bigsnake49

I am pretty sure that at some point, the tech will be tested in a Faraday cage and analyzed via a scope. Then tested in a real world scenario as well.

He is not going to release any technical details because people (read Chinese, Koreans) will clone it and he will have to stop them in court. As I said, let it play out. I will let those that are in SF, then NYC test it for me. Or the technical sites.

It is OK to be skeptical. As an old EE, trained in calssical RF, I was highly skeptical of multipath, QAM, cross-polarization, beam forming, etc. But they work. It could be an extreme case of beam forming! The man is putting his money where his mouth is. He is building a netwok in San Fran then, NY, then other large cities. The proof is in the pudding. Let it play out!

I'm stealing from a post at Light Reading: The Litmus Test Ask yourself these questions. Is the Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal... Good for consumers? Good for suppliers? Good for content providers? Good for employees? Good for shareholders? Except for the near-term share price increase for shareholders, I can't find any reasons to say the answer is yes.

They should totally reject this merger. The same way they should have never allowed AT&T landline to reconstitute itself or allowed landline companies to own wireless. If they are rejecting Sprint/T-Mobile out of hand then they should just totally laugh at this. Come on Apple/Google/Microsoft. Put your money where your mouth is.

DT absorbed much of the Metro debt itself to make T-Mobile's financials look better. If going forward, T-Mobile and Sprint just cannibalize each other, that is is not sustainable and I don't think that that's what the feds want. I don't see the gains that T-Mobile made to be sustainable. The other ones match it and it results in a stalemate. The only way T-Mobile and Sprint compete against the big two is through either consolidation or network sharing. They just don't have the wherewithal individually to compete with the other two. At least not on the scale. If they networked shared, it might reduce their overhead susbtantially and they might be able to make the investments necessary to compete. One nugget to come out of this is that it does not look like Sprint will be participating in the AWS auctions. They will be looking for lower frequency spectrum.

ARPU was up to $64.07. That is excellent!

Verizon's and AT&T's adds were mostly due to tablets as well. That's the trend, get used to it. Tablets, connected cars, etc.

I listened to the webcast. Nothing really new. They expect to complete NV 1.0 by midyear. They are adding 8001x voice at a feverish pace and 800LTE and Spark. $8B in NV+Spark spend throughout the year. They expect margins to improve from the 20% that they are right now to the industry average as the spend tapers down.

The operating losses were due to spend on NV.

Are you going to watch them eat crow ?

Ooops!!!! http://s4gru.com/index.php?/topic/5496-q4-2013-results/ All of you negative nellies

Fourth quarter Operating Loss improved 22 percent to $576 million; Adjusted EBITDA* of $1.15 billion improved by nearly 40 percent or more than $300 million year-over-year compared to combined prior year resultsCombined annual Operating Loss of $1.9 billion Annual Adjusted EBITDA* of $5.4 billion grew 13 percent year-over-year Highest-ever annual Sprint platform wireless service revenue of $28.6 billion grew more than 5 percent year-over-yearFourth quarter Sprint platform wireless service revenue of $7.2 billion grew year-over-year for the 15th consecutive quarter Best-ever annual Sprint platform postpaid ARPU of $64.07 Highest-ever Sprint platform subscribers at 53.9 million682,000 total Sprint platform net additions in the fourth quarter 58,000 Sprint platform postpaid net additions in the fourth quarter Annual retail smartphone sales of 20.5 million and a record 95 percent of quarterly Sprint platform postpaid handset sales were smartphones Continued progress on the NetworkMore than 200 million people covered by 4G LTE Sprint Spark TM available in 14 of the largest U.S. cities including today’s launches in Philadelphia and Baltimore Launched revolutionary new Sprint FramilySM that redefines traditional wireless family plans Comment at will. I guess Robert's source was not reliable after all !

I thought they were a lot of tablets added to the aforementioned carriers.

Now, I was definitely surprised at the timing of this potential merger. Why now? Wait until you have at least NV 1.0 and 800MHz overlay. What's the hurry? Are you trying to preempt Dish?

I would love to see them absorb USCC just like I would have loved for them to have absorbed Alltel. The combo of Alltel/USSC would have given them approximately 18M customers that would have stayed instead of running off to Verizon and AT&T and later on absorbed Leap and Metro. I advocated for them to absorb Leap and Metro before T-Mobile got them. But Sprint never listened to me.

The major problem is that USCC might not want to get bought. Or some of the ones run by co-ops

It isn't Sprint, it's Softbank. And they are spending it to buy customers.

Where is EBS for fixed broadband when you need it?

Dish has been awfully quiet about this whole affair. Are they waiting for Sprint to give up, the stock price to go back down to non-speculative levels and then swoop in? DT could also spin-off T-Mobile USA. Or have a JV with Softbank and have the two share a network. and sell T-Mobile's to Dish.

Yes you can drop the power and thicken your network for capacity. You want to design the network using the natural propagation distances, acounting for terrain, tall buildings that might be blocking, multi-path interference, etc. I don't hink Verizon is objecting too much to the potential Sprint/T-Mobile merger because they know that there will be some spectrum divestment from it.

Yes they do need more low frequency spectrum.

What if US Cellular does not want to get bought?

T-Mobile USA will be either outright owned by Softbank or Softbank could be a 49% minority owner with the rights to manage T-Mobile USA. Alternate scenarios have been developed. What these alternate scenarios do actually is to take out any possible leverage the feds have on buildout requirements for rural coverage either in the 800MHz SMR or the 2600MHz band. The 2600MHz band is great for rural fixed broadband.

Son is getting T-Mobile one way or the other. If he is not allowed to merge them outright, he will merge them a bit more subtly. As in they will merge networks, they can freely roam on each other's networks in the beginning, etc. They will probably form a company that just runs the network and then the two founding companies (Sprint, T-Mobile) are MVNO's. The network company will lease the spectrum from the two member companies. So Sprint and T-Mobile will pretty much share everything but maerketing and billing systems. There will be 4 nationwide carriers in name only. Network sharing can work very well. What that will do is to shut Dish completely out, unless they can come up with some cash to contribute. I don't think that they will be able to build a brand new network from the ground up. The major reason why the Feds don't want this merger is that it will drive the price of spectrum down in the upcoming auctions (with the sole exception of the 600MHz auction) so they can finance the ill conceived/ill fated PS broadband network.