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I will say, I'm not terribly fond of mergers on principle. However, based on my insight as a former customer and shareholder of the company, Sprint's goose was

I will say, I'm not terribly fond of mergers on principle. However, based on my insight as a former customer and shareholder of the company, Sprint's goose was most definitely cooked to a crisp. If this merger had not happened, I could have seen Sprint file for bankruptcy, with Verizon and AT&T picking the carcass clean. I think folks forget how dire Sprint's straits were at the time, and this specific merger truly was the least of all evils.

mchannon 2y ago
A Sprint bankruptcy may have been inevitable, but Verizon and AT&T would have been forced to steer clear (a failed merger having made that inevitable). The private market would have provided a bounty of suitors for Sprint if it couldn't recover from bankruptcy. It may have emerged in a far weaker fourth place, but it would still be around.
- TheAmazingRace 2y ago
  The only other possible dark horse that could have emerged was either in US Cellular or Dish Network. However, I believe there were concerns with issues like market capitalization (in the case of US Cellular) or having different priorities (like Dish) that would have jeopardized a proper fourth option for the US. I'm not suggesting the merger was "good" or anything like that. Just that the other options seemed quite unlikely.
  - Aloha 2y ago
    US Cellular is actually pretty probably, same tech stack, same hardware, similar customer bases, but they didnt have acres of capital. The issue was the albatross of the debt from the Nextel merger.
  - derefr 2y ago
    As a Canadian (so possibly biased here), my own hypothesis for what would happen if a sufficiently-large long-tail power vacuum emerged in the US cellular data market — either back then or today — is that one of the major Canadian carriers would try to move in, beginning by serving cities just across the border from major Canadian cities. You could easily do cell-tower-maintenance truck-rolls from offices in Vancouver BC to towers in Seattle or Portland; from Toronto to Buffalo (or, less plausibly, to Chicago); or from Montreal to Boston. And that's only if they even bother to operate towers — if they tried today, they could just as well operate as pure MVNOs. In fact, flagship plans on Canadian carriers today, already usually build in no-cost full-speed US roaming data access through partnership with US carriers operating on the same frequency bands. It's a very short distance from there to operating an MVNO atop the same carrier's network. (I would say that I'm surprised they haven't tried to do this already; but until recently, Canadian carriers were addicted to the extremely-high-profit-margin rate plans they built up through oligopolist price fixing. Our current government has seemingly broken that up for now, with much cheaper plans finally appearing — so they might finally decide it's time to expand their TAM to stay profitable.)
  - selimthegrim 2y ago
    Dish is already making a hash out of its mobile customers (Ting, etc)
    - drewzero1 2y ago
      What's wrong with Ting?
      - selimthegrim 2y ago
        Have you been a customer lately?
        drewzero1 2y ago
        Yes, and haven't had issues with it recently... Was there some bad news I missed?
        selimthegrim 2y ago
        The reddit forum for Ting has a lot of complaints about billing issues, lack of eSIM support, and poor customer service (for the TMobile/DISH customers, of which I was one)
        rav3ndust 2y ago
        I'm a current Ting customer for the last ~5 years and have had no issues with them.
  - chrisco255 2y ago
    There is already a burgeoning dark horse competitor to the wireless companies: SpaceX. I believe within a few years Starlink will be a viable global wireless network.
    - inemesitaffia 2y ago
      They are using local partners
      - chrisco255 2y ago
        For now. But this is where the tech is heading: https://www.pcmag.com/news/att-ast-spacemobile-promise-true-broadband-from-satellite-phone-service https://www.pcmag.com/news/att-ast-spacemobile-promise-true-... https://www.starlink.com/business/direct-to-cell https://www.starlink.com/business/direct-to-cell
bogwog 2y ago
I don't follow this industry at all, so I'm out of the loop. Are you saying Sprint could not have possibly reversed course? (E.g. through pricing or even new leadership) Sometimes when companies are trying to merge, executives from both sides will come out and say it's "necessary" and push the narrative that one or both will go bankrupt without the merger. In cases where that strategy doesn't work it, unsurprisingly, turns out to be a lie. The companies will just keep competing and figure out a way to operating as usual. (I remember reading not-too-long-ago about an example of this exact thing, but don't remember what it was) So personally, I don't trust anything a business says when a merger is on the table.
- TheAmazingRace 2y ago
  To be frank, I thought the merger was necessary at the time as a lowly shareholder, only a few dozen shares at best, based on what I could tell on financial reports. I really wanted Sprint to not be a complete mess and be strong again, but they made way too many boneheaded decisions back in the day and the chickens were coming home to roost.
