Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Killed Wireless Price Competition in U.S. | Hacker News Reader

Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Killed Wireless Price Competition in U.S.

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299 pointsrntn250 comments

I will say, I'm not terribly fond of mergers on principle. However, based on my insight as a former customer and shareholder of the company, Sprint's goose was most definitely cooked to a crisp. If this merger had not happened, I could have seen Sprint file for bankruptcy, with Verizon and AT&T picking the carcass clean.

I think folks forget how dire Sprint's straits were at the time, and this specific merger truly was the least of all evils.

A Sprint bankruptcy may have been inevitable, but Verizon and AT&T would have been forced to steer clear (a failed merger having made that inevitable).

The private market would have provided a bounty of suitors for Sprint if it couldn't recover from bankruptcy. It may have emerged in a far weaker fourth place, but it would still be around.

The only other possible dark horse that could have emerged was either in US Cellular or Dish Network. However, I believe there were concerns with issues like market capitalization (in the case of US Cellular) or having different priorities (like Dish) that would have jeopardized a proper fourth option for the US.

I'm not suggesting the merger was "good" or anything like that. Just that the other options seemed quite unlikely.

As a Canadian (so possibly biased here), my own hypothesis for what would happen if a sufficiently-large long-tail power vacuum emerged in the US cellular data market — either back then or today — is that one of the major Canadian carriers would try to move in, beginning by serving cities just across the border from major Canadian cities.

You could easily do cell-tower-maintenance truck-rolls from offices in Vancouver BC to towers in Seattle or Portland; from Toronto to Buffalo (or, less plausibly, to Chicago); or from Montreal to Boston. And that's only if they even bother to operate towers — if they tried today, they could just as well operate as pure MVNOs.

In fact, flagship plans on Canadian carriers today, already usually build in no-cost full-speed US roaming data access through partnership with US carriers operating on the same frequency bands. It's a very short distance from there to operating an MVNO atop the same carrier's network.

(I would say that I'm surprised they haven't tried to do this already; but until recently, Canadian carriers were addicted to the extremely-high-profit-margin rate plans they built up through oligopolist price fixing. Our current government has seemingly broken that up for now, with much cheaper plans finally appearing — so they might finally decide it's time to expand their TAM to stay profitable.)

Dish is already making a hash out of its mobile customers (Ting, etc)

What's wrong with Ting?

Have you been a customer lately?

Yes, and haven't had issues with it recently... Was there some bad news I missed?

The reddit forum for Ting has a lot of complaints about billing issues, lack of eSIM support, and poor customer service (for the TMobile/DISH customers, of which I was one)

I'm a current Ting customer for the last ~5 years and have had no issues with them.

There is already a burgeoning dark horse competitor to the wireless companies: SpaceX. I believe within a few years Starlink will be a viable global wireless network.

They are using local partners

For now. But this is where the tech is heading:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/att-ast-spacemobile-promise-true-...

https://www.starlink.com/business/direct-to-cell

US Cellular is actually pretty probably, same tech stack, same hardware, similar customer bases, but they didnt have acres of capital. The issue was the albatross of the debt from the Nextel merger.

I don't follow this industry at all, so I'm out of the loop. Are you saying Sprint could not have possibly reversed course? (E.g. through pricing or even new leadership)

Sometimes when companies are trying to merge, executives from both sides will come out and say it's "necessary" and push the narrative that one or both will go bankrupt without the merger. In cases where that strategy doesn't work it, unsurprisingly, turns out to be a lie. The companies will just keep competing and figure out a way to operating as usual. (I remember reading not-too-long-ago about an example of this exact thing, but don't remember what it was)

So personally, I don't trust anything a business says when a merger is on the table.

To be frank, I thought the merger was necessary at the time as a lowly shareholder, only a few dozen shares at best, based on what I could tell on financial reports. I really wanted Sprint to not be a complete mess and be strong again, but they made way too many boneheaded decisions back in the day and the chickens were coming home to roost.

Sprint could not have possibly reversed course because they had already wasted too much capital on a failed WiMax network and couldn't afford to build a competitive nationwide 5G network. Their options for raising more capital weren't looking good. New leadership or a different pricing model wouldn't have changed that reality.

if memory serves, Sprint had huge debts racked up from buying Nextel, as well as buying massive amounts of spectrum for WiMAX. They also purchased Clearwire. But WiMax never actually happened, everyone went to LTE, so sprint did as well.

The main reason they were attractive to T-Mobile is that large amount of spectrum they owned, which was very valuble for 5G.

https://www.rcrwireless.com/20160401/featured/worst-week-bol...

A huge costly mistake for Sprint trying to grow subscribers. Nextel's network was incompatible with Sprints, just a ton of business and technical issues. Sprint was always trying to be on the forefront of technology whether wireless or fiber. They spent a ton money on a project called ION that was last mile fiber to businesses, ahead of there time but a ton of costs actually laying down fiber doomed it. Poor timing for a lot of ideas and projects I saw. Source: ex-sprint emp.

Were they legitimately in financial straights? or was it the thing where they want to force regulators to allow the deal by blowing up their own company?

For example, Albertsons is blatantly doing this so Kroger can acquire them.

Is that why they are absurdly expensive compared to all of their competitors?

They're paying out an excessive dividend that completely empties their cash reserves and makes operating the company unsustainable

https://www.opb.org/article/2022/11/12/oregon-ag-files-court...

Corporate bankruptcy is a scam. Any merger on auction should acquire existing debts, and execs should be a lien against wealth and future income.

What a ridiculous proposal. Eliminating corporate bankruptcy and making employees personally liable for business debts would wreck the US economy. If debtors take a haircut then it's their own fault for lending in the first place; no one is forced to buy corporate bonds and vendors always have the option of requiring cash on delivery.

> making employees personally liable for business debts would wreck the US economy

Letting employees loot the company for their own profit isn't any better.

Shareholders and lenders already have the necessary legal tools to prevent employee looting, if they choose to use them.

Counter-argument, moneylenders shouldn't loan money to companies doing this. And secured lenders have their protections.

Anyways, they knew the game. Bankruptcy auctions are essentially debtors recouping as many of their costs as possible before writing off the rest (further minimizing future taxes).

I don’t have a real strong view on this specific situation one way or the other but it’s relevant that the appeals courts pretty quickly threw out this suit and allowed Albertsons to pay the dividend.

Yes, they consistently lost money from 2008-2019.

What makes you think someone else wouldn’t have picked up the pieces? Whether that be dish/comcast/google, or just some private equity.

Being acquired by a competitor wasn’t their only exit option, and pretty much anything else would’ve resulted in more competition.

To be honest, I truly do not know all possible ends, as I'm not an oracle. Based on the information I had at the time, I felt that this merger was the best option out of all of the ones being explored at the time. I'm happy to have been wrong about this if they went a different direction and it worked out better, but history is history.

In an infinite universe of possibilities, you're right: a failing brand with a household name being acquired by a competitor is not the only possible outcome.

But it is historically far and away the most likely one.

