4 ms·

>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 bac

>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
I don't think that materially really had anything to do with it. Sprint was dying - with extraordinarily high debt, in 2007, well before Softbank bought them, and indeed they lost money every year from 2008 forward - https://www.statista.com/statistics/481739/sprint-corporation-net-income/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/481739/sprint-corporatio... The Merger with Nextel managed to kill what was great about Nextel, and what was good about Sprint, and they lost customers in droves (mostly former Nextel ones). In reality Sprint bought Nextel's OAM equipment and their customers, and moved all the legacy Sprint customers onto the surviving billing and network management platforms (Nextel). The iDEN turndown also lost even more customers, most of whom who realized they didnt need PTToC after all (which is too bad, because on dedicated CDMA hardware, it worked really great). Then they needed to start rolling out LTE (Network Vision) - and NV didnt start in earnest until 2012/13 - and as someone who was on the field end of it, was very very very poorly managed. Sprint some years prior had outsourced all their engineering expertise to Ericsson, which means they had no one in house with any knowledge. They only realized that 18 months in, and then scrambled to get people back from Ericsson (who I will note, they did not contract any of the deployment management to). I only know this because I was in the middle of the deployment as a field resource in Seattle. My guess is only half the sites in the network (in Seattle Market) had enough customers to pay their fixed costs. I concluded while I worked there that there was no way for four carriers to be viable, there isnt enough spectrum allocated, and you pay the same fixed costs over and over again. I'll go further, Sprint had a massive switch facility for the LD operations with room for like 4 DMS250's in Tacoma, but that's not where they put the SPCS 5ESS, that was in Kirkland in a rented building (and interestingly enough, it's still part of T-Mobiles operations today), there was also another Motorola iDEN switch also in Kirkland. Post merger they never really made any effort to reduce their fixed costs (sites, switching centers, et al), because that would have cost money - they also got bled dry by having to foot the entire bill for rebanding the SMR band, which was on the order of 2.5 billion dollars. They did close stores (and RS was a major outlet for Sprint Sales, before it went belly up) which contributed to problems later. So I don't know where you got your info, but I think its hooey - before Softbank bought Sprint, they didn't have the capital to upgrade their 2G/3G network to LTE, much less consider a merger with T-Mobile.
- ericcumbee 2y ago
andy800 2y ago
Sprint went all-in on WiMax as it's 4G network. I owned an early Sprint 4G smartphone (made by HTC) and the 4G never worked. I would go to the Sprint store and ask to show me a signal with 4G turned on, and they would always blame congestion, or weather, or some other made-up excuse.
- TheAmazingRace 2y ago
  I think the only place I knew where WiMAX actually worked properly was in Japan.
- unsignedint 2y ago
  Was it more about the device than the network? I used mobile WiMax from Clear for years until it ended its service. For what it was, it worked great. It wasn't necessarily a speed demon, but it was reliable. I used it to avoid public WiFi congestion, as a backup when my home network was down, and in 'bring your own infrastructure' situations.
  - ganoushoreilly 2y ago
    I had a clear hotspot puck in the DMV area, worked well most of the time. I don't think I had any issues with price paid vs performance given the current state of tech at the time. I think targeting homes was just a hard battle, FIOS and others were really ramping up their initial push into fiber and it was just not going to compete sadly.
  - andy800 2y ago
    That's possible but it was a Sprint-branded device bought from Sprint that was clearly supposed to be compatible with its new 4G network. And they charged an extra $10 4G access fee every month! The other bonus was that being a CDMA device, there was no connectivity when traveling internationally, and no option to buy a local SIM card. Wifi only.
    - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
      Why does that exclude international use?
explorigin 2y ago
Let's not forget the amazing Palm Pre that was released 18 months too late. If it could have been released on time, it might have done much to save Sprint. But by the time it was released it was merely competitive instead of compelling.
- TheAmazingRace 2y ago
  Tell me about it. I bought my Palm Pre shortly after launch and, to this day, I can't think of another smartphone experience on the software end that was as good as webOS, save for Sailfish OS perhaps. If only Palm had been able to get their device on Verizon earlier, and perhaps started off with what the Pre 2 hardware was like.
chrisco255 2y ago
Radio Shack was a major retail channel for Sprint since the 90s. By the mid-00s, I would wager most of Radio Shack's gross profit came from wireless retail. They were already more or less Sprint stores with some overpriced PCs and stereos by then.
- Benjammer 2y ago
  Why would it be a prudent move to take on the corporate real estate costs associated with RS if it was already a profitable retail channel? What does that change other than increasing overhead for Sprint? And if RS was working, why would converting them to solely cell phone stores make things any better?
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    Because the choice presumably wasn't {Radio Shack business-as-usual} vs {acquire Radio Shack stores}, but rather {Radio Shack disappears as a retail entity and channel for Sprint} vs {acquire Radio Shack stores}.
TallTales 2y ago
I'm a former engineer at Sprint and I strongly disagree with this characterization. Sprint's goose was cooked but it was due to debt from selling junk bonds to build Network Vision at the time of the original LTE rollout. Their credit was ruined by that point from 30+ years of absolutely terrible and corrupt c-suite executives. Marcello has a lot of faults but he didn't run Sprint into the ground. He is actually pretty smart and at that time we cut over a billion dollars out of the operating budget circa 2016/2017 iirc. It was an impossible position and it's really sad because it was a great old company in my estimation. T-Mobile is just the worst.
- Aloha 2y ago
  He finally reduced the fixed costs that should have been done post Nextel merger. I remember Nextel and iDEN sites co-sited on the adjacent towers.. but with different shelters (sprint was often outdoor cabinets).
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Yeah, I always thought the two primary factors here were the lost bet on WiMax (which probably cost a lot to build infrastructure for) and the Nextel aqui-merger causing a lot more friction than synergy. I'd be a horrible businessman, because I really can't imagine keeping so much debt and simply being okay with it until its too late. I'd be considered a fool if I managed my personal finances like that, but that's the normal operation when managing millions or especially billions at a time.
  - Aloha 2y ago
    WiMAX was the answer for build 4G for cheap, and also how to use a bunch of spectrum that was not conventionally useful. It did work quite well in practice, I can assure you.
- shadowpho 2y ago
  Why is T-Mobile the worst?