- nradov 2y ago
  Sprint could not have possibly reversed course because they had already wasted too much capital on a failed WiMax network and couldn't afford to build a competitive nationwide 5G network. Their options for raising more capital weren't looking good. New leadership or a different pricing model wouldn't have changed that reality.
- briffle 2y ago
  if memory serves, Sprint had huge debts racked up from buying Nextel, as well as buying massive amounts of spectrum for WiMAX. They also purchased Clearwire. But WiMax never actually happened, everyone went to LTE, so sprint did as well. The main reason they were attractive to T-Mobile is that large amount of spectrum they owned, which was very valuble for 5G. https://www.rcrwireless.com/20160401/featured/worst-week-bold-look-back-sprint-wimax-network-tag2 https://www.rcrwireless.com/20160401/featured/worst-week-bol...
  - 2y ago
fooey 2y ago
Were they legitimately in financial straights? or was it the thing where they want to force regulators to allow the deal by blowing up their own company? For example, Albertsons is blatantly doing this so Kroger can acquire them.
- idontwantthis 2y ago
  Is that why they are absurdly expensive compared to all of their competitors?
  - fooey 2y ago
    They're paying out an excessive dividend that completely empties their cash reserves and makes operating the company unsustainable https://www.opb.org/article/2022/11/12/oregon-ag-files-court-action-opposing-albertsons-payout-amid-proposed-kroger-merger/ https://www.opb.org/article/2022/11/12/oregon-ag-files-court...
    - lupire 2y ago
      Corporate bankruptcy is a scam. Any merger on auction should acquire existing debts, and execs should be a lien against wealth and future income.
      - nradov 2y ago
        What a ridiculous proposal. Eliminating corporate bankruptcy and making employees personally liable for business debts would wreck the US economy. If debtors take a haircut then it's their own fault for lending in the first place; no one is forced to buy corporate bonds and vendors always have the option of requiring cash on delivery.
        idontpost 2y ago
        > making employees personally liable for business debts would wreck the US economy Letting employees loot the company for their own profit isn't any better.
tw04 2y ago
What makes you think someone else wouldn’t have picked up the pieces? Whether that be dish/comcast/google, or just some private equity. Being acquired by a competitor wasn’t their only exit option, and pretty much anything else would’ve resulted in more competition.
- TheAmazingRace 2y ago
  To be honest, I truly do not know all possible ends, as I'm not an oracle. Based on the information I had at the time, I felt that this merger was the best option out of all of the ones being explored at the time. I'm happy to have been wrong about this if they went a different direction and it worked out better, but history is history.
- bityard 2y ago
  In an infinite universe of possibilities, you're right: a failing brand with a household name being acquired by a competitor is not the only possible outcome. But it is historically far and away the most likely one.
  - ElevenLathe 2y ago
    Isn't that circular reasoning? Regulators have to allow the merger because other outcomes are unlikely, but they are unlikely because regulators always allow the merger. If the merger is blocked, the probability of that outcome falls to 0, and the others' increase, no?
    - hylaride 2y ago
      You're assuming anybody else would have wanted to acquire a debt-laden company with an enormous infrastructure deficit as they mismanaged the move to 4/5g. Sprint essentially was only valuable to a company with a better LTE/5G network already in existence that users could me moved to and then Sprint's old spectrum repurposed. Anyone else would have been left with many tens of billions in network upgrade costs.
      - 2y ago
hedora 2y ago
The regulators could have forced the big four carriers (now three) into a common carrier model. In that setup, all cell providers would effectively be an MVNO, and the three (then, four) physical networks would be operated at arms length from the consumer facing side. Also, the four networks could be structured so that their financial incentives were to improve cell coverage and bandwidth instead of undermining each others' operations.
- issafram 2y ago
  I mean Sprint was strictly CDMA, so that would be an issue on it's own.
  - nradov 2y ago
    Sprint had started as CDMA. They were in the process of building a 5G network but lacked the capital necessary for competitive nationwide coverage.
    - Aloha 2y ago
      They didnt start to build their LTE network until 2012-13.
  - chimeracoder 2y ago
    > I mean Sprint was strictly CDMA, so that would be an issue on it's own. How so? Sprint operated 4G LTE, which is a GSM technology (or alternatively, unified the two, depending on how you look at it).
    - neelc 2y ago