Isn't that circular reasoning? Regulators have to allow the merger because other outcomes are unlikely, but they are unlikely because regulators always allow the merger. If the merger is blocked, the probability of that outcome falls to 0, and the others' increase, no?

You're assuming anybody else would have wanted to acquire a debt-laden company with an enormous infrastructure deficit as they mismanaged the move to 4/5g. Sprint essentially was only valuable to a company with a better LTE/5G network already in existence that users could me moved to and then Sprint's old spectrum repurposed. Anyone else would have been left with many tens of billions in network upgrade costs.

If the merger was blocked and no one else wanted to buy it whole, then their assets would get sold off and the proceeds divied up by creditors (and if anything was left after that, to shareholders), same as any other company. Why is this an unthinkable scenario? There would have been some market-clearing price for the Sprint brand name and CDMA network (possibly separately, or even the network itself parted out) and even if that price was zero, then it was the shareholders (and possibly creditors) who should have taken the bath, not the entire phone-using public.

Allowing an anti-competitive merger simply because the alternatives for Sprint shareholders were bad is a bailout by any other name.

The sprint shareholders already took a bath going from over $80/share in 2000 to $5. Hard bankruptcy and selling off its network would have been disruptive to their remaining customers, more complex/expensive to unwind (causing more of the money to go lawyers), and would still result in 1 less major carrier, resulting in essentially the same thing. The results would have most likely been most Sprint customers eventually being part of the other carriers anyways. If there was a market clearing price for sprint, a private equity firm would have snapped it up - that didn't happen because there was too much debt to go on as its own entity.

Could things have been done differently? Sure. A condition of the merger could have been guaranteeing MVNO access or selling off a portion of the spectrum (maybe that happened).

But T-Mobile, combined with Sprint, went from being a distant competitor in subscriber numbers competitive. If sprint was "sold off" separately, T-mobile would most likely eventually run out of steam and end up like Sprint. They just wouldn't have the number of subscribers to amortize costs down the way AT&T and Verizon could.

Keeping struggling, small players going somehow would likely of only delayed the inevitable.

I have to say I don't actually care or know very much about the merger, but the fact remains that there were other possible outcomes than the merger going through as it did. If regulators had blocked the merger, one of those would have happened instead. AFAICT there is no way to refute this argument. Possible futures at that point in time were are F_1 through F_n. If we had eliminated F_1, we would instead have F_2 through F_n. Maybe F_2 through F_n all entail a complete collapse of the US and world economy, or maybe they would have better outcomes. I don't know, but one of them WOULD have happened.

Yes, obviously "something" else would have happened had regulators blocked the merger - I don't know why you're hyper-focusing on that. My point is that it would almost certainly have been an even worse outcome for everybody involved.

Unless you can show me how a cellular company that and backed itself into a technological dead end (and built up enormous debt during said process that sapped most of the money it earned to service) and needed quite possibly multi-tens of billions to even catch up to the others, you're not really adding to any conversation. If it was possible, business-people with more money and brains than either of us would have leapt at the opportunity.

The only alternative I can possibly think of is taxpayers ponying up - but that would in the end mean that consumers would "pay" indirectly, to say nothing of the moral hazard costs of government bailing out private businesses (works so well in the financial industry, doesn't it?).

Sorry, I thought we were just talking about what we were taking about. Have a good day.

Sprint had outdated technology w.r.t their infrastructure and cell towers, so an outside acquirer didn’t make as much sense. It needed an existing player with more advanced infrastructure to take on the customer base, or a large investment in upgrading it’s own infrastructure.

Pretty much this. Sprint bet the farm several times on ultimately dead-end tech (CDMA, WiMAX) and were too focused on other things to get ahead of technical evolution. They ended up saddled with debt by the end of it, which hampered any ability to actually upgrade their networks (another poster already pointed out the technical issues with running LTE without UMTS). By the time of the merger, the only things of any value they had was the spectrum and customer base to be moved over.

An external acquirer would almost have to build from scratch after absorbing all the legacy costs and run the risk of inheriting Sprint's bad business decision culture or spending an enormous sum building out a new team. Of course, they'd still have to support the old and new setups at the same time for awhile as the new stuff was built out. The ROI would have been decades at best.

With a merger with another telecom, people can be migrated over already existing infrastructure (with some upgrades to deal with new traffic) and have sprint's old spectrum slowly merged into the existing infra.

I'm oversimplifying of course, but one gets the idea.

By the time they merged with T-Mobile, they had a fully modern LTE network - I know because I helped to deploy it.

That never would have happened without Softbank buying them however.

The regulators could have forced the big four carriers (now three) into a common carrier model.

In that setup, all cell providers would effectively be an MVNO, and the three (then, four) physical networks would be operated at arms length from the consumer facing side. Also, the four networks could be structured so that their financial incentives were to improve cell coverage and bandwidth instead of undermining each others' operations.

That's kinda orthogonal to the merger deal, though, no? The government could do that today, if there was the political will to do so. Of course there isn't, though, and the merger (or lack thereof) didn't change that.

I mean Sprint was strictly CDMA, so that would be an issue on it's own.

Sprint had started as CDMA. They were in the process of building a 5G network but lacked the capital necessary for competitive nationwide coverage.

They didnt start to build their LTE network until 2012-13.

> I mean Sprint was strictly CDMA, so that would be an issue on it's own.

How so? Sprint operated 4G LTE, which is a GSM technology (or alternatively, unified the two, depending on how you look at it).

The reality is, when a CDMA carrier deploys LTE without deploying UMTS, there are usually compatibility layers between CDMA and LTE such as CSFB and eHRPD for when VoLTE is absent. CDMA was never designed to interoperate with LTE as LTE was built around IMEIs and SIM cards but CDMA was built around burned-in ESNs and PRLs, so LTE support was hacked on.

This is why Sprint and Verizon used whitelists: they literally couldn't accept GSM-only devices because you wouldn't be able to make a phone call (the phone would try UMTS but only the non-supported CDMA2000 can be used to actually call, so in turn no phone calls).

Sprint went further by using the CDMA provisioning system on top of LTE instead of just using SIM cards and 3GPP provisioning like most GSM and CDMA carriers. This was a nightmare for custom ROM users like me as custom ROMs were designed for GSM carriers in mind and Sprint was at best an afterthought.

I once got tossed out of a sprint store for pissing off a salesperson with this factoid.

This is a story that's just begging for more detail

Meh, I was a smart-alec kid there with my friend. The salesperson had to go get a sim card "for the LTE to work" and I said "oh right, because LTE is GSM and requires a sim". The salesman insisted Sprint didn't use GSM so I looked up the wikipedia page for LTE on one of their demo phones and started reading out loud "In telecommunications, long-term evolution (LTE) is a standard for wireless broadband communication for mobile devices and data terminals, based on the GSM/EDGE and UMTS/HSPA standards."

That's when the salesman told me to leave.

Sprint also had Wimax https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/farewell-wimax-sprints-orig...

