<story><title>Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Killed Wireless Price Competition in U.S.</title><url>https://www.techdirt.com/2024/05/16/report-sprint-t-mobile-merger-immediately-killed-wireless-price-competition-in-u-s/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Benjammer</author><text>&amp;gt;Sprint&amp;#x27;s goose was most definitely cooked&lt;p&gt;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 &amp;quot;fixer&amp;quot; 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).&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Oh, whatever shall we do, our company is failing, you MUST let us merge with one of our primary competitors or we&amp;#x27;ll go bankrupt. No company at all is worse for consumers than a merged company.&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>TheAmazingRace</author><text>I will say, I&amp;#x27;m not terribly fond of mergers on principle. However, based on my insight as a former customer and shareholder of the company, Sprint&amp;#x27;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&amp;amp;T picking the carcass clean.&lt;p&gt;I think folks forget how dire Sprint&amp;#x27;s straits were at the time, and this specific merger truly was the least of all evils.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TallTales</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a former engineer at Sprint and I strongly disagree with this characterization. Sprint&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;Marcello has a lot of faults but he didn&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x2F;2017 iirc. It was an impossible position and it&amp;#x27;s really sad because it was a great old company in my estimation. T-Mobile is just the worst.</text></comment>
<story><title>Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Killed Wireless Price Competition in U.S.</title><url>https://www.techdirt.com/2024/05/16/report-sprint-t-mobile-merger-immediately-killed-wireless-price-competition-in-u-s/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Benjammer</author><text>&amp;gt;Sprint&amp;#x27;s goose was most definitely cooked&lt;p&gt;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 &amp;quot;fixer&amp;quot; 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).&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Oh, whatever shall we do, our company is failing, you MUST let us merge with one of our primary competitors or we&amp;#x27;ll go bankrupt. No company at all is worse for consumers than a merged company.&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>TheAmazingRace</author><text>I will say, I&amp;#x27;m not terribly fond of mergers on principle. However, based on my insight as a former customer and shareholder of the company, Sprint&amp;#x27;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&amp;amp;T picking the carcass clean.&lt;p&gt;I think folks forget how dire Sprint&amp;#x27;s straits were at the time, and this specific merger truly was the least of all evils.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andy800</author><text>Sprint went all-in on WiMax as it&amp;#x27;s 4G network. I owned an early Sprint 4G smartphone (made by HTC) and the 4G &lt;i&gt;never&lt;/i&gt; 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.</text></comment>