      The reality is, when a CDMA carrier deploys LTE without deploying UMTS, there are usually compatibility layers between CDMA and LTE such as CSFB and eHRPD for when VoLTE is absent. CDMA was never designed to interoperate with LTE as LTE was built around IMEIs and SIM cards but CDMA was built around burned-in ESNs and PRLs, so LTE support was hacked on. This is why Sprint and Verizon used whitelists: they literally couldn't accept GSM-only devices because you wouldn't be able to make a phone call (the phone would try UMTS but only the non-supported CDMA2000 can be used to actually call, so in turn no phone calls). Sprint went further by using the CDMA provisioning system on top of LTE instead of just using SIM cards and 3GPP provisioning like most GSM and CDMA carriers. This was a nightmare for custom ROM users like me as custom ROMs were designed for GSM carriers in mind and Sprint was at best an afterthought.
lxgr 2y ago
> If this merger had not happened, I could have seen Sprint file for bankruptcy, with Verizon and AT&T picking the carcass clean. This situation seems extremely similar to the failed Spirit/Jetblue acquisition [1]. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-04/jetblue-abandons-troubled-3-8-billion-offer-for-spirit-airlines https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-04/jetblue-a...
goda90 2y ago
That's what's going to happen with US Cellular: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/report-t-mobile-may-buy-part-of-us-cellular-in-latest-wireless-consolidation/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/report-t-mobile-...
Benjammer 2y ago
>Sprint's goose was most definitely cooked The reason their goose was cooked is because they previously were planning to acquire T Mobile, but SoftBank got back-channel info that it would never be approved by the anti-trust regulators. At the time they had Marcelo Claure running Sprint, basically a corporate "fixer" guy for SoftBank. So he ran the company into the dirt in order to make the merge feasible to regulators (e.g. - Sprint purchased a 33% stake in Tidal, the music streaming service. Or how they entered a partnership with bankrupt RadioShack after it got scooped up by PE, and decided it was a good idea to take over all the physical RadioShack locations and turn them into Sprint stores). "Oh, whatever shall we do, our company is failing, you MUST let us merge with one of our primary competitors or we'll go bankrupt. No company at all is worse for consumers than a merged company."
- cherioo 2y ago
  How is ruining and destroying the value of Sprint, that SoftBank owns, possibly good for SoftBank? What is SoftBank to gain here from enriching TMobile?
  - georgeecollins 2y ago
    I don't know if the OP post is true-- or partly true-- but to explain how it might be good for SoftBank: This was an all share deal, so sandbagging the value of Sprint shares so you can merge with TMobile could be good in the long run because you own shares in the new entity which has much less competition.
  - dralley 2y ago
    I'm not sure if SoftBank deserves the credit of assuming that their actions are based on sound logical reasoning.
  - Benjammer 2y ago
    They want to spend whatever billions it costs to consolidate the industry and then reap the monopolized profits down the road.
- Aloha 2y ago
afavour 2y ago
I believe you but I also think there was a third path available… wasn’t Dish going to buy them at some point, or something like that? Sprint were in dire straits but plenty of their core businesses seemed viable if placed in competent hands.
CodeWriter23 2y ago
Sprint was cooked for one specific reason: parent company QWEST refused to do the prism-split of fiber cables into secret NSA colocation rooms like AT&T did.
- tomohawk 2y ago
  Hmmm - interesting! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio EDIT: more info here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/qwest-ceo-nsa-punished-qwest-refusing-participate-illegal-surveillance-pre-9-11 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/qwest-ceo-nsa-punished...
- Aloha 2y ago
  Qwest never owned Sprint.
  - CodeWriter23 2y ago
    Ok young'n In March 1998 Qwest announced it would acquire long-distance carrier LCI International Inc. for $4.4 billion. The deal created the fourth-largest long-distance carrier in the United States behind AT&T, MCI Worldcom, and Sprint Corp. The combined companies had about 5,800 employees and revenue of $2.3 billion. The acquisition gave Qwest 2 million long-distance customers and a well-established sales force.
    - Aloha 2y ago
      Which has what to do with Sprint?
      - CodeWriter23 2y ago
        > and Sprint Corp Oh nothing. Move along, nothing to see here.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Aloha 2y ago
You're spot on, I posted a long comment downthread elsewhere, but you're 100% correct here. Sprint lost money basically every year after they merged with Nextel (having to pay for rebanding was part of it).
paul7986 2y ago
Dish network the supposed new 4th wireless carrier's goose is being cooked now and i bet will file for bankruptcy in the next year or so. Satellite pay TV is a dying to dead industry.
ksec 2y ago
>I think folks forget how dire Sprint's straits were at the time, and this specific merger truly was the least of all evils. Exactly. If you map out all the MNOs around the world in each and every country the trend is very clear where they merge to around 3 - 4 MNOs depending on population density. It is both economical and technical decision, I wouldn't even put it in the category of "least of all evils".

