On Friday, The Wall Street Journalreported that Sprint may be looking at buying T-Mobile in early 2014. Now earlier this week, Sprint’s CEO Dan Hesse, had said that his company would be making waves in 2014, especially with Softbank behind them, owning 70% of the carrier now. It looks like Sprint is looking to purchase T-Mobile in early 2014. Which we had heard from T-Mobile’s CEO John Legere, that he would be open to a merger.
Right now, Sprint is really starting to struggle to keep their #3 spot in the US Carrier race, behind AT&T and Verizon. Right now T-Mobile is catching up really quickly. They’ve been adding customers like Verizon does in the past few quarters, while Sprint has been losing customers. So Sprint could use the help that T-Mobile could provide them. Sprint would be willing to pay about $20 billion for its rival. And it sounds like Softbank is the one steering this deal, and not Sprint itself. But since Softbank owns the majority of Sprint, they can do that.
But there’s one thing here with this report. Would this merger go through? We already saw AT&T try to buy T-Mobile a couple of years ago, and that fell through, which AT&T then had to pay T-Mobile a ton of money which they have since pumped into making their network better. Now if the same thing happens to Sprint, it’ll hurt them a whole lot more than help. There’s going to be some antitrust issues, especially since we’ll be losing a carrier. Instead of 4 major nation-wide carriers, we’ll have 3. Especially since the next largest carrier, MetroPCS, is now part of T-Mobile.
What does everyone think? Sprint + T-Mobile =? I’m not sure what to think about this. I actually like both carriers, but Sprint’s network is just so terrible in a lot of places, but they do have “service” in more areas than T-Mobile and T-Mobile has faster speeds pretty much everywhere, so you’d think putting them together would help them both out, but I’m not sure. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.