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

I don't think that materially really had anything to do with it. Sprint was dying - with extraordinarily high debt, in 2007, well before Softbank bought them, and indeed they lost money every year from 2008 forward - https://www.statista.com/statistics/481739/sprint-corporation-net-income/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/481739/sprint-corporatio... The Merger with Nextel managed to kill what was great about Nextel, and what was good about Sprint, and they lost customers in droves (mostly former Nextel ones). In reality Sprint bought Nextel's OAM equipment and their customers, and moved all the legacy Sprint customers onto the surviving billing and network management platforms (Nextel). The iDEN turndown also lost even more customers, most of whom who realized they didnt need PTToC after all (which is too bad, because on dedicated CDMA hardware, it worked really great). Then they needed to start rolling out LTE (Network Vision) - and NV didnt start in earnest until 2012/13 - and as someone who was on the field end of it, was very very very poorly managed. Sprint some years prior had outsourced all their engineering expertise to Ericsson, which means they had no one in house with any knowledge. They only realized that 18 months in, and then scrambled to get people back from Ericsson (who I will note, they did not contract any of the deployment management to). I only know this because I was in the middle of the deployment as a field resource in Seattle. My guess is only half the sites in the network (in Seattle Market) had enough customers to pay their fixed costs. I concluded while I worked there that there was no way for four carriers to be viable, there isnt enough spectrum allocated, and you pay the same fixed costs over and over again. I'll go further, Sprint had a massive switch facility for the LD operations with room for like 4 DMS250's in Tacoma, but that's not where they put the SPCS 5ESS, that was in Kirkland in a rented building (and interestingly enough, it's still part of T-Mobiles operations today), there was also another Motorola iDEN switch also in Kirkland. Post merger they never really made any effort to reduce their fixed costs (sites, switching centers, et al), because that would have cost money - they also got bled dry by having to foot the entire bill for rebanding the SMR band, which was on the order of 2.5 billion dollars. They did close stores (and RS was a major outlet for Sprint Sales, before it went belly up) which contributed to problems later. So I don't know where you got your info, but I think its hooey - before Softbank bought Sprint, they didn't have the capital to upgrade their 2G/3G network to LTE, much less consider a merger with T-Mobile.

ericcumbee 2y ago

andy800 2y ago

Sprint went all-in on WiMax as it's 4G network. I owned an early Sprint 4G smartphone (made by HTC) and the 4G never worked. I would go to the Sprint store and ask to show me a signal with 4G turned on, and they would always blame congestion, or weather, or some other made-up excuse.