mchannon 2y ago

A Sprint bankruptcy may have been inevitable, but Verizon and AT&T would have been forced to steer clear (a failed merger having made that inevitable). The private market would have provided a bounty of suitors for Sprint if it couldn't recover from bankruptcy. It may have emerged in a far weaker fourth place, but it would still be around.

TheAmazingRace 2y ago
The only other possible dark horse that could have emerged was either in US Cellular or Dish Network. However, I believe there were concerns with issues like market capitalization (in the case of US Cellular) or having different priorities (like Dish) that would have jeopardized a proper fourth option for the US. I'm not suggesting the merger was "good" or anything like that. Just that the other options seemed quite unlikely.
- Aloha 2y ago
  US Cellular is actually pretty probably, same tech stack, same hardware, similar customer bases, but they didnt have acres of capital. The issue was the albatross of the debt from the Nextel merger.
- derefr 2y ago
  As a Canadian (so possibly biased here), my own hypothesis for what would happen if a sufficiently-large long-tail power vacuum emerged in the US cellular data market — either back then or today — is that one of the major Canadian carriers would try to move in, beginning by serving cities just across the border from major Canadian cities. You could easily do cell-tower-maintenance truck-rolls from offices in Vancouver BC to towers in Seattle or Portland; from Toronto to Buffalo (or, less plausibly, to Chicago); or from Montreal to Boston. And that's only if they even bother to operate towers — if they tried today, they could just as well operate as pure MVNOs. In fact, flagship plans on Canadian carriers today, already usually build in no-cost full-speed US roaming data access through partnership with US carriers operating on the same frequency bands. It's a very short distance from there to operating an MVNO atop the same carrier's network. (I would say that I'm surprised they haven't tried to do this already; but until recently, Canadian carriers were addicted to the extremely-high-profit-margin rate plans they built up through oligopolist price fixing. Our current government has seemingly broken that up for now, with much cheaper plans finally appearing — so they might finally decide it's time to expand their TAM to stay profitable.)
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  Dish is already making a hash out of its mobile customers (Ting, etc)
  - drewzero1 2y ago
    What's wrong with Ting?
    - selimthegrim 2y ago
      Have you been a customer lately?
      - drewzero1 2y ago
        Yes, and haven't had issues with it recently... Was there some bad news I missed?
        selimthegrim 2y ago
        The reddit forum for Ting has a lot of complaints about billing issues, lack of eSIM support, and poor customer service (for the TMobile/DISH customers, of which I was one)
      - rav3ndust 2y ago
        I'm a current Ting customer for the last ~5 years and have had no issues with them.
- chrisco255 2y ago
  There is already a burgeoning dark horse competitor to the wireless companies: SpaceX. I believe within a few years Starlink will be a viable global wireless network.
  - inemesitaffia 2y ago
    They are using local partners
    - chrisco255 2y ago
      For now. But this is where the tech is heading: https://www.pcmag.com/news/att-ast-spacemobile-promise-true-broadband-from-satellite-phone-service https://www.pcmag.com/news/att-ast-spacemobile-promise-true-... https://www.starlink.com/business/direct-to-cell https://www.starlink.com/business/direct-to-cell

bogwog 2y ago

I don't follow this industry at all, so I'm out of the loop. Are you saying Sprint could not have possibly reversed course? (E.g. through pricing or even new leadership) Sometimes when companies are trying to merge, executives from both sides will come out and say it's "necessary" and push the narrative that one or both will go bankrupt without the merger. In cases where that strategy doesn't work it, unsurprisingly, turns out to be a lie. The companies will just keep competing and figure out a way to operating as usual. (I remember reading not-too-long-ago about an example of this exact thing, but don't remember what it was) So personally, I don't trust anything a business says when a merger is on the table.

