Sprint and T-Mobile announced their merger earlier this year, and while it still has not been approved just yet, the two companies are fairly sure it will be approved. One of the many questions surrounding the merger, however, is what would happen to Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile on Sprint’s side and MetroPCS on T-Mobile’s side, the three prepaid brands of the combined company. Well, executives are promising that the three brands will survive the merger. In the questioning by the FCC, neither T-Mobile nor Sprint did say how the brands would survive, but that they would survive. One has to wonder whether all three will continue to exist as they do today, or be combined into one or two brands.
In the letter to the FCC, Sprint and T-Mobile also boasted that the combined company would “have sufficient capacity to offer an in-home product at a lower price than current offerings in over half of US zip codes, bringing broadband choice to many customers for the first time.” Now this does fall in-line with what executives have been saying already, including T-Mobile’s fixed wireless plan, that it announced before the Sprint merger was announced. With 5G, carriers are going to be doing fixed wireless service, before doing regular wireless service. Which means that the combined company could offer a broadband service, and that might be what allows the merger to go through. As it would bring more competition to the ISP space, considering right now there’s only one choice in may areas, for Internet, with a few having two choices.
The FCC is currently mulling over whether to approve this merger, though analysts are pretty confident that it will be approved. This is because the Justice Department was unable to block the merger of AT&T and Time Warner, but also because it would allow Sprint and T-Mobile to better compete with AT&T and Verizon, as they would be closer to their sizes. This is a big deal actually, since in wireless you have two larger carriers and then two smaller carriers. And bringing the two smaller carriers into one, means more competition.