Sprint Considering Merger With T-Mobile

by Michael Murphy
tagged merger, Sprint, T-Mobile

In a recent statement, Dan Hesse (Sprint CEO) told the media that a merger with T-Mobile is being considered, primarily to put them in a better position for 4G. Sure, Sprint is the only carrier with 4G currently live, but Verizon’s got big plans for later this year, and Sprint would find itself fighting to keep up again. To make matters worse, WiMax, Sprint’s 4G data network, is turnout to be inferior to LTE in many ways. The big advantage of a T-Mobile/Sprint merger, for Sprint, would be to leverage T-Mobile’s LTE structure that has been in the works for several years now.

“We have the spectrum resources where we could add LTE if we choose to do that, on top of the WiMAX network…The beauty of having a lot of spectrum is we have a lot of flexibility.”

As I reported yesterday, analysts at Yahoo! Finance think T-Mobile may be in some trouble, though they may still have a few tricks up their sleeves. Still, I don’t see how this merger could be anything but a good thing for T-Mobile.

I am unsure what this merger would mean in terms of networks…Sprint’s CDMA and T-Mobile’s GSM networks aren’t exactly interchangeable, so would phones start launching that could accommodate both? Or would they both focus on going purely LTE? There’s a lot of room for speculation, so feel free to sound off.

[via Financial Times]

» See more articles by Michael Murphy

Categorized as Android Carriers

Comments

Bryan

I spent too much time and too much money breaking my contact with sprint so I could go to T-mobile.. hopefully T-mobile “has some tricks up it’s sleeves”
Danny

If this actually happens, I would imagine that they would keep both GSM and CDMA networks running for at least a couple of years while they decide which network they want to keep and then phase out the phones that work on the network they want to drop, possibly offering upgrade incentives as well to get everyone on either GSM or CDMA (whichever one they want to keep). Then I figure they would either dismantle or convert the towers (depending on redundancy) to support one standard once they finish switching all of their phones to that same standard. This would probably take at least two years in order to minimize the negative impact on customers, and leave them with a denser and more wide-spread network than either had to begin with.

I very seriously doubt we’ll see any GSM+CDMA phones if the merger happens. They’ll have to decide on one or the other.