Takeover rumors run at full 'Sprint'

Here is what I see.
If something does happen (40% chance in my opinion) Sprint gets a leveraged buyout and becomes a Limited Partnership. Cable Companies owning Sprint. Probably Comcast owning the most Time Warner, Cox and others in the partnership as well.

Sprint also has tons of fiber and I think they still have the long distance business too.

If there is a buyout
I don't see the name being changed just top management and who get the profits.
I do not see Sprint becoming this

 

Anything is possible, heck all of these companies created a JV for buying spectrum in the AWE auction, so they could do it as a group, but there probably would be a bunch of problems dealing with who say's what with the company.
I also think they would want to wait to see how Sprint does with shutting down Nextel in the future, so there are less headaches.

I guess I am in that 40% tops bracket of this happening as well.

 

I think sprint may re-badge to try to start fresh like some the other mergers adn buy out you remember. Anyone remember GTE Wireless + Airtouch = Verizon? Heres good one for you.

McCaw Cellular One becomes ATT Wireless Systems which seperates to become ATT wirelesss which is molded into a conglomerate of little companies that became Cingular which is now Cingular now the new ATT not the Old ATT, or Lucent or Bell Systems. They should use a symbol like prince, we will call them the Cell Company formally known as "put company name here"

A little off topic and damn Im the king of run on sentences. Good thing its a forum and not an essay contest.

I think they might re-badge is my thought. Sprintel, Nextsprint. Who knows.
Maybe they will seperated the two and put up for auction anything is possible.

 

I think your right about that. I have seen companies put a new face and name on their companies and the common person doesnt know the difference and thinks this rebadge company is something new. I think eventually Sprint will gobble Nextel completely. I wish Sprint would use some of that 850 Specrum for its CDMA. They could even limit the spectrum so it wouldnt interfere with police and fire and CDMA could still use the freqs more effectively that the IDEN can. I dont think Sprint nor any of the other companies relized at the time when they went straight PCS that it would cover as effective as the 850.

My first cell was a sprint 850 panasonic bag phone at about a buck a minute.

 

Anyways I hope Sprint doesnt get taken over. They were one of the forerunners in the industry, plus mulitple companies keep the rates and plans lower.

 

I am sure since Sprint/Nextel basically said they would be shutting down iDEN in the near future (maybe 3 more years?) they will use the spectrum for CDMA, I believe that was another reason they bought Nextel.

As for the interference, that is part of the rebanding going on now so when/if they shut down iDEN, it won't be an issue for public safety for them using CDMA.

 

Definately true. CDMA being a narrower bandwidth being using plus shifting freqs and time slots will be alot less that the TDMA based IDEN platform.
One problem with Nextel is they run full power on their co-located freqs that run next to our 850 and can cause interference. On Nortel CDMA and GSM the switch automatically cuts the power to 43 db on border channels to help limit co-interference. Back in the old days of TDMA we had to put recieve filters on our stuff to block there signal.

 

Sorry about the wording on that. Pretty sloppy typing there.

 

I really hope Sprint does use the SMR band for CDMA. Removing IDEN from there will make lots of public safety entities happy because CDMA won't cause the interference that IDEN causes.

 

The IDEN spectrum will be Returned to Gov't
in exchange for the 1900 MHz they Got.

Sprint's chairman and CEO Gary Forsee acknowledged the company was having difficulty merging the Sprint and Nextel operations.

 

The FCC really hosed up the wireless industry when they let public safety use 800 freqs. The public safety was already using UHF and VHF. They should open up 700 band to the wireless carriers. 1900 requires 3 times the towers to cover the area of one 850 site. Nextels site will go to 1900 and they really wont have coverage then.

 

If Comcast buys Sprint, they better not add Sprint service to their Cable/Phone/Internet bundles... I am NOT switching to Sprint if that happens...

 

They are already offering the quadruple play including wireless in 2 or 3 markets and plan to expand it soon.
It does not mean you "Have" to select it, it's just going to be offered, just like you don't have to select the Triple Play you listed.
I have them for Cable & Internet & use AT&T CallVantage VoIP.

 

1900 is great if you have wide open areas wheres its flat with no hills or trees. Have you ever been in the back of a mega store like Walmart and you couldnt use your phone but you see others that can. Thats the 850 advantage. I have both 850 and 1900 cell sites and some are on the same tower. I have a site that has dual band antennas with 850/1900 equipment in the bottom building. While using test gear I can see both broadcasting and the 850 is almost 10db stronger.

