The Cynic Says……

This should be rather interesting… It’s been announced that Sprint & Nextel will be merging. Obviously even if/when they do merge, it will take a couple of years for them to get everything squared away and both networks integrated. Nextel uses iDEN, which is a proprietary Motorola standard. Sprint uses CDMA, which is developed by Qualcomm. I think that it’s a good merger all in all because Sprint wants to become more of a force in the business world and Nextel wants better data services. They both have what the other wants, provided they can get over the technological hurdles. Sprint has to be careful not to botch up the walkie-talkie feature too much as that’s the one thing that most Nextel users could not do without and is Nextel’s #1 selling point. Sprint has a similar feature but it takes longer to setup the session and the “message” (for lack of a better term) takes longer to get there. Hopefully with Nextel’s engineers on the job, they’ll be able to fix that problem and have a kickass PTT(push-to-talk) along with some kickass data. Nextel was already going to have to move to the 1900 Mhz spectrum anyway because of an FCC(Federal Communications Commission) mandate to move out of their 800Mhz SMR(specialized mobile radio) spectrum because it was it was interfering with police and other safety radios. Needless to say, it was going to cost nextel a buttload of money to replace every single user’s phone if they were to go at it alone. Now that they have Sprint’s help, hopefully things will go smoother. Verizon can’t be happy about all this as now they’ll be #2 behind Cingular but being gained on quickly by Sprint/Nextel. Apparently at some point, Verizon had actually talked about making a bid for Sprint to try and keep them from merging with Nextel. However, I seriously doubt that Verizon will make a serioud bid and even if they did, I just can’t see such a merger or buyout ever passing regulatory approval. Sprint/Nextel should do fine with the regulators, though. Apparently the deal is worth $36 billion and will be mostly stock changing hands. Should be interesting to see how things pan out.

Here’s the link