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Comment by dougmwne | Hacker News Reader

FYI, the coverage for the 2 networks will remain separate for now and will be gradually merged into a single network over the next few years. T-mobile is offering a $15/month 2GB prepaid plan as part of the sweetener to get regulators to approve the merger and AT&T has followed suit with a competing plan. Dish Network has been earmarked as the future 4th carrier for the USA and will be getting access to spectrum as part of the merger deal.

In my own opinion this merger is a good thing. Sprint holds huge amounts of spectrum but has absolutely failed to create a competitive network with it. It was a misallocation of a precious natural resource.

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I think that the first-class Google Fi devices have shown a path where CDMA and UMTS networks like Sprint and T-Mobiles can coexist on the same phone. Basically, the phone uses geolocation and a database of signal strength to determine which network to prefer in a particular location. It hangs up the baseband on one network and switches to the other. (Disclaimer: work for Google but not on the Android or Fi teams. Know nothing that isn't public.)

T-Mobile will be shutting down the Sprint CDMA, LTE, and 5G NR networks, and the T-Mobile UMTS network will probably also be shut down around the same time leaving just the T-Mobile LTE and 5G NR networks. While the Sprint network is still running existing Sprint customers will have access to both the Sprint network and (on a "roaming" basis) the T-Mobile network but T-Mobile customers will not have access to the Sprint network.

That's just business as usual for long-time Sprint customers. Many of them have dealt through several network shutdowns already :D

Sprint is the world champion of picking the wrong wireless technology.

Think I have still have some iDEN and WiMAX devices in a drawer somewhere.

WiMAX might not have been wrong if Sprint hasn’t flubbed the launch. Sprint had working WiMAX in many markets long before anyone had LTE, and there was a decent portfolio of laptops and such that had working client support. But Sprint never marketed it and wouldn’t sell it even if you knew about it unless you had a billing address in one of the few tiny markets that had official support. I would gladly have paid Sprint for their service if they would have been willing to sell it to me.

It’s hard to recover one’s investment if you refuse to sell the product you built.

WiMAX was a sweet idea but worked liked shit in reality... I know, I worked for Clear at launch selling it. I couldn't even use it in my apartment 10 blocks away from a tower. We actually had to install a special tower, in our store, because it got no signal either...

It was so frustrating to sell something and have it returned because they didn't have service even though we said they did. Metal roof? That's no good. Metal building? That's worse. Concrete? Sorry. Wood? Maybe... if you're not blocked by a large metal or concrete building. Oh too many people joined and now you don't get a reliable signal?

They refused to sell it to you because it wouldn't have worked.

It also fucked with certain satellite radio frequencies and other weird shit you wouldn't expect.

WiMAX was a 10/10 idea, but a 0/10 everything else.

WiMAX also lacked backwards compatibility, which 4G had with 2/3G.

I had Sprint WiMAX for my primary home internet connection for a while -- but I could literally see the tower out of my window. I loved it at the time.

But I was in the center of a pretty decent sized city. There wasn't even service in the burbs at that point, and by the time it got there, LTE was already a thing and Sprint was stuck with only a couple of odd-ball devices for their 4G network.

Momentum means a lot. It's hard to make money selling your service if the devices that people want don't support it.

It was like ~2010/2011 when WiMAX was a really hot tech. The iPhone 5 launched with LTE in 2012.

Canada's providers decided to shut down CDMA in favor of an all-LTE network, and I think they're better off for it.

I really hope that we could see that in the next five years for Sprint/T-mo: existing Sprint customers get upgraded to LTE and/or 5G devices, and then the CDMA network gets turned off in 2025 or 2030, and the bandwidth repurposed for 5G or 6G or whatever.

Too bad Canada's mobile prices are still crazy high.

Sounds like an application for Multipath TCP: http://www.multipath-tcp.org/

How much CDMA does Sprint have? Haven't they been on LTE for years already?

Sprint still requires CDMA for voice service in some areas. They've been by far the slowest to adopt VoLTE of the big 4 carriers in the US, the others all fully support VoLTE in all areas.

Sprint's towers were built for it's CDMA network running in the 1900 MHz spectrum. However, their LTE network primarily run at the 2.5GHz spectrum which has far less range/requires a different cell tower spacing. As a result, they have coverage gaps on the LTE network. If they moved to VoLTE, they'd drop a lot of calls due to the gaps, so they've primarily kept voice on the CDMA network.