CDMA, from an RF performance perspective regularly outperformed GSM, but as is noted downthread, the provisioning/auth system was inherited from AMPS/D-AMPS, CDMA2000 with a GSM network core would have been amazing.

Which, tbh, is exactly what LTE is.

The best way to resolve these issues is never "force the bad guys to do good things" but rather destroy the walls which enable their rent seeking.

Regulators can work to make it extremely simple for new techs in this space to come up so there is real competition for ATT etc.

Regulators cannot magic spectrum into existence.

The problem is that there is finite spectrum available. The upfront cost of building a national cellular network are also astronomical, regardless of regulatory hurdles.

The FCC was created to manage the scarcity inherent to the radio spectrum. It's not an area where regular free market economics apply. GP's proposal would actually make it easier for startups to horn in on the territory of the big established players, since the underlying infrastructure would effectively be socialized.

Out of curiosity: What are some examples of "regular free markets"?

There are finite amounts of everything. Free market economics solve this problem all the time. There are finite amounts of food, land, energy, shelter, human resources, etc. The problem isn't that spectrum is finite, it's that there is no way to prevent interference.

It's questionable if the FCC is really optimal though. There are huge amounts of spectrum still devoted to dying industries like AM/FM radio and broadcast television.

We the People should own infrastructure. Want to start a new shipping company to compete with UPS? You don't have to build roads, We the People provide those to you. So, do the same with wireless.

> We the People should own infrastructure

Going 4 to 3 sucked, let’s go all the way to a state monopoly!

It didn't suck for the shareholders of the remaining 3. With a state monopoly, we'd all be shareholders. Win!

Right, because we only have one single shipping company using all the roads...

This is the biggest solution to the problem that many people seem to ignore. If you want your communities to prosper, then the public needs to own the infrastructure that companies provide services for. Full stop.

Anything less is giving companies control over something they should not have control over.

I think there's an argument to be had on 'owned by the public, but operated by private industry.'

Another on 'built by private industry, but owned by the public.'

Government ownership isn't a panacea and has historically faultered when faced with innovative and expert requirements.

But I do think anything that trends towards monopoly makes sense as 'let the public own the simplest level, exposed via standards, and innovation happen above and/or below that.'

Nothing prevents you from working with liked minded individuals to create your own "infra". The phrase "we the people" sounds cool but in reality what you mean is "your money, my idea".

Roads is a very common argument, but none of the roads are build by "we the people". Government takes your money by force irrespective of how you think it should be spent and then a completely unaccountable red tapy system that employs otherwise unemployable people decides how to spend it. After a massive waste you have some roads which are poorly built even worse maintained.

There is no need for roads to be public infrastructure. It can be fully privatized and people be asked to pay for its use. (While entire compontent of taxes that go towards road building be returned back to the people.)

We will have better roads, less traffic and more money in pocket with that model.

> Government takes your money by force

Oh good grief.

> We will have better roads, less traffic and more money in pocket with that model.

I call bullshit.

> There is no need for roads to be public infrastructure. It can be fully privatized and people be asked to pay for its use. (While entire compontent of taxes that go towards road building be returned back to the people.) We will have better roads, less traffic and more money in pocket with that model.

As evidenced by the many successful and popular real-world cases where it's played out exactly this way. For example, um, uh...

>a completely unaccountable red tapy system that employs otherwise unemployable people decides how to spend it.

The "accountability" is people voting in/out politicians. I agree they need more accounability, but in this case the folly falls on the ignorant for not properly researching who will lead and manage their towns.

>There is no need for roads to be public infrastructure. It can be fully privatized and people be asked to pay for its use.

Sounds like an awful idea. Land isn't infinite, so it falls into the same problem we have with housing. Lots of inefficiently crafted roads and a nightmare of tolls to manage based on the route you take. Which finals down to a few big boys either battling for the best roads, or worse, colluding with each other to keep tolls high. Navigation now has to incorporate not only for physical distance, but approximate cost as well.

I fail to see an upside here unless your underlying narrative is to force people onto public transportation. Even then that doesn't mean public transportation imroves for those with bad access (also managed by "unaccountable red tapy system")/

That's a terrible idea. If the government owned wireless infrastructure then we'd still be stuck with 1G analog service. Competition between private cellular carriers is the primary factor driving innovation.

There is no "We the People". There is a government, or really layers of government, composed largely of politicians and bureaucrats. Whether those people running the cellular network is good or not ought to be assessed on what actually exists or is reasonably possible, not appeals to vague abstractions.

And yet even with all that infrastructure, the market has coalesced around 3-5 shipping companies for vast majority of consumer shipments.

> The best way to resolve these issues is never "force the bad guys to do good things" but rather destroy the walls which enable their rent seeking.

The walls here are defined by physics. There's only so much spectrum to go around.

You can't have more than 3-4 large cell phone operators working in the same area. Decoupling the radio part and forcing everyone to play as MVNOs is a way to work around this.

Or as I once heard by way of explanation: the capacity of an early analog cellular ~30km AMPS cell was ~60 simultaneous calls.

Modern protocols do magic things with spectrum efficiency, but there's only so much you can do.

That sort of decoupling could be fascinating. IMO, the walls may be as much a function of economics as physics.

Running a small number of powerful radios on low-frequency spectrum is a cost-effective way to cover large areas. Physics constrains how much of that can happen in the same area. But if networks are willing spend cash, they can get a ton of capacity by densely deploying high-frequency radios. Don't think we're anywhere near hitting the walls on what's possible there.

Putting this another way, networks provide enough bandwidth for everyone in Manhattan. It's just expensive.

It won't help much. Radio waves start getting too much attenuation to be useful outside the LoS around 5GHz.

That's still not a lot of spectrum. And you need to share it with other consumers (WiFi).

Then you start getting into the practicalities. You'll need to spam EVERYTHING with your access points. Can you imagine dozens of different wireless providers installing access points on every floor of every building? It's just not going to happen.

In USA the CBRS band allows running real LTE or better, real 5G SA on very lightly licensed spectrum.

All kinds of more experimental community networks make use of it. Even better, Magma core is a free 5G core and multiple vendors like Baicells make cheap 5G CBRS base station hardware. CBRS also fully overlaps international 3.5GHz 5G bands, so phones and modems are cheap.

> If this merger had not happened, I could have seen Sprint file for bankruptcy, with Verizon and AT&T picking the carcass clean.

This situation seems extremely similar to the failed Spirit/Jetblue acquisition [1].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-04/jetblue-a...

That's what's going to happen with US Cellular: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/report-t-mobile-...

>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."

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?

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.

I'm not sure if SoftBank deserves the credit of assuming that their actions are based on sound logical reasoning.

They want to spend whatever billions it costs to consolidate the industry and then reap the monopolized profits down the road.

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-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.

and then there was also the Wimax debacle. Sprint had invested pretty heavily in Wimax being their future network before they realized this wasnt going to work.

I got bit by the wimax nonsense as a consumer. I had a 4G HTC flagship phone on sprint and it was awesome. Then when I went and upgraded my phone a few years later to another HTC flagship phone, also with 4G, I was very confused why I could only use 3G.

