Hacker News Reader

Comment by scarface_74 | Hacker News Reader

And the alternative was that Sprint would have gone out of business. Sprint hadn’t made money in over a decade

My brief experience with Sprint a couple years before the T-Mobile merger had basically unusable coverage. Was genuinely surprised how far it had fallen.

They stopped maintenance on some cell sites in anticipation of selling to 'anyone'.

Source: used to deal with permits for them in a metro area.

except Dish network, because they tried multiple times[0]

Ultimately they got some assets in the merger though

[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/id/100637184

And T-Mo inherited all that and is now the bottom feeder. It's just a matter of time before one of the other two merges with them to "increase customer value and create jobs".

yields of course layoffs. Tmobile has been laying off people with the reason being overlap between the companies.

T-Mobile acquired both Sprint and MetroPCS to increase their spectrum allocation. I literally travel all over the country and don’t have an issue with T-mobiles service

Right now I am in small town south GA and getting 120/40 on cellular.

Meanwhile I live in a city of 300k people about a mile away from the capitol building and I can't get cell access when on the incorrect side of the BK down the road.

Anecdotal: I've been quite happy with T-Mobile's coverage for many years now. At least where I'm at they have just as good, if not better, coverage than Verizon does.

I was quite happy with T-Mobile's service for the last 5 years, in that I had no signal at all at my house and my work phone was, conveniently, T-Mobile!

The universe enforced me being unreachable outside of work hours and I didn't mind that at all.

"Bottom feeder" is a funny way to describe the only carrier in the US with a realistically functioning 5G network.

Probably not a surprising fact, but fun fact: Sprint tried buying t-mobile first and it was blocked by courts. It was quite surprising to hear it happening the other way around since I thought Sprint was always larger than T-Mobile.

But yes, the nextel merger and the bad gamble with wiMax definitely sunk them long term.

AT&T was blocked from buying T-Mobile, not Sprint.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_purchase_of_T-Mobile...

Both happened:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merger_of_Sprint_Corporation...

>In December 2013, multiple reports indicated that Sprint Corporation and its parent company SoftBank were working towards a deal to acquire a majority stake in T-Mobile US for at least US$20 billion...On August 4, 2014, Bloomberg reported that Sprint had abandoned its bid to acquire T-Mobile, considering the unlikelihood that such a deal would be approved by the U.S. government and its regulators

I guess saying it got blocked is subtly inaccurate, though. They simply stopped because they weren't confident in getting through antitrust.

> Sprint Corporation and its parent company SoftBank

Why am I not surprised to see that name. Is there anything that SoftBank touched that's not a complete failure? What the fuck have they been doing besides burning Saudi oil sheik money?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com