TheAmazingRace 2y ago
To be frank, I thought the merger was necessary at the time as a lowly shareholder, only a few dozen shares at best, based on what I could tell on financial reports. I really wanted Sprint to not be a complete mess and be strong again, but they made way too many boneheaded decisions back in the day and the chickens were coming home to roost.
nradov 2y ago
Sprint could not have possibly reversed course because they had already wasted too much capital on a failed WiMax network and couldn't afford to build a competitive nationwide 5G network. Their options for raising more capital weren't looking good. New leadership or a different pricing model wouldn't have changed that reality.
briffle 2y ago
if memory serves, Sprint had huge debts racked up from buying Nextel, as well as buying massive amounts of spectrum for WiMAX. They also purchased Clearwire. But WiMax never actually happened, everyone went to LTE, so sprint did as well. The main reason they were attractive to T-Mobile is that large amount of spectrum they owned, which was very valuble for 5G. https://www.rcrwireless.com/20160401/featured/worst-week-bold-look-back-sprint-wimax-network-tag2 https://www.rcrwireless.com/20160401/featured/worst-week-bol...
- 2y ago

fooey 2y ago

Were they legitimately in financial straights? or was it the thing where they want to force regulators to allow the deal by blowing up their own company? For example, Albertsons is blatantly doing this so Kroger can acquire them.

idontwantthis 2y ago
Is that why they are absurdly expensive compared to all of their competitors?
- fooey 2y ago
  They're paying out an excessive dividend that completely empties their cash reserves and makes operating the company unsustainable https://www.opb.org/article/2022/11/12/oregon-ag-files-court-action-opposing-albertsons-payout-amid-proposed-kroger-merger/ https://www.opb.org/article/2022/11/12/oregon-ag-files-court...
  - lupire 2y ago
    Corporate bankruptcy is a scam. Any merger on auction should acquire existing debts, and execs should be a lien against wealth and future income.
    - nradov 2y ago
      What a ridiculous proposal. Eliminating corporate bankruptcy and making employees personally liable for business debts would wreck the US economy. If debtors take a haircut then it's their own fault for lending in the first place; no one is forced to buy corporate bonds and vendors always have the option of requiring cash on delivery.
      - idontpost 2y ago
        > making employees personally liable for business debts would wreck the US economy Letting employees loot the company for their own profit isn't any better.

tw04 2y ago

What makes you think someone else wouldn’t have picked up the pieces? Whether that be dish/comcast/google, or just some private equity. Being acquired by a competitor wasn’t their only exit option, and pretty much anything else would’ve resulted in more competition.

TheAmazingRace 2y ago
To be honest, I truly do not know all possible ends, as I'm not an oracle. Based on the information I had at the time, I felt that this merger was the best option out of all of the ones being explored at the time. I'm happy to have been wrong about this if they went a different direction and it worked out better, but history is history.
bityard 2y ago
In an infinite universe of possibilities, you're right: a failing brand with a household name being acquired by a competitor is not the only possible outcome. But it is historically far and away the most likely one.
- ElevenLathe 2y ago
  Isn't that circular reasoning? Regulators have to allow the merger because other outcomes are unlikely, but they are unlikely because regulators always allow the merger. If the merger is blocked, the probability of that outcome falls to 0, and the others' increase, no?
  - hylaride 2y ago
    You're assuming anybody else would have wanted to acquire a debt-laden company with an enormous infrastructure deficit as they mismanaged the move to 4/5g. Sprint essentially was only valuable to a company with a better LTE/5G network already in existence that users could me moved to and then Sprint's old spectrum repurposed. Anyone else would have been left with many tens of billions in network upgrade costs.
    - 2y ago

hedora 2y ago

The regulators could have forced the big four carriers (now three) into a common carrier model. In that setup, all cell providers would effectively be an MVNO, and the three (then, four) physical networks would be operated at arms length from the consumer facing side. Also, the four networks could be structured so that their financial incentives were to improve cell coverage and bandwidth instead of undermining each others' operations.

issafram 2y ago
I mean Sprint was strictly CDMA, so that would be an issue on it's own.
- nradov 2y ago
  Sprint had started as CDMA. They were in the process of building a 5G network but lacked the capital necessary for competitive nationwide coverage.
  - Aloha 2y ago
    They didnt start to build their LTE network until 2012-13.
- chimeracoder 2y ago
  > I mean Sprint was strictly CDMA, so that would be an issue on it's own. How so? Sprint operated 4G LTE, which is a GSM technology (or alternatively, unified the two, depending on how you look at it).
  - neelc 2y ago
    The reality is, when a CDMA carrier deploys LTE without deploying UMTS, there are usually compatibility layers between CDMA and LTE such as CSFB and eHRPD for when VoLTE is absent. CDMA was never designed to interoperate with LTE as LTE was built around IMEIs and SIM cards but CDMA was built around burned-in ESNs and PRLs, so LTE support was hacked on. This is why Sprint and Verizon used whitelists: they literally couldn't accept GSM-only devices because you wouldn't be able to make a phone call (the phone would try UMTS but only the non-supported CDMA2000 can be used to actually call, so in turn no phone calls). Sprint went further by using the CDMA provisioning system on top of LTE instead of just using SIM cards and 3GPP provisioning like most GSM and CDMA carriers. This was a nightmare for custom ROM users like me as custom ROMs were designed for GSM carriers in mind and Sprint was at best an afterthought.