The first phone was labeled 4G and second one was 4G LTE, which sprint didn't have in my area. I had been using wimax.

I switched to Verizon not too long after that so I could have 4G again

Wimax actually did work great in practical terms even if the clearwire network was made out of compressed spit.

All of them - all the CW sites, were under provisioned for backhaul.

>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.

I think both of us can be right at the same time though. Just because they had problems before the SoftBank acquisition as well doesn't necessarily make what I'm saying unreasonable. There was still sentiment in 2013 when SB closed the deal that regulators would not have approved of Sprint acquiring T Mobile [0], despite the struggles going on at Sprint at the time (that you describe). Sprint was definitely putting together a bid to acquire T Mobile, WSJ reported on it [1].

As you yourself said, Sprint was _dying_ at the time of the SB acquisition, but as far as large firms go, they were far from bankrupt yet. SoftBank simply twisted the dagger and then presented the corpse to congress instead of the dying patient.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/4/5376824/fcc-chief-reported...

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303293604579256...

I remember saying at one point to my operations manager at Ericsson, "how does anyone make money in this business?" he laughed and said "I have no idea".

I cannot explain how poorly managed Sprint was, it'd take me an essay to just explain the various dysfunctions I saw there.

That said, it did improve some once Softbank bought them.

Yeah network vision was a disaster. I think in the market I helped built our average number of site touches was like 21 or 22 from construction complete to on-air. All the funds gathered from the high interest junk bond sale to fund NV was used very inefficiency because sprint lacked the expertise to not get taken for a ride by their vendors.

It was a shitshow, you'd have GD tell us a site was complete and show up and find no equipment or equipment on pallets. GD rather than the equipment vendors were the villains, it was subcontractor-o-rama, and no one was responsible for anything. There was one site I went to like six times to inventory non-existent equipment - never mind when they decided to preload the inventory but used the barcodes on the samsung gear that didnt match anything.. I escalated that to Ericsson and then Sprint directly (it mattered for ericsson, because they'd have failed ATLAS audits), about two weeks later all that vanished, and we got a tranche of tickets to go reinventory everything.

I also saw at least half a dozen sites, cut and in service still sitting on their pallets, such a mess.

Imagine for a moment you go off to the crusades, leave the barn to one group, the fields to another group, and leave the house to a third group, then gleave no one in charge and give them no way to communicate beyond the most informal means - and you're surprised everything is on fire upon your return?

In the end it did work once it was done, but it was only hell for the customer during deployment because it was deployed and cut in a hopscotch fashion, which would be fine, if you could roam from new back to old - there was a one way roam, from old to new, once on new, there was no path to roam back.

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.

I think the only place I knew where WiMAX actually worked properly was in Japan.

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.

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.

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.

Why does that exclude international use?

Because just about every other country is on a GSM network, not CDMA.

Yeah it depends on the market you were in. I helped build the WiMax network but it was built very quickly and in places it was built by people who didn't care very much.

It was all microwave back hauled so rain fade in stormy weather was absolutely a thing. Most of those were FCC licensed or should have been but I know of at least 1 market where they just never filed the paperwork to get the licenses and built it anyway.

The clearwire side of things was wildly oversubscribed on backhaul, often totally saturated 10m circuits.

in all fairness, the 5G isn't much better these days, at least in my area. T-mobile seem to have inhereted Sprints bad coverage, to the point where they had to send me a booster modem for my own home.

5g is higher frequency, lower wavelength. That means it gets better potential speeds when it does work, but it's going to have more difficulty penetrating barriers, reaching longer distances, do worse in inclement weather, and so on. This is also a fundamental limitation of trying to reach higher speeds with this form of tech, because frequency and wavelength are inversely proportional. The point of this being that 5g is inherently less reliable/robust than 4g, and so it's not too surprising that you'd need a booster, especially if 4g in an area is not the hottest.

At this point telcos are also deploying 5G to old bands, so the assumption that 5G is 3.5GHz and mmW only no longer holds.

In my part of the world I see 5G on 1800MHz and 2100MHz bands in addition to the 3.5GHz one.

Unfortunately that's not done near my home, so I get 1-2bars of 5G, instead of the full bars I see at the office and elsewhere in town.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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}.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Why is T-Mobile the worst?

I believe you but I also think there was a third path available… wasn’t Dish going to buy them at some point, or something like that? Sprint were in dire straits but plenty of their core businesses seemed viable if placed in competent hands.

Sprint was cooked for one specific reason: parent company QWEST refused to do the prism-split of fiber cables into secret NSA colocation rooms like AT&T did.

Hmmm - interesting!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio

EDIT: more info here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/qwest-ceo-nsa-punished...

Qwest never owned Sprint.

Ok young'n

In March 1998 Qwest announced it would acquire long-distance carrier LCI International Inc. for $4.4 billion. The deal created the fourth-largest long-distance carrier in the United States behind AT&T, MCI Worldcom, and Sprint Corp. The combined companies had about 5,800 employees and revenue of $2.3 billion. The acquisition gave Qwest 2 million long-distance customers and a well-established sales force.

Which has what to do with Sprint?

> and Sprint Corp

Oh nothing. Move along, nothing to see here.

You're spot on, I posted a long comment downthread elsewhere, but you're 100% correct here.

Sprint lost money basically every year after they merged with Nextel (having to pay for rebanding was part of it).

Dish network the supposed new 4th wireless carrier's goose is being cooked now and i bet will file for bankruptcy in the next year or so. Satellite pay TV is a dying to dead industry.

>I think folks forget how dire Sprint's straits were at the time, and this specific merger truly was the least of all evils.

Exactly. If you map out all the MNOs around the world in each and every country the trend is very clear where they merge to around 3 - 4 MNOs depending on population density. It is both economical and technical decision, I wouldn't even put it in the category of "least of all evils".

Post merger I went from a $25/month t-mobile plan to a $15/month t-mobile plan. Not entirely apples to apples, but close.

My spouse went from $30/month to $25/month on Verizon for more data.

And there's lots of options at https://prepaidcompare.net/

Prepaid sounds great unless you ever want roaming, it’s either straight up not possible or priced in a way that makes it impractical.

I’ve been on prepaid since at least 2015 and never have had a problem with roaming in the US.

Data-only global eSims are super cheap. Having done a lot of international travel lately, this is undoubtedly the best way to go.

Cheaper and better coverage too.

Also, things like iMessage, FaceTime and Signal definitely work with those sims. Not sure about "wifi" calling or SMS with your home country's plan though.

Where would you recommend someone find one of these? Do they expire, or could I get one to cover years worth of travel? Thanks!

Eskimo has a 2y global SIM, excluding a handful of countries, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40382377

I've used the Airalo app to buy data-only eSims in multiple regions, and they have global ones also. I would guess it's not as cheap as you'd get if you waited to buy from local providers in arrival, but it's very convenient.

+1 to Airalo. The country specific ones are super cheap. $7 for 2GB or something like that?

