CNet News has an interesting article analyzing the “new Sprint.” A lot of it points out some of the same issues I raised when I first complained about what a dumb idea this was. Namely:
– While investors love a merger, any merger, this one combines two companies that couldn’t possibly have less in common from a technical standpoint, unless one company happened to be a cell phone company and the other happened to, oh, sell seafood or something.
– No synergy until at least 2010. Basically the “new” Sprint is going to be running “old” technology until at least that date, right alongside its existing state-of-the-art network, and trying to leverage both as somehow equal, even though they speak different languages.
The only real gain seems to be that Sprint gets to leapfrog to the #3 spot in the US, in terms of how many paying customers it has, even if those customers aren’t unified. That’s a high price to pay just to become #3.