> Dish Network has been earmarked as the future 4th carrier

If Sprint and T-Mobile are having such a hard time creating competitive networks, what are the chances that Dish will be able to do it from scratch?

Everything about this looks terrible for consumers. There's even less competition.

Sprint literally had to give their service away it was so bad. They ran that first year free promotion for years. I'm not sure the other networks were exactly quaking in their boots over that "competition." Verizon and AT&T have always been the first class carriers. If T-mobile can fully catch up to them in coverage that increases competition instead of diminishing it.

I agree that Dish is unlikely to become a major player. This is a desperation move for them as their satellite business dies.

I can echo this experience. Dealing with Sprint was impossible. Sometimes trying to pay them more money was impossible. The best thing TMobile could do is migrate the customers to the current TMobile infrastructure and software and shred everything at Sprint. Or maybe better, try to convince AT&T or Verizon to buy/adopt it as a form of sabotage.

In the past few years, T-Mobile has done an excellent job of increasing coverage (at least in my region).

T-Mobile is doing great. The merger with Sprint gives them access to more frequencies for better coverage/speed. I can't say for sure how well Dish will do, but if they have good service/support/prices, then hopefully they will do fine. Better to have a stronger T-Mobile to keep ATT and Verizon on their toes.

>> Everything about this looks terrible for consumers. There's even less competition.

Sprint was giving away service, devices, and running promos on top of all of that. Still consumers didn't buy it. What do you want to happen in a situation like this? There was "competition" in the space but consumers had zero interest in engaging with them.

Just because Dish has the airwave rights doesn’t mean it will be used for personal mobile telephony - could Dish be using it for other purposes, such as fixed point-to-point transmission - or a StarLink competitor? (Disclaimer: I have no idea if those frequency bands are suitable for satellite comms or not).

Dish owns a lot of terrestrial-use spectrum, but it's mostly oddball frequencies nobody else in the world is using for cellular service today. IIRC the most "standard" band they own is band 71 (600 MHz, also used by T-Mobile) and a bit of band 66 (standard AWS-3, used by all US carriers), but the rest of their spectrum is band 29 (supplemental downlink only), band 70 (unique to Dish), and (with this merger) band 26 (currently unique to Sprint). They certainly could launch cell service using it but they would pretty much have to custom-order base stations and phones to match the frequency bands they own. This was another problem that Sprint faced (with requiring band 25, 26, and 41 which were all unique to them in the US market).

>Just because Dish has the airwave rights doesn’t mean it will be used for personal mobile telephony

It certainly will be used for that, unless they've been lying to everyone: http://about.dish.com/2019-07-26-DISH-to-Become-National-Fac...

Large communication companies could never do anything like that.... Just lie ? To the public?

> In my own opinion this merger is a good thing. Sprint holds huge amounts of spectrum but has absolutely failed to create a competitive network with it. It was a misallocation of a precious natural resource.

as far as I see the same Sprint CEO is continuing as the CEO of the merged company so I don't think things will improve. If he failed to create a competitive network then how are things to improve all of a sudden?

That is not the case. The T-mobile COO, Mike Sievert, will be taking over the combined company as part of a succession plan that's reportedly been in the works for awhile.

Where did Sprint CEO Michel Combes go?

There’s not been any releases about his new role, as far as I can see.

Sprint CEO is not staying on as CEO of the merged company. T-Mobile's COO is.

>In my own opinion this merger is a good thing. Sprint holds huge amounts of spectrum but has absolutely failed to create a competitive network with it. It was a misallocation of a precious natural resource.

Yes. Not from US but as far as I am aware there are pretty much only 2 Network in US, AT&T and Verizon. With T-Mobile and Sprint being a very distant third and fourth. Basically they are so minor that even they have combined they are still a distant third. But it does gives them a fighting chance, assuming they follow on with their T-Mobile orderly execution.

Hopefully this would bring US closer to world quality standard in terms of Mobile Network. Because as far as I can tell it has possibly the worst mobile network out of all the developed countries. ( Edit: Sorry I forgot Canada, which I have heard is similar to US.)

Depending on where you live, that's not accurate. T-Mobile is perfectly adequate (and sometimes even better) compared to AT&T and Verizon, except in more rural and isolated places.