I once did the 30-day Global one for I think $20 for 4GB or so. Worked all over Europe + Middle East. Was very impressed.

What keeps me on a postpaid plan is that I like not having to worry about my phone plan when I go abroad on vacation.

Haven't done that in a year and a half, but when I spent a few weeks out of the country it was a simple matter of buying a $30 prepaid SIM from a vending machine at the airport and having more data than I had time to use. Honestly, no contracts or carrier locks has always made it easier to deal with travel compared to friends who occasionally have issues just swapping SIMs.

Unfortunately, the increasing prevalence of eSIMs in new phones makes temporarily switching to a foreign carrier far more inconvenient than "just buy a SIM at a vending machine".

The last time I traveled to Europe, I got an eSim for like $20, and they emailed it to me. I had coverage before the plane taxied.

iPhones (and probably Androids too) support up to 10 eSIMs with 2 active at the same time, if I'm not mistaken. And you can buy data eSIMs before even leaving the country in an app like Airalo.

Yes, it's much easier to buy ahead of time in the app and have it automatically activate upon arrival, instead of having to find a kiosk in the airport.

The increased prevalence of eSIMs has made using a foreign carrier easier than ever. You don’t even need to find a vending machine or store. You can purchase your eSIM online before you even get to your destination.

How so? I have my US number on an eSIM. If I went abroad, the hardware slot is available. Or, pretty sure I can just add a second eSIM, no?

I had international roaming on the $25/month tmobile prepaid, but if I'm saving ~$8/month (25/month was all in, 15/month charges taxes), I can figure something out if I need it if I leave the states.

My two work trips a long time ago, I managed to get prepaid sims abroad that worked enough.

Pretty much nobody offers meaningful domestic roaming anymore, no matter the cost, so while I'd love that, I'd need a dual sim, dual active phone to approximate it, and I don't care about dead zones near me enough to do it. But my spouse and I are on different networks, so if we're both somewhere we rarely both have no coverage.

I'm looking to switch to Visible here soon after being on Google Fi for many years. Just looks like a cheaper rebranded Verizon to me, and has all the features I would need for a cheap price.

https://www.visible.com/

I moved from T-Mobile to Visible, and my SO from AT&T to Visible. It was well worth it, we now pay $80 combined with unlimited 5G (incl. cellular for our watches) and have had no issues. We've been to concerts (Taylor Swift) and never had any issues with our connection. So far, this was a great choice.

Visible is really good, only reason not to use them is when you have to travel internationally a lot.

I switched away from Visible to US Mobile due to deprioritization. I believe they now offer a non-deprioritized plan for $40/mo though, but U.S. mobile is less expensive for a non-deprio plan.

On Visible, your first 50GB of mobile data are not deprioritized.

Some people use a lot of mobile data - but I'm on my phone all day/night for business and pleasure, watch a lot of video content etc, but usually am within Wifi range of my home or office. I struggle to use more than 6GB of mobile data per month...

Before switching to Visible, I worried a lot about prioritization etc. After switching from Verizon (proper) -> Visible, and I can honestly say I haven't noticed any difference in performance. My bill is significantly lower though, which I do enjoy.

Looks like that's only on the nicer plan?

Looks like you're right. I pay $35 a month for my line - there's some $10 monthly credit they applied to my account. With their annual payment option, it's $33 monthly.

The new yearly Visible+ plan has 50GB of non-deprioritized data a month, not that I ever really had an issue on the normal Visible plan, free calling in Canada and Mexico, 2GB of data a day in Canada and Mexico, double the tethering speed and a free global pass per month. It is $395 which works out to $32.92 per month.

I use Mint Mobile because it's cheap and has been reliable for my family.

A couple of months ago, I traveled to Belize with my iPhone 14 Pro, which only has eSIM. The websites for the two local companies said that I could buy them at a local store but none of the stores at the airport sold eSIMs or SIM.

Mint Mobile offered me 10GB of data for $40/week. Plus fees, as it turned out, so total of $42 or $43. I took it because I couldn't find a local solution and it was only about $20 difference.

I was happy with the service. My wife uses prepaid Verizon and it was $10/day for their service in Belize which is more in line with what I was expecting. We ended up never feeling like we needed to turn it on.

Half of the time we were in the mountains where there wasn't any cell service so I only ended up using about 1GB of cellular and the rest the resort's WiFi there. But it was nice to be able to search on the road for restaurants, coffee stops, etc.

On a trip to Croatia and Italy a few years ago, the situation for local SIMs was confusing enough that I ended up not using any cell service, just downloading maps from Google Maps in offline mode from the hotel WiFi. Worked great with just GPS but only for places I'd pre-selected - no searching for anything.

Google Fi plus wifi calling or whatsapp/zoom/etc.

The problem with MVNOs, at least that I'm noticing as a Google Fi subscriber, is I believe MVNOs are deprioritized. In a congested area, folks who have direct service with Verizon or T-Mobile seem to have better reception and bandwidth than I do.

Google Fi is not deprioritized AFAIK and it's been discussed in the MVNO subreddit a bit.

That being said, most ARE and they are damn near unusable now in places that are growing.

Here in Orlando, Mint mobile can't even stream Spotify if you are stuck in traffic, that's how bad it has gotten. Forget being downtown or at an event of any kind.

I use Google fi specifically because its not lower priority.

Are you using a Google Pixel 6/7/8 ?

Its widely accepted that Google Pixel's radio is weaker than the competition. Google stopped using Qualcomm chipsets on Google Pixel 6. (Or the last time Google used a Qualcomm radio in its phones was in Pixel 5 generation).

I'm sure Google is working on making its radio better, but it still a shame that of all the things they decided to cut to make it cheaper / hit the $600 pricepoint (instead of the $800+ flagship tier) is... the radio.

On the other hand, I hear that Qualcomm is basically raising prices behind the scenes, which is what's causing all of this in the first place.

I have a Pixel 7 Pro, the mobile connectivity is hot trash.

> Qualcomm is basically raising prices behind the scenes

> it still a shame that of all the things they decided to cut to make it cheaper / hit the $600 pricepoint (instead of the $800+ flagship tier) is... the radio.

If it's truly a shame that they went to a lower-performing competitor then maybe Qualcomm thinks that their modem is worth more than they were charging because they provide a superior product.

Bingo. They do. Apple bought Intel's modem unit but they still use Qualcomm modems.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/21/23883565/apple-5g-modem-f...

True but it’s unclear how much the performance difference is from Qualcomm delivering value vs. Qualcomm destroying competitors’ value through blatant patent trolling.

I admit that it seems to be an abuse of the patent system in some regards.

But its not patent trolling. Qualcomm is making a real product and truly selling it. Anyone who wants that product is allowed to buy from Qualcomm or even license it for their own use.

A "Patent Troll" is someone who has no intention of even making the product, sitting on the patents suing everyone. Its far worse than what Qualcomm is doing here. In effect, a "Patent Troll" kills the technology. The "troll" has no ability (or intention) to actually make the tech, yet still prevents everyone else from making the tech.

