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This would be big, really big. We've been reporting on Sprint's woes for quite awhile now and apparently we're not the only ones who've noticed that Sprint has fallen on hard times of late. The parent company of both T-Mobile USA and T-Mobile Europe, Deutche Telekom, is reportedly looking into purchasing Sprint. They'd merge T-Mobile and Sprint with an eye toward competing with the two big guns in the US market, AT&T and Verizon.
Things are still at a very early stage, of course -- supposedly Deutsche Telekom is basically just “thinking about it” right now. The mess: Sprint has CDMA, iDEN, and is planning on WiMAX. T-Mobile is EDGE and just now rolling out 3G services. That's a whole lotta different radios to manage, it doesn't sound like much fun.
[Google Translation of Spiegel Online]
In other news, we reported earlier that T-Mobile has lit up New York city with 3G and is rolling it out in other areas as well. We also heard that they were just doing 3G for voice and not for data. Turns out that's only partially true -- T-Mo is rolling out 3G for data, just much more slowly and they basically can't guarantee whether faster data will work for you or not yet. It's catch as catch can. Also contrary to reports: they will do full HSDPA and not just UMTS. Phew.
Have you caught it yet?
to quote Stewie--"what the deuce?"
I always dismissed any GSM tech based company buying Sprint, and always assumed either Verizon or even Alltel would try to make a play. Verizon has made overtures in the past, but they know passing regulatory muster will be harder for them than even that one big airline merger going on right now.
Of course once Sprint and Nextel merged on the grounds that WiMax would "sort it all out" I guess all bets were off. Just how would T-Mobile and Sprint integrate? Not that I'm complaining-- I'd like to be able to have a Quadband GSM/UMTS/EVDO/WiMax/LTE device one day.