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>But the reality was either they merged, or Sprint would shut down. There was no scenario where Sprint stayed in businesses acting as competition. That is beca

by athms 6y ago

>But the reality was either they merged, or Sprint would shut down. There was no scenario where Sprint stayed in businesses acting as competition. That is because SoftBank didn't know what to do with Sprint and refused to invest money into the business. When SoftBank bought Sprint, the company was profitable and T-Mobile was unprofitable. Deutsche Telekom had been trying to offload T-Mobile for years but wanted more than it was worth. Slowly the tables turned and T-Mobile became profitable while Sprint started losing money. Masayoshi Son is the Eddie Lampert of Japan. Son used to be worth about $100 billion, but his bad investments via SoftBank over the last twenty years cut $80 billion off his wealth.

csharptwdec19 6y ago
Sprint made a lot of stumbles -before- Softbank. Honestly when the Acquisition happened I thought softbank was insane for doing so. IOW Sprint didn't know what to do with sprint either, I'm just glad TMO got some spectrum out of it at the end. But, even before that, Sprint was realizing the pain of their missteps. Probably the biggest of which was WIMAX, the smaller was taking too long to get rid of IDEN. Sprint didn't know what to do with Sprint in 2013. Even before the Acquisition they were foregoing parts of their normal maintenance and instead 'living' with problems. The one major saving grace in all of it? The biggest reason it was still good for TMO? Sprint had a LOT of sub-1000Mhz spectrum whereas TMO had none. And, to TMO's credit... They played the game very well. Their roaming deal from AT&T before the sprint merger completed allowed them to temporarily gloss over lot of their coverage issues until they were able to start using that spectrum for LTE (Also that nice piece of 700mhz they got from VZQ). Source: Sprint user from 2009-2013, switched to TMO, Used to deal with maintenance of Sprint Infrastructure in a large municipality as a contractor.

by athms 6y ago

csharptwdec19 6y ago

Sprint made a lot of stumbles -before- Softbank. Honestly when the Acquisition happened I thought softbank was insane for doing so. IOW Sprint didn't know what to do with sprint either, I'm just glad TMO got some spectrum out of it at the end. But, even before that, Sprint was realizing the pain of their missteps. Probably the biggest of which was WIMAX, the smaller was taking too long to get rid of IDEN. Sprint didn't know what to do with Sprint in 2013. Even before the Acquisition they were foregoing parts of their normal maintenance and instead 'living' with problems. The one major saving grace in all of it? The biggest reason it was still good for TMO? Sprint had a LOT of sub-1000Mhz spectrum whereas TMO had none. And, to TMO's credit... They played the game very well. Their roaming deal from AT&T before the sprint merger completed allowed them to temporarily gloss over lot of their coverage issues until they were able to start using that spectrum for LTE (Also that nice piece of 700mhz they got from VZQ). Source: Sprint user from 2009-2013, switched to TMO, Used to deal with maintenance of Sprint Infrastructure in a large municipality as a contractor.