TheAmazingRace 2y ago
I think the only place I knew where WiMAX actually worked properly was in Japan.
unsignedint 2y ago
Was it more about the device than the network? I used mobile WiMax from Clear for years until it ended its service. For what it was, it worked great. It wasn't necessarily a speed demon, but it was reliable. I used it to avoid public WiFi congestion, as a backup when my home network was down, and in 'bring your own infrastructure' situations.
- ganoushoreilly 2y ago
  I had a clear hotspot puck in the DMV area, worked well most of the time. I don't think I had any issues with price paid vs performance given the current state of tech at the time. I think targeting homes was just a hard battle, FIOS and others were really ramping up their initial push into fiber and it was just not going to compete sadly.
- andy800 2y ago
  That's possible but it was a Sprint-branded device bought from Sprint that was clearly supposed to be compatible with its new 4G network. And they charged an extra $10 4G access fee every month! The other bonus was that being a CDMA device, there was no connectivity when traveling internationally, and no option to buy a local SIM card. Wifi only.
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
    Why does that exclude international use?

explorigin 2y ago

Let's not forget the amazing Palm Pre that was released 18 months too late. If it could have been released on time, it might have done much to save Sprint. But by the time it was released it was merely competitive instead of compelling.

TheAmazingRace 2y ago
Tell me about it. I bought my Palm Pre shortly after launch and, to this day, I can't think of another smartphone experience on the software end that was as good as webOS, save for Sailfish OS perhaps. If only Palm had been able to get their device on Verizon earlier, and perhaps started off with what the Pre 2 hardware was like.

chrisco255 2y ago

Radio Shack was a major retail channel for Sprint since the 90s. By the mid-00s, I would wager most of Radio Shack's gross profit came from wireless retail. They were already more or less Sprint stores with some overpriced PCs and stereos by then.

Benjammer 2y ago
Why would it be a prudent move to take on the corporate real estate costs associated with RS if it was already a profitable retail channel? What does that change other than increasing overhead for Sprint? And if RS was working, why would converting them to solely cell phone stores make things any better?
- ethbr1 2y ago
  Because the choice presumably wasn't {Radio Shack business-as-usual} vs {acquire Radio Shack stores}, but rather {Radio Shack disappears as a retail entity and channel for Sprint} vs {acquire Radio Shack stores}.

TallTales 2y ago

I'm a former engineer at Sprint and I strongly disagree with this characterization. Sprint's goose was cooked but it was due to debt from selling junk bonds to build Network Vision at the time of the original LTE rollout. Their credit was ruined by that point from 30+ years of absolutely terrible and corrupt c-suite executives. Marcello has a lot of faults but he didn't run Sprint into the ground. He is actually pretty smart and at that time we cut over a billion dollars out of the operating budget circa 2016/2017 iirc. It was an impossible position and it's really sad because it was a great old company in my estimation. T-Mobile is just the worst.

Aloha 2y ago
He finally reduced the fixed costs that should have been done post Nextel merger. I remember Nextel and iDEN sites co-sited on the adjacent towers.. but with different shelters (sprint was often outdoor cabinets).
johnnyanmac 2y ago
Yeah, I always thought the two primary factors here were the lost bet on WiMax (which probably cost a lot to build infrastructure for) and the Nextel aqui-merger causing a lot more friction than synergy. I'd be a horrible businessman, because I really can't imagine keeping so much debt and simply being okay with it until its too late. I'd be considered a fool if I managed my personal finances like that, but that's the normal operation when managing millions or especially billions at a time.
- Aloha 2y ago
  WiMAX was the answer for build 4G for cheap, and also how to use a bunch of spectrum that was not conventionally useful. It did work quite well in practice, I can assure you.
shadowpho 2y ago
Why is T-Mobile the worst?