 jobs? You'd be totally naive if you did not think that there was some serious quid pro quo, aka horse trading going on. What would Son want from Trump? Think really hard!

The merger is not part of the investment fund of $100B. But you can bet your ass that it is part of the quid pro quo for allowing Trump to claim it. After all it was announced in October for the first time and then re-announced after Trump was elected. I will let you claim the $100B if you approve the merger shall we decide to go ahead with it. If I am the FCC, I'll put in the following conditions: 1. Coverage expansion to match Verizon in square miles covered. 2. Divestment to get under the spectrum screen 3. Negotiate with Dish/Cable networks/Google to sell off one of the networks.

The two are not mutually exclusive.

I think it has to stay at or above 8 for like 150 days or something?

I think that Sprint wants to elevate its market cap to approximately equal to T-Mobile's. Right now Sprint's is about $33-34B and T-Mobile's is $47B.

Yes they are.

Nope, not going to happen.

I have not seen the lease agreements with the different institutions. They might or might not be able to sublease it. It will also depend on what is the status of owned vs leased spectrum in the spectrum screen.

They cannot sell EBS because they are leasing it from educational institutions. They might be able to sublease it.

That would be 14 Mhz 800. Sprint will not give up 2.6GHz. Plus they can sell AWS for a pretty penny. Since 2.6 GHz, except for 60 MHz is leased they can't sell it.

Because they will have to divest some of the spectrum. Take your pick. There is a spectrum screen and Newco will be over it. The spectrum screen is 1/3 of the available spectrum in any given market. Having a 4th competitor ready to go will make the merger more palatable. Also it put some money back in the coffers.

I could see them divesting AWS and concentrating on PCS for mid-band. I also could see them divesting the whole T-Mobile network sans the 700MHz and PCS spectrum wholesale to Dish.

As far as the merger is concerned, Trump is very sensitive on the subject of jobs. As you well know, mergers result in loss of jobs. Will the investment fund that Softbank is putting together and the 10,000 jobs it promised be enough to counteract the loss of jobs? Don't know. I thought the time to merge was before both of them spent an ungodly amount of money to deploy LTE. Sprint's Net Debt is around $31B, where as T-Mobile's is $22.4B.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/12/fcc-chair-tom-wheeler-wont-resign-for-now-as-fcc-enters-2-2-deadlock/ They explain it a lot better than I could.

It does require newer handsets.

It was always about execution.

I guess will deploy massive MIMO at some point or another. 64Tx64R. They showed off prototype Nokia antenna in NYC. http://www.lightreading.com/mobile/spectrum/sprint-lights-fire-under-high-band-4g-builds-for-5g/d/d-id/728971?

One does not have to buy the other, they could just merge. If they do buy them, they only need to own 51% of the resultant company, so Softbank might have to come up with some money but nowhere near $93.4B. What was interesting to me is the T-Mobile's net debt of $33B. I did not know it was that high.

Except a merger will result in the loss of 10,000 jobs.

Pops and square miles are not the same.

Both Comcast and Charter will activate Verizon based MVNOs in 2017. They will probably be WiFi first, advantage of WiFi indoors and while a phone is stationary outside using Verizon only as backup. Can they succeed and what effect will they have on Sprint and or T-Mobile?

Something I was not aware off is that Sprint small cells use dedicated spectrum. They don't share the same channels as the macro sites, thereby avoiding interference. http://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/sprint-our-dedicated-spectrum-for-small-cells-key

They call it "innovation" .

I looked at both the CFO and CTO transcripts. Basically, what they leasing transactions have enabled them to do is to retire high interest rate debt and replace it with very low interest debt. They are also lowering their opex. Because of the way they have designed the network the capex was up front and they can enable new functionality like 3xCA via a software upgrade. They will add more macro sites as needed but they are concentrating on densification via small cells and optimization. They expect to spend more capex in sprint's financial year 2017 (starting in March).

I am pretty sure that a merger is coming. Son let Trump trumpet this announcement for a reason, even though it was announced couple of months ago. There is quid pro quo in this...