Having a better product and charging more for it very quickly becomes overcharging in a market that has such limited competition.

Their premium was very very likely already plenty.

Replying to myself to add a bit of thought.

Deprioritization has no effect on your radio signal. What it means is that your radio has connected just fine, its just waiting for everyone else to talk before you can talk.

If you really were getting a bad signal, then... that's a Radio module problem. So I'd check to see if your radio was below par (ex: Pixel 6/7/8, or the myriad of midrange phones like Samsung A(whatever)). Qualcomm quality radios cost a lot extra these days, unfortunately.

MVNOs are definitely often deprioritized, as I experienced with Visible wireless where I'd often have no data access despite having 2-3 bars of service. Switched a year or two ago to US Mobile which is apparently one of the few that is not deprioritized on the Verizon network (bizarrely as long as your phone is 5G capable, even when only using 4G). So there's options out there without paying $70/mo for Verizon postpaid.

I believe if you get the higher-priced Visible plan (Visible+), you have higher/equivalent to postpaid priority. I switched to this plan a year ago from Verizon, in an area where being deprioritized on any of the carriers means it's useless much of the day, and it's been great.

Visible is 100% owned by Verizon and therefore technically not a MVNO. I use Visible and my wife is on Verizon. Her service is provided through her employer. Sometimes she has better data than I do and sometimes I have better data. For instance during a recent trip to Puerto Rico she struggled to receive reliable data and I had no issues. Don’t think it has anything to do with prioritization. I recently upgraded to the yearly Visible+ plan since I added an Apple Watch and will be traveling to Vancouver frequently in the next year. It includes 50GB of Verizon premium tier data and then you fall back to whatever prioritization normal Visible has. It also includes 2GB a day in Canada and Mexico along with Apple Watch service. $395 for the year which is around $32.92 a month.

For anyone wondering, voice/data on Visible's entry-level $25/mo plan is deprioritized in times of congestion, and their $45/mo plan is not. Hotspot usage is throttled on both, differently. You can read the full details on their plans page [0] by pressing the "Get all the details" buttons.

Visible $25/mo:

> Typical 4G LTE & 5G download speeds are 9-149 Mbps. Video streams in SD. In times of traffic, your data may be temporarily slower than other traffic.

> Visible includes mobile hotspot with unlimited data at speeds up to 5 Mbps. Video streams in SD. While more than 1 device may be connected to your Hotspot at one time, a single connected device will experience optimal speeds. Performance will be reduced if multiple devices access data through the Hotspot simultaneously. Actual data speed, availability and coverage will vary based on device capabilities, usage, your location and network availability. Service is not available while roaming.

Visible $45/mo:

> Visible+ gives you unlimited premium data on Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband network, the fastest 5G network access we offer — up to 10X faster than median 4G LTE speeds. Premium data means no data slowdowns due to prioritization. Download apps, games, entire playlists and TV series in seconds.

> Visible+ also gives you 50 GB/mo of premium data on Verizon's award-winning 5G & 4G LTE networks when 5G Ultra Wideband is unavailable. Premium data means no data slowdowns due to prioritization.

> Typical 4G LTE & 5G download speeds are 9-149Mbps. Video streams in SD. After 50 GB, in times of traffic, your data may be temporarily slower than other traffic.

[0] https://www.visible.com/plans/

There's a good guide to the prioritization (QCI) of various carriers here: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/oaophe/data_pri...

It feels crazy-making to me that information like this only exists in Reddit threads. Prioritization is, IMO, a totally valid way to price differentiate. But it should be clearly stated when you’re buying in the same way GB data limits are.

There’s different levels of priority within the same mobile networks, at all of them. MVNOs are just a price discrimination tool. It’s all the same electromagnetic waves being sold at different price points and priorities.

ATT just increased their higher priced consumer plan by $7 per month.

I buy service from this company that is a MVNO and is a prioritized cellular company : https://xcapeinc.com/mvnovoice.html

You aren’t going to get service that is cheap but they do offer things like static IPs and peering.

Not all MVNOs are deprioritized. Many are, but the Reddit thread mentioned in a sibling comment outlines it well.

Been with Verizon Wireless for 20 years. Got sick of how expensive their entry level 5G plan was with deprioritized data. Switched to US Mobile a few months ago. Half the price month-to-month, good prioritized data pool (35GB), and 5G UW access.

The US Mobile CEO is active on their subreddit and is attempting interesting things, such as allowing you to port between 2 major carriers (and soon all 3) up to 8 times a month as needed, and a beta of dual carrier coverage at a reduced price.

https://www.reddit.com/r/USMobile/

https://www.reddit.com/r/USMobile/comments/1bl7qf4/hey_you_y...

https://www.reddit.com/r/USMobile/comments/1cjn4qa/launching...

Plus International calling is included, and adding cheap/free/included international roaming.

Mint is part of T-mobile now so it shouldn't be deprioritized any more.

I think it'll continue to be. T-Mobile needs to differentiate services somehow & last I checked, subscribers on T-Mobile's older in-house + low-cost brand, Metro, generally received low priority relative to customers on T-mobile-branded plans

Stetson Dogge has created an awesome tool here - It's a crazy breakdown similar to the site you linked but with a bit more

https://airtable.com/appQ7TstG5Wn17FjY/shrraH105YVJQF2Yr/tbl...

and he made a website comparison as well

https://www.bestphoneplans.net/

Nice; doesn't include my MVNO (Ting) though.

I went from a $15/mo Mint plan to a $0/mo Dish plan. So, worked for me I guess?

I wish there was an equivalent of https://prepaidcompare.net/ for IoT.

I had to scour a bunch of different providers and often call/email for pricing to put together a list of options in a spreadsheet. I needed cellular service for iPads but they are only used a handful of times a year (normally <50MB each) and Verizon/T-Mobile/AT&T all wanted something like $30/mo per iPad (every month). Even their "IoT" plans with pooled data wanted an absurd per-device fee every month.

I finally settled on SimpleX [0] which has been working very well though I wish their API was a little nicer. I pay an upfront fee ($3) for each eSIM then, based on the plan I picked, I pay $0.04/MB and $0.25/device/mo. I wanted a lower per-device per-month fee for a higher per-MB fee. They have other plans where the MB cost is cheaper and you pay more per month. If I ever get to the point where I'm using the iPads more frequently then maybe it will be worth switching to one of those plans but as it is I pay <$100 per event I do for all my data which I'm very happy with (42 iPads).

[0] https://simplexwireless.com

A government condition of the merger was that T-Mobile had to offer low-cost prepaid plans without an MVNO. The program is called T-Mobile Connect, https://clark.com/cell-phones/connect-by-t-mobile/ & https://coveragecritic.com/t-mobile-connect-review/ & https://prepaid.t-mobile.com/connect/phone-plans

Monthly price for USA-only unlimited talk/text + 5G/LTE data, is $15/5GB, $25/8GB, $35/12GB + taxes/fees.

