Roger Fingas
U.S. Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai said he'll recommend approving a proposed merger between T-Mobile and Sprint, following a series of promises the carriers made for their $26.5 billion deal.
The pair have agreed to sell off Sprint's Boost Mobile prepaid brand, but keep Metro and Virgin Mobile, Bloomberg reported. That's presumably to allay competition fears, since the three brands combined would control 42% of the country's prepaid market.
Sprint and T-Mobile have also committed to a three-year expansion of their 5G network, and a block on price hikes while that network is being built. Verizon is already charging a premium for 5G mobile access.
The merged entity would see the "Sprint" name disappear under T-Mobile's, and the latter's CEO, John Legere, assume leadership.
The businesses are looking to better challenge the two dominant U.S. carriers, AT&T and Verizon. Critics have worried about a merger further reducing competition and maintaining high prices.
That could still potentially scuttle the deal, which has to be approved by the rest of the FCC as well as the U.S. Justice Department. The carriers recently extended their deadline to July 29.
Charles Martin
Christine McKee
Wesley Hilliard
Malcolm Owen
Andrew Orr
William Gallagher
Sponsored Content
11 Comments
Now less competition, higher prices from ATT and Verizon especially 5G.
Now more competition, faster deployment of 5G, and lower prices from AT&T and Verizon. Finally!
Sprint will disappear... thank god.
I expect more of the same... degraded performance at T-mobile for at least several years. Until they remove Sprints trash from their combined network.
I don’t see how this was the best solution for T-mobile. They could have purchased assets from Sprints bankruptcy in 5 years. Sprint doesn’t appear to have much of the way of 5G assets... The low cost wireless provider was about to become the loooow cost provider.
T-mobile was likely to become 2nd place to Verizon regardless. ATT has taken on to much debt...
The merger might benefit Verizon the most. They’re going to role out 5G first and charge a “nice” premium...
What? I thought this thing was already a “go”?
I have no idea how this will turn out, but I think there tends to be a limited number of these 'utility' type companies because so much of the cost is fixed infrastructure cost. (In other words, it's pretty hard for a small player to compete on coverage.) I think T-Mobile has done a great job, so I hope they're able to absorb Sprint and not ruin themselves. First thing I'd do is just disband all of Sprint's customer "service" — in my experience, Sprint truly hates its customers.