Yes 850 sites are closer because 2.5 and 3G technology does not put out 50-75 watt like analog did. I am talking about rural america for the most part where the towers are still spaced pretty far apart and in Michigan it is real hilly with dense trees. I have both 1900 and 850 so im speaking from in the field experience on this one. We are running 850/1900 GSM 850/1900 Motorola CDMA/Analog and TDMA 850. We have to run multiple flatforms after buying out 2 smaller companies and still have to honor roaming agreements made by these companies.

Im not knocking 1900 but it doesnt penetrate dense objects like steel, concrete or dense foliage like 850 can. Therefore there is a need for more 1900 when you encounter these objects.

 

Sprint already provides the Telephone Long Distance
for the cable Companies' VOIP and that includes Comcast.

 

This effect is very noticable in north Georgia/metro Atlanta. 1900 seems to take a beating from the terrain and foliage. Weak signal in the Walmart or grorcery store is very typical. Also, many neighborhoods or inside some schools (unless a tower is very very close) can have weak signal. Plus, there are lots of even moderately dense population ares that simply do not justify the kind of close tower spacing Larry is accustomed in the Southern California area. This is why I am looking forward to their getting the rebanding done, and for Sprint to finally be able to use part of the 14MHz of contiguous 800 MHz spectrurm they will be left with for CDMA.

 

Not exactly true. You need to go to http://www.800ta.org and read the fact sheets for a better understanding of what is involved with the rebanding effort.

Sprint will still have 14 MHZ (most markets) of 800 MHz spectrum after the rebanding is done, with the advantage it will now be contiguous blocks (817-824 and 862-969) similar to the larger 25 MHz cell A and B sides.

 

Your exactly right. Metro environments are alot different. There are alot more towers in a major town than in the sticks were I live or most of rural america. You are right thou alot of time 850 will be down tilted in towns or they will pick up too much traffic and start to block. Adding capacity to a cell site is cheaper than building a new tower. In big towns we use alot more 1900.

 

I dont know about that set up its an odd config. Normal you use 2,3 or 4 panels and the only time you have a 1 panel config is usually because off space on a tower but in that case you would use a dual pole ant (ant that has two cable connections instead of one.) The other sector should mimic that of the first. The sector on the right the far right ant almost looks like a inverted omni stick. The one on the left looks like a WIFI panel. The other panels are narrowband 65% degree panels design to keep the sites coverage small, the fly swappers on the side somewhat block the signal.

The 3 panel set up is pretty much what ive seen on all of the Nextel towers up here. The new sites up here look the same as the old but the nextel tech said they are using dual band ants. With dual band antennas and diplexers you save money by having less cables on the tower.

When you say synergy do you mean dual Sprint 1900/ IDEN 800? Sometime I miss being a contractor Id love to get my hands on some of that.

 

The sites up here are 3 dual band antenna per sector. So the Iden and CDMA share 2 recieves like they were designed to have.

 

Cellonetech - do you know if any CDMA operator has deployed voice channels on 800 and 1900 in an "overlayed" manner? Meaning, covering the same area with both 800 CDMA and 1900 CDMA deployed on the same SID, with live call handoff between the two bands as required?

I beleive I read that the GSM carriers have done this on some cases, but I was wondering if this had been done with CDMA. Perhaps VZW has in markets where they have bnoth bands? The concept would be to let 1900 handle the majority of the calls, but lean on 800 as required, such as when signal strength dictates.

 

That doesn't work well with CDMA...frequency hopping that is. Going from 800 to 1900 would be a "hard handoff" which CDMA does not do well. CDMA's strenght is soft-handoff...unlike TDMA/GSM/AMPS which use hard handoff. That is why GSM carriers can overlay 800 with 1900 with and not suffer dropped calls or handoff issues.

 

From what I've seen around no Sprint 1900mhz CDMA is sharing an antenna with an 800mhz IDEN antenna. Yes, the CDMA is designed to have two receive antennas, but the iDEN is designed to have three though not always used. Hence the reason that even if only two out of the four iDEN antennas are being used they'll still leave the third and only replace the fourth with a dual 1900mhz antenna for the duplexed RX/TX and the diversity RX of the CDMA equipment.

Also, the only dual band antennas I know iDEN to be using are the 800/900 dual antennas for sites that have the temporary 900mhz equipment in them.