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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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}.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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
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.
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."