T-Mobile court filing trashes Sprint, but for a good reason
“Plaintiffs’ prediction that Sprint would abruptly reverse this long trend and emerge as a vigorous standalone competitor is nothing more than wishful thinking. Plaintiffs are dwelling in the past while the rest of the world is building superhighways.”-T-Mobile
Why would T-Mobile trash the company that it wants to merge with?
T-Mobile states that a merger with Sprint won’t lead to higher prices, and says that it won’t halt competition in the industry. To make sure that there is a healthy competition for U.S. wireless customers if the merger does go through, Sprint agreed to sell its pre-paid businesses including Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile to Dish Network for a total of $5 billion. The deal includes some of Sprint’s 800MHz spectrum and cell sites. In addition, Dish agreed to sign a seven-year MVNO agreement with T-Mobile; this will allow Dish to start selling wireless service in its name (using T-Mobile’s 4G LTE network) while the satellite content provider begins to build out its own standalone 5G network. In its lawsuit, the state attorneys general called the deal with Dish a “fig leaf” that would not be of any help to consumers.
5G is the next generation of wireless connectivity and can provide download dataspeeds 10 times faster than 4G LTE. Once 5G signals are available throughout the U.S., it will help create new businesses and industries that will drive the U.S. economy. This is one of the reasons that T-Mobile is so eager to get this deal done; the carrier cites U.S. leadership in 5G as one of the reasons why it wants to merge with Sprint.
The lawsuit was originally scheduled to go to trial in October, but the plaintiffs were granted a delay until December. The deal will not close until a decision is reached in this case.