I'm in a fairly rural area, and use a T-mobile MVNO (ting). In this area, there are holes, but they're the same holes that ATTVZN have.

I don't live in a rural area (~1000 people/sq. mile), 40 miles away from NYC. At least as of a year ago, T-Mobile's coverage map of my area was "occasional service outdoors".

I live in LA, and when switched to T-Mobile from Verizon (10 years ago). I had better experience with coverage in T-Mobile than I had with Verizon (for example it didn't work in nearby Costco). I'm sure it isn't an issue right now, but basically back then T-Mobile didn't feel at all like a downgrade.

According to this 2018 article from The Verge[1], the new T-Mobile will have 90 million customers putting it just behind AT&T (at 93 million) and slightly farther behind Verizon (116 million). The New T-Mobile's customer base will still be more heavily weighted towards lower-cost prepaid customers rather than higher-cost postpaid consumer and business customers compared to their competitors so they will probably remain behind them in ARPU.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/30/17301392/t-mobile-sprint-...

> T-mobile is offering a $15/month 2GB prepaid plan as part of the sweetener to get regulators to approve the merger

A short term discount to break into a market niche? That looks like overy antitrust "dumping".

I've had a $30/mo 5GB prepaid plan from Tmobile for about 10 years now (the "walmart plan"). To this date I've not seen anything cheaper. $15/2G is getting close though.

I've been using Mint Mobile for a few years. If you're ok being on an MVNO they use T-Mobile towers and offer an 8 GB, $20/mo plan, hotspot included. It includes unlimited calling unlike the discontinued Walmart plan.

Mint Mobile is also getting the SARS uncapped data limit, too, since we're on the T-Mobile network.

This may be true, but fyi, it isn't necessarily true - the MVNO is the one that sets the data charges in this case. If Mint did the right thing, I'm glad, though.

Mint sent out an email a few days after T-Mobile did, announcing we're getting it too.

I went from a $70 per month plan to mint mobile and now I don't even remember what I pay because it is so much cheaper ($15 or less for 2GB). I love paying for a year at a time through a really clean interface, getting a discount AND not caring about bills. The reception of t-mobile is not always great and mint uses T-Mobile, but I'm a mint shill now.

T-Mobile was so terrible I couldn't even pay my bill in their store. Their service was awful and if you couldn't do something online you might as well forget it. It turned into modern banking, where going to a physical location would just get you people telling you they can't do anything and that you have to everything through their website while pretending that that isn't ridiculous.

Same! until I switched to Mint Mobile just a few months ago because I was regularly hitting the bandwidth limit. I wish Google Fi was price competitive and didn't have conflicts with Google Voice, but it's just not there.

It looks like they added a $25/5GB/month plan too:

https://prepaid.t-mobile.com/plan-detail/t-mobile-connect

Unrelated: This page doesn't render for me. The header and footer do, but the body is blank, even after turning off uBlock.

> short term discount to break into a market niche?

Dumping generally related to international trade and describes selling at a loss to drive off competition [1].

It is not clear T-Mobile is selling the plan at a loss. And it has no hope of driving AT&T or Verizon out of the wireless market. This is plain old discounting, not dumping.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

Hard to consider it "dumping" when you look at competitive offerings. For example, Comcast (Xfinity Mobile) offers a $12/month 1GB prepaid plan, and they don't even own the networks they use. $15/month for 2GB on your own network is entirely reasonable.

I assume buying mobile service from sellers other than the network owner themselves makes you a second class citizen on the network and subject to throttling or whatever QoS they use to make your traffic lower priority.

I even assume that you are getting prioritized depending on how much you pay or how politically important you are for the networks. I.e. a $20 prepaid ATT customer is lower priority than a $80 post paid unlimited customer which is lower priority than a US Senator.

FWIW, a lot of MVNOs on other networks were faster than first-party service on Sprint.

I am curious for Sprint's reasons for allowing that.

Not MVNOs on Sprint -- MVNOs on other networks.

For instance, Straight Talk on AT&T isn't (or wasn't) even throttled. Other MVNOs, even if they were throttled on Verizon, were still quicker than Sprint's network.

Of course, but that's been a fact of life forever.

Yes, I was agreeing that it isn't dumping since it's a different product since the services are lower priority than more expensive ones. But it's not explicitly stated, which now that I think about it, should be a required disclosure.

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