Early March had seen storms of speculation that Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile’s parent company, was considering an acquisition of Sprint. Recent reports are again pointing to the same direction. With talks being in the primary stage, such a move will hurl the No. 4 US carrier into the No. 1 position by having about 83 million customers over AT&T’s 71 million.
The initial acquisition came into play as a result of the recent price war which will ‘hurt’ T-Mobile further if Sprint were to cut its prices again.
With VoiceStream’s acquisition being quite ‘pricey’ for Deutsche Telekom, Sprint’s acquisition will be considerably cheaper due to T-Mobile’s stock standings.
Every 3-6 months these rumors start, how often they keep popping up it makes you believe it could be some validity to them
What does this really mean… an eventual end to the Sprint name? Absorption into a company that suffers from awful pink advertising?
Do you have a source? It would be nice to read the original story and not just the same thing from another blog site
Yes, if you click on ‘same’, it will take you to the source. Unfortunately, you need a subscription to read the whole article.
As of now, no one can say anything about the Sprint name. There are law makers who had an issue with the acquisition of VoiceStream by a German company back in 2000 so I’m pretty sure that once these talks go to the next step, the same issues will rise. I’m waiting to see what really happens in the next several months. And another thing is that Sprint runs on CDMA while T-Mobile is GSM so that’s another issue that has to be dealt with. We’ll keep you posted if something comes up.
A Sprint Nextel purchase by Deutsche Telecom does NOT necessarily mean they plan to integrate networks with its US subsidiary T-Mobile USA (at least at first). I believe analysts get too hung up over the whole network integration thing without considering the alternatives.
Sprints CDMA customer base could be given or forced the option to migrate to T-Mobile’s EDGE/UMTS network upon their individual contract expiration dates or be sold/given handsets with a 4G capability that would allow for network handoff assuming that is their goal.
Sprint’s iDEN base is a whole other story. Some of these customers are dead set on being buried using their iDEN handset and refuse to migrate to a newer technology. Network rebanding and spectrum allocation is a whole other sub-issue that would have to be addressed no matter whom owns this particular sub base.
I hear constantly that iDEN customers will be migrated to CDMA with the new Qchat (coming soon!). But if I go to the Sprint site, I can order up a brand-new iDEN handset. Why can’t they just stop adding new Nextel customers?
I still think Google is the best option for sprint. Sprint is trying very hard to fix the mess it created internally. Unfortunately everything they try creates new problems. They need the software developers and systems engineers that Google can bring to the table
I was hoping Sprint could turn things around on their own before anyone else muscled in…
How about Alltel plus Sprint? Merger of equals, but then sprint’s management and customer service gets the boot and Alltel takes over everything…
Ya know i knew this was comming sooner or later.. when sprint launched the $99 everything its brought back memories when i was with AT&T. When AT&T first came out back in the early 2001-2004. I was a cutomer When they first started selling Service. later on that year they had a Plan i could not belive $99 for Unlimimited Everything, i was Shocked, Supprized i was thinking to my self what a plan, little did i know AT&T was struggling. Nexting thing i know AT&T was Gone. Over taken by Cingular. So now 2008 after that 29.8 BILLION 4 quarter loss and the $99 Everything Plan I know SPRINTNEXTEL was Going down. Luckly I dropped them just after the Promotion of $99 Everything I KNOW ALL WAS NOT WELL.
R.I.P SPRINTNEXTTEL…
Well I don’t think it will happen. It makes less sense than the whole sprint, nextel mereger which made no sense at all. This will be a logistical nightmare. There are nothin but horrible options. First you can have everyone move over to tmobile which has barely any spectrum and then it will leave sprints spectrum unused (it will be horrible to deploy gsm on another non-standard spec. This mess will last more than 10 years worth of clean up while att and verizon keep on treading. Then visa versa for the migration of all customers to sprint’s spec and just imagine the horror of keeping the customers split as they are now.