Sprint Corp. (S) plans to push forward with a bid for T-Mobile US Inc. (TMUS) after meeting with banks last month to make debt arrangements for that offer, people with knowledge of the situation said.
Sprint Chief Financial Officer Joe Euteneuer and Treasurer Greg Block met with six banks to ensure the lenders would be ready with financing structures when Sprint decides to pursue a takeover, said three of the people, asking not to named because the discussions are private. T-Mobile ended trading yesterday with a market value of about $23.5 billion.
Well, in all fairness, neither Sprint nor T-Mobile quite have the resources to win against Verizon or AT&T long-term, and both have good elements and weaknesses (Sprint still offers true Unlimited Everything plans, but has crummy phone selection due to CDMA stupidity and is massively behind on a true 4G network rollout after wasting years with their WiMax shenanigans. T-Mobile allow any device and have great, consumer-centric policies in many venues, but lack strong rural coverage and still have crummy data caps at most price points/service levels).
If you combined the two to cancel out the bad points and kept the good, it’d be awesome. Then again, I have no idea how the mixture of a GSM network with a CDMA network would work out, financially. The cost just to add extra broadcast equipment to existing towers would be phenomenal, but at some point, they’d need to pick one and go with it, and neither network is really strong enough to support the increased load. Getting either (or both) to that point would take even more money, all other issues aside.
Well, a lot of Sprint’s more recent devices COULD be GSM capable, so maybe they’d equip all future devices with capabilities for both and just take advantage of the better towers? I have no idea, but I can see this merger being a very good thing.
I really, really don’t know how they’d merge the two networks, though. Even my own suggestion seems unlikely, it’s just the best I’ve got.
You know, my contract with Sprint is up this summer, and in looking for a new phone, I think I’ll probably make the smart move and get something that does both CDMA and GSM. I think there’s a version of the Galaxy S5 that does that…
Sprint still has the best prices. If you’re in an area with adequate coverage (which is admittedly spotty away from major highways, but Tulsa is pretty okay, and I don’t generally have any trouble traveling, but I typically stick to big cities,) their prices + unlimited plans really make them solid contenders. They’ve just had a bad rep for a long time (which they maybe deserved) and are having a hard time overcoming that.
Yeah, a lot of the galaxy phones are multi-band phones. I think currently the GSM portions are only “active” for international travel, since Europe uses GSM exclusively, but it seems likely that they could change that if they merged with a GSM carrier.
Sprint is awesome where I am. Seems to depend highly on location. They used to be solid with slow 3g, but now solid with blazing 4G and still the cheapest.