Outside USA, T-Mobile pSIM Wi-Fi call/text continues to work with cellular/eSIM data from 2nd line.

Eskimo has 2y ("global", excluding Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Qatar, Maldives, Morocco, Oman, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa) and 1y (regional) data eSIMs for about $4/GB, https://www.eskimo.travel

IIRC, Connect was proposed as a 5 year solution, I fully expect T-Mobile to discontinue Connect as soon as possible.

Merger was in 2020, which implies that Connect ends next year.

If 2024 wireless price competition is lacking, can US regulators extend Connect beyond 2025?

No, but I won't be surprised if the plans stick around longer. Speculating here, but I think odds are good T-Mobile continues to offer them for longer than required & just stops the annual data increase it has been doing

This is full of central-planning nonsense. He wants lower prices, but is also mad when the company does layoffs. US consumers probably have some of the highest if not the highest demand for mobile data in the world, and the cost of living is already higher regardless, yet he acts shocked that American consumers pay more for mobile data.

Not to mention the fact that I pay $15 for a very reasonable Mint mobile plan that would probably suffice for upwards of 80% of American consumers.

I agree with your general point.

However, we don't have particularly high mobile data usage. Countries with subscribers that use mobile to the exclusion of broadband (e.g. India) have higher mobile data usage per subscriber.

Yep, you can get cheap plans like that through T-Mobile MVNOs or even their own prepaid plan. I'm generally near wifi all the time. A couple gigs of data a month is fine for me.

Am I missing something or is there no actual evidence in the article that proves the title?

All I can see is a comparison between countries. Which is pretty weak evidence in general and definitely doesn't show anything about what happened in the US after the merger.

The only bright side to the merger was that T-Mobile inherited Sprint's permanent contract with Mobile Citizen, and now nonprofits can get extremely low prices on uncapped, unthrottled 5G hotspots from T-Mobile, something you can't get as a normal consumer. Before the merger, you were stuck with Sprint's not-so-great network, but after the merger you end up with all of T-Mobile's coverage and speeds exceeding 1gbps in some urban areas.

If you meet certain income requirements, you can get one from one of Mobile Citizen's resellers (such as PC's for People) for around $15/month.

Or, for like $400-500/year you can get one through the Calyx Institute as a "gift" for donors.

There's no getting out of this contract either. It's part of a deal Sprint made when they took over $1B in taxpayer money to build out their LTE infrastructure. This is how they pay it back - forever.

If you needed something to help swing the pendulum back towards the consumer, still, the merger wasn't good for wireless competition in the U.S.

How would one secure one or more of these for a non-profit?

Thinking redundancy for current AT&T fiber hookup for the admin staff and voip gateway.

Did it kill price competition?

My anecdotal observation is that there are more cheap phone plans now than, say, five years ago.

Same. I can get an unlimited prepaid plan at $25/mo on AT&T. I remember unlimited plans being like $70 when Sprint was around.

It seems to have created a two-tier system.

You can get a "real" monthly plan from AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile for $50/month with unlimited data and prioritization.

Or you can get a prepaid plan with data caps and no prioritization for $15 - 25 / month.

US Mobile has prioritized data.

https://www.usmobile.com/blog/unlimited-premium-coverage-on-...

DOE needs to stop approving mergers and acquisitions over $150 mil or so. Every such merger: Facebook/Instagram, Google/Youtube, etc has been a disaster.

They were great investments for soon to be has beens. And helped the acquisition flourish too.

Google and YouTube seems pretty good. YouTube is the most old school webby experience I have these days, although now in video form, now that the web web is so walled off.

$150 million is way too low today. Nearly every small acquirable company will meet that threshold. I do think that a limit could possibly be set though for companies with significant market share in the same sector. The Sprint acquisition was over $20 billion. Exxon's acquisition of Pioneer last year was around $60 billion.

What do you think would happen to the venture-capital-funded tech ecosystem and the resulting tech salaries if this were to happen?

The hope would be a vast increase in employers available rather than consolidation down to FAANG, increasing demand and driving salaries up.

> increasing demand and driving salaries up.

Despite the demand, the revenue per employee for the company might be low, and those companies might not be able to pay high salaries to employees.

do you know how easy it is to get to a million bucks a year in revenue? Do you know how easy it is to have that pass 50% margin? 75?

If you know how to build a stack, and have a useful service finding people to pay 20 bucks a month for it is not that hard.

5000 users is a fairly low target...

> Google/Youtube

Just a reminder that Google purchased YouTube in October 2006, about 18 months after it launched. Google already owned YouTube when "Charlie Bit My Finger" went viral in 2007. Google owned YouTube before they launched Chrome, back when they were still the heroes of the internet.

There might be some people who are still nostalgic for a pre-Google YouTube, but for most people the better times that they're remembering were still part of the Google era. The acquisition didn't ruin YouTube, Google ruined YouTube about 10 years later when Google as a whole pivoted for the worse.

YouTube as we know it today is only possible with Google’s acquisition. YouTube burned through literally billions of dollars for many years until it became profitable much later.

Only likes of Google could have bankrolled it. Google did this intentionally to destroy all competition in the video space. Ultimately successfully.

DOE? The Department of Energy?

Department of Education. https://www.ed.gov

I can only assume a typo in the comment.

yeah, DOJ apologies

Way off topic, but apparently Energy is the canonical "DOE". https://www.doe.gov redirects to https://www.energy.gov. <Insert joke about whoever had the most nukes wins here.>

“Let’s just abolish capitalism”. Seriously though, a world in which the government runs the economy and picks the winners is a bad one indeed.

Where in the parent comment does it say that?

That's exactly how it works right now actually. I'm proposing a rule where everyone is treated equally.

Yeah. The FTC under the current admin has done more anti-merger work than in the entire rest of my lifetime. I intend to do my part to let them continue on that path this November.

I'm struggling to feel the lack of price competition here in the US. It feels like mobile service has continually improved over time with fairly constant competition from MVNOs serving to experiment with different pricing models, as bandwidth has continued to be deployed.

T-Mobile needed that Sprint merger to remain a viable nationwide competitor to Verizon and AT&T, and now they've done that.

Mobile scene in USA is much improved than 10 years ago in my opinion. ATT/Verizon were too expensive and T-Mobile despite that poor service made a big difference. Google Fi has been my fav though as it gives me basic connectivity when I am abroad and cheap international calling to countries I care about.

Four. As in a European study, price competition requires four significant competitors.[1] This should be a basic rule of antitrust regulation.

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2024/05/16/report-sprint-t-mobile-m...

It is hard to imagine mobile prices for a national network the size of the US. I pay less than $30 per month total for 3 lines. maybe it would be cheaper if the Sprint/TMobile merger never happened, but the adticle doesn't seem to present any hard evidence.