lxgr 2y ago

> If this merger had not happened, I could have seen Sprint file for bankruptcy, with Verizon and AT&T picking the carcass clean. This situation seems extremely similar to the failed Spirit/Jetblue acquisition [1]. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-04/jetblue-abandons-troubled-3-8-billion-offer-for-spirit-airlines https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-04/jetblue-a...

goda90 2y ago

That's what's going to happen with US Cellular: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/report-t-mobile-may-buy-part-of-us-cellular-in-latest-wireless-consolidation/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/report-t-mobile-...

Benjammer 2y ago

>Sprint's goose was most definitely cooked The reason their goose was cooked is because they previously were planning to acquire T Mobile, but SoftBank got back-channel info that it would never be approved by the anti-trust regulators. At the time they had Marcelo Claure running Sprint, basically a corporate "fixer" guy for SoftBank. So he ran the company into the dirt in order to make the merge feasible to regulators (e.g. - Sprint purchased a 33% stake in Tidal, the music streaming service. Or how they entered a partnership with bankrupt RadioShack after it got scooped up by PE, and decided it was a good idea to take over all the physical RadioShack locations and turn them into Sprint stores). "Oh, whatever shall we do, our company is failing, you MUST let us merge with one of our primary competitors or we'll go bankrupt. No company at all is worse for consumers than a merged company."

cherioo 2y ago
How is ruining and destroying the value of Sprint, that SoftBank owns, possibly good for SoftBank? What is SoftBank to gain here from enriching TMobile?
- georgeecollins 2y ago
  I don't know if the OP post is true-- or partly true-- but to explain how it might be good for SoftBank: This was an all share deal, so sandbagging the value of Sprint shares so you can merge with TMobile could be good in the long run because you own shares in the new entity which has much less competition.
- dralley 2y ago
  I'm not sure if SoftBank deserves the credit of assuming that their actions are based on sound logical reasoning.
- Benjammer 2y ago
  They want to spend whatever billions it costs to consolidate the industry and then reap the monopolized profits down the road.
Aloha 2y ago

afavour 2y ago

I believe you but I also think there was a third path available… wasn’t Dish going to buy them at some point, or something like that? Sprint were in dire straits but plenty of their core businesses seemed viable if placed in competent hands.

CodeWriter23 2y ago

Sprint was cooked for one specific reason: parent company QWEST refused to do the prism-split of fiber cables into secret NSA colocation rooms like AT&T did.

tomohawk 2y ago
Hmmm - interesting! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio EDIT: more info here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/qwest-ceo-nsa-punished-qwest-refusing-participate-illegal-surveillance-pre-9-11 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/qwest-ceo-nsa-punished...
Aloha 2y ago
Qwest never owned Sprint.
- CodeWriter23 2y ago
  Ok young'n In March 1998 Qwest announced it would acquire long-distance carrier LCI International Inc. for $4.4 billion. The deal created the fourth-largest long-distance carrier in the United States behind AT&T, MCI Worldcom, and Sprint Corp. The combined companies had about 5,800 employees and revenue of $2.3 billion. The acquisition gave Qwest 2 million long-distance customers and a well-established sales force.
  - Aloha 2y ago
    Which has what to do with Sprint?
    - CodeWriter23 2y ago
      > and Sprint Corp Oh nothing. Move along, nothing to see here.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Aloha 2y ago

You're spot on, I posted a long comment downthread elsewhere, but you're 100% correct here. Sprint lost money basically every year after they merged with Nextel (having to pay for rebanding was part of it).

paul7986 2y ago

Dish network the supposed new 4th wireless carrier's goose is being cooked now and i bet will file for bankruptcy in the next year or so. Satellite pay TV is a dying to dead industry.

ksec 2y ago

>I think folks forget how dire Sprint's straits were at the time, and this specific merger truly was the least of all evils. Exactly. If you map out all the MNOs around the world in each and every country the trend is very clear where they merge to around 3 - 4 MNOs depending on population density. It is both economical and technical decision, I wouldn't even put it in the category of "least of all evils".