This goes to show how disastrous a single bad business decision can be. When the 4G standards were still in flux, Sprint committed to WiMax and spent billions building a new network around it. Then the rest of the industry went with LTE, WiMax died, and Sprint had little money left to redo their network again. They've been basically on life support since.
The only way this merger would work is if the entirety of Sprint's leadership gets canned and replaced with T-Mobile's.
While Sprint has huge spectrum holdings to build out all sorts of network technologies, quite a bit of it is practically worthless. The really high band stuff is stopped by wet leaves.
They finally have some great new equipment coming online and things are improving, but their IP network is a mess and they rely on terribad CDMA 1X fallback for calls.
EDIT: I guess what I'm trying to say is this would only go through if DT receives a deal valuing TMUS more than it is. T-Mobile doesn't need Sprint and DT will continue to make money off TMUS. DT can wait to pick Sprint off when they inevitably go bankrupt. Sprint, however... they seriously had to advertise 'We're not that much worse than everyone else!'
As someone with a great deal of first hand familiarity with the Sprint network - in the western region, the last network upgrade was a forklift upgrade - out went the ALU (alcatel-lucent) hardware, and in went brand new shiny Samsung hardware, with brand new shiny tower top radios, and brand new shiny antennas, all connected over a fiber backhaul.
In my market, even the 1x network is hugely improved (as well as EV-DO) - I also take issue with you using 1x fallback to imply that on the sprint network there is another way to make phone calls other than 1x - there is no VoLTE footprint on the sprint network.
The industry is moving to high-band and small cells for 5G, so Sprint will be well-positioned there. But building that is going to be insanely capital-intensive, and the question is whether Sprint has the money.
>The industry is moving to high-band and small cells for 5G, so Sprint will be well-positioned there. But building that is going to be insanely capital-intensive, and the question is whether Sprint has the money.
They don't, but Softbank could pony it up. T-Mobile is also well densified with Verizon also being comparable in this area.
AT&T is the one that sucks with densification right now and would most benefit the most by a Sprint acquisition. Nobody wants the trash fire though, so it comes down to what Sprint/Softbank might be able to afford. US Cellular would be an awesome target as well but anyone in the industry knows that that would have to be pried from the Carlson family's dead fingers.
In some ways I believe WiMax was the right choice technically, but the wrong choice politically. Sprint though didnt spend as much as you think building out the WiMax network.. clearwires network was built very much on the cheap, but still provided a remarkably resilient service.
How much do you think I think Sprint spent on WiMax? If it wasn't very much then why was their LTE network so shitty for so long?
I was a Sprint early adopter when they were the first ones to launch a nationwide CDMA network and stuck with them for years even when it became clear that 3G GSM was technically superior (no simultaneous voice and data over CDMA). But I finally had to switch when they dragged their heels on deploying 4G LTE.
WiMax is why sprint didn't have an LTE network for so long, my market (Seattle) didn't get LTE until Q2 2013 in any form, and it wasn't even fully turned up until like Q4 2014, if not into early 2015.
I don't have a dollar estimate though. I know that having to do site development for all those non-shared sites, was very very expensive. I also know that Sprint made other network upgrades too in that time.
I disagree with your assertion however that GSM is superior to CDMA - GSM has the advantage of being more extensible, because its a collection of loosely coupled network elements working in tandem, but in terms of network construction CDMA is much more forgiving for poor deployment engineering, and offers (in my opinion) much better audio quality compared to GSM. CDMA also has one more advantage for the future, you can build a market out on it, and put all the sites on a single CDMA carrier (frequency), allowing you to more aggressively reallocate your spectrum to other uses (like LTE).
The reasons Sprints LTE network sucks is spectrum, in most of their markets, they don't have enough spectrum in the right band (1900 MHz PCS Block) to cram enough bandwidth into a macro site, meaning you have to do things like densification, which Sprint is very well positioned for with spectrum, but poorly positioned for in customer counts - its this math that really leads me to believe that there is no room for 4 competitive national networks, there are just not enough customers to pay the bills and keep the lights on.
None of the efficiency of CDMA matters from a customer experience standpoint. If it couldn't do simultaneous voice and data then it was inferior technology.