How exactly are you doing that? The average price of a standard-feature line (i.e., not a MVNO with strict deprioritization) is approximately $70 USD a month (including taxes and fees, but not including any phone subsidy or equipment plans)

Even a strict hyper-cut-down MVNO (say something like Mint Mobile) is still about $20 a month per line on average, for their cheapest plan. And T-Mobile acquired Mint, so it's pricing will almost certainly rise in a year or two. (T-Mobile did the same thing to Metro when it acquired their network + subscribers, prices were doubled after a few years)

US Mobile, an MVNO, I am on the Verizon network as they have slightly better coverage in the outskirts around me. I have never had any trouble with deprioritization.

Prices were always high in the US, before and after that merger. I think part of it is due to the low intelligence of an average US consumer, who wants to have his iphone "for free" with the contract, and is unable to calculate the real price he is paying.

Ah, yes, that's what did it, not the reunification of Ma Bell.

We're in a better spot then with the AT&T monopoly because there are three viable carriers almost everywhere. The Baby Bells were local monopolies, and you had to get long distance service from the national monopoly. I never understood how people see that as a win.

The point being made is that AT&T should have never been allowed to reform itself as it did, probably along with numerous other acquisitions/mergers that the government approved that they should not have. There was a period of time late in the last century when many of us had numerous (i.e. 5-6) options for a while.

AT&T we have now is not really related to this old evil AT&T. Actual company that uses this brand in mobile space is used to be called Cingular. They bought AT&T remains and promptly rebranded.

> AT&T we have now is not really related to this old evil AT&T.

Yes, it is.

> Actual company that uses this brand in mobile space is used to be called Cingular.

So, in the beginning there was AT&T, the telephone monopoly.

It was broken up into 7 RBOCs (Regional Bell Operating Companies, also called “baby bells”) providing local service (each of which got a corresponding chunk of the AT&T subsidiary doing mobile work as their own mobile subsidiary), and the reduced AT&T, which did long distance, and some other things. There were also two other local service providers (which, before the divestiture, weren’t AT&T subsidiaries but did partial AT&T control.)

The modern AT&T is the result of mergers of, among other things, the long-distance AT&T and 4 of the 7 baby bells. As part of the road to getting there, Cingular Wireless, which was formed as joint venture of two of the Baby Bells (SBC, which had already acquired Pacific Telesis, one of the other Baby Bells, and BellSouth) from their mobile units and other mobile and other firms (like, more than 100 in total), acquired AT&T Wireless (not AT&T), which became part of Cingular (which was still an SBC/BellSouth joint venture)

Then AT&T merged with SBC, making Cingular an AT&T/BellSouth joint venture. Then it was announced that the AT&T brand would be used for Cingular service when packaged with AT&T services. Then AT&T bought BellSouth, making Cingular an AT&T/AT&T joint venture…or, rather, just part of AT&T.

So AT&T is the old long-distance AT&T after eating a bunch of other companies, but it’s also a very large portion of the older monopoly AT&T. Part of the wireless business was Cingular for a while between being AT&T before and then being AT&T again. (This leaves out a lot of mergers that went into forming the current AT&T that are not related to the claim that some company called Cingular that was completely unrelated to the old AT&T bought some minor remnant of AT&T and clothed itself with the name.)

Verizon (originally Bell Atlantic)'s history is much the same. There's even some back and forth between it and what is now AT&T over who gets what of the RBOCs and their spinoffs/successors.

Now, if Verizon and AT&T merge, then Ma Bell really will be back.

I’d love to see an economist tease apart the contribution of industry consolidation to inflation and wage suppression.

Several have! There’s no consensus on the relationship though. Some cases it does, some cases it doesn’t. Unions are a big factor.

and they acquired Mint, which almost certainly means my $30/mo prepaid plan will disappear soon.

Really sad to see the got Mint.. Cheers for the people that profited, but I feel this is a more serious blow than the sprint takeover.

Check out US Mobile. They follow a similar ethos of prepaid plan, but you don't necessarily even need to sign up for months at a time like Mint.

I just switched to US Mobile and so far it looks very good. You can even choose between Verizon and GSM networks.

+1 for US Mobile. Very happy with them.

T-Mobile was the worst, most incompetent company I have had the displeasure of working with in recent years. I fled to Mint. To say I’m chuffed by that acquisition is an understatement.

I'm confused by this. You don't like T-Mobile, but you're happy you'll be returning?

Long ago I had a T-mobile prepaid plan that had the wrong caller ID info. They claimed it couldn't be fixed because it was prepaid and they were unable to properly manage those accounts. Mint has been much better and will remain cheaper for now.

Wait so are you really happy they got acquired? Or does chuffed mean something else in the states?

I think it was sarcasm...or just the word being misused.

I don't know how long it will last, but Mint advised their rates were staying the same.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/t-mobile-closes-mint-mobile...

I'm sympathetic to a lot of the points here, but a key part of the story got left out:

T-Mobile's performance used to suck vs. Verizon and AT&T.

When T-Mo's network was crummy, the company to differentiated itself by being cheaper and less gimmicky than its competitors. I'm not too surprised T-Mo is adjusting its strategy as the company's network narrows the gap w/ VZW + AT&T.

T-Mobile's performance was probably trending in a good direction even w/o the merger, but acquiring Sprint (and Sprint's spectrum) likely helped improve performance a good bit.

T-mobile for years and still is cheaper then ATT & i assume Verizon. I was paying $165 for 4 unlimited lines with mobile hotspot. Now with T-Mobile same level of svc is $130 a month. Its up in the air tho if the service is a reliable and good as AT&T as i do have issues with T-mobile .. echoes heard on calls, calls not going thru/just dropping instead of connecting and no service at all where i previously had it with ATT (in southern york county pa by MD line).

Anecdotally, i'm now paying far less then I used to for wireless service. $26/month on verizon's network for two lines through US mobile.

Data point: I'm on Sprint, now T-mobile, and my plan has stayed at exactly the same price in dollars for a decade, despite 30+% inflation over that time and the addition of 5G data.

Verizon has slightly better service in my area, but would cost me $20-30/month more.

I realize that's just one data point, but I'm not seeing any problems with pricing.

Might be a change of guards that is causing this https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/17tl1du/why_is_mik...

Really? In 2018, a voice only family plan was more than twice than a voice, text, and data plan I have today. Mind you, it just went down $10/month a few months ago so it isn't like all the price drops happened years ago.

Does this article actually provide evidence for the headline claim?

Absolutely! T-Mobile started to increase prices with their newer plans, which offer less for more.

Maybe why I'm having so much difficulty working

Mint, or at least some time back.

The graph they chose to use in the article has to be one of the main poster childs for 'correlation does not mean causation'.

I don't know what's worse, not adjusting for purchasing power, or not adjusting for country size.

Also targeting 100GB screams 'writer had an agenda' to me. My screen on time is absolutely atrocious and I still rarely get over 20gb a month. I'm guessing the stats must change if you choose a number that fits in most plans defaults.

I use 2GB a month and I thought I was a doom-scroller...

I guess 2GB of text / forums / newspapers is very different from like, Netflix every day on the phone though.

Meh. Go with Consumer Cellular or other discount MVNO. Plenty of competition at that strata.

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