Hacker News Reader

Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

To me this makes a lot more sense than the T-Mobile At&t merger that failed to go through.

Sprint is a pretty dead brand and provider. They were actually giving away a year of free service without any obligation (you only had to pay $2 tax/fee) and people still would not switch to it.

T-Mobile has pushed the other carriers to bring back unlimited plans and they've separated the phone cost from the plan itself (allowing people to more easily switch carriers and bring their own phone).

Allowing T-Mobile to get more customers and a stronger position might be a good thing in order to compete with Verizon and At&t.

View on HN

I had the Sprint plan. I liked it. Hard for the average person to get on it though. You would have to pay full price for the phone and then activate it (while switching your old phone number over) and you couldn't do that in store. If you bought say a new Apple phone at full price and wanted to finance it through Apple/Citizen One, Apple would make you activate first which if you chose Sprint would invalidate your BYOD plan. That was a mess to resolve. And it was even more painful if you had multiple lines. So you had to be pretty savvy to get onto that $0 plan... which means those that did are also savvy enough to switch to something else if they are price sensitive.

That being said I expect with the merger that prices will go up. Maybe we could get some MVNO deregulation or something.

I also had the Sprint BYOD promo for a year since I had an unlocked iPhone 6+ at the time. The network was only very slightly worse than Verizon (mostly in and around NYC). I switched to Tello (Sprint MVNO, $17/mo for 3GB) when the promotion ended and the network quality has been the same. I only chose Tello because I already had the SIM and my plan was going to renew within 48. It's been fine.

I probably would've bought a new phone sooner but the terms were ambiguous as to whether or not switching phones (even one purchased separately and fully paid) would negate the promo or not.

Sprint has a pretty solid network in most markets, but they also have a metric crapton of debt.

What it comes down to, is there isnt enough spectrum to have three fully competitive carriers. The merger of T-Mo and Sprint will give them a huge leverage point on spectrum. T-Mo bring 600, AWS bands, as well as 1900 PCS blocks, Sprint brings 2.6, 900 and 1900 PCS blocks.

Sprint does have a lot of debt ($33 billion), but AT&T does also: ~$180 billion.

Last I looked Sprint was much more leveraged than AT&T was however.

They both have debt roughly equal to their yearly revenue, but AT&T has dramatically better margins. Sprint has repeatedly gone years without a single profitable quarter.

I agree, but only in areas that Sprint has band 41 deployed. In areas that Sprint only has band 25 and band 26, its data speeds are at the bottom of the pack...

I did the cellphone module for the EO PDAs back when there was just the "A" and the "B" ('Bell') carriers. I recall reading academic papers at the time pointing out that, technically, it would be most efficient to have a single swath of bandwidth assigned to a single company; instead, half went to 'A' and half went to 'B' -- guaranteeing a suboptimal technical solution. It's interesting to me that, at the time, they were able to get away with only 2 carriers per region.

AMPS was designed prior to divestiture being a thing, but even with that in mind, no one really knew how fast cellular usage would take off, and so the carriers were caught somewhat flatfooted.

Consider that most cellular networks were originally built with omni antennas, not panel antennas, so the ability to reuse channels and channel-per-site density was noticeably lower.

>To me this makes a lot more sense than the T-Mobile At&t merger that failed to go through.

I'm sure that's true. But public interest is not why the T-Mobile At&T merger was derailed.

Don't leave us hanging, man! With what nefarious interest did the public interest fortunately coincide?

https://www.businessinsider.com/jared-kushner-cnn-staff-2017...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2017/02/17/tru...

https://www.vox.com/2017/11/11/16637186/kushner-cnn-time-war...

(discussion starts with paragraph starting with "Cohn, a former president of Goldman Sachs") at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-...

Not that I shed any tears for the failed merger (imo AT&T should be broken up further). But the corporate incentives to avoid merger blockage are radically different when anti-trust is used this way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com