Sprint Ups Bid to Acquire Clearwire

Good for shareholders of Sprint & Clearwire. Probably bad news for Sprint customers as there will now be less money available to improve Sprint's network and customer service.

The Network Vision rollout is already supposedly funded. But is unfortunate Dish did this to Sprint considering Dish buying Sprint was never realistic, like wild claims of saving $11B. Shareholders were able to use Dish as leverage and it worked. SoftSprint maybe unnecessarily caved in but wanted to move on.

Dish was pwn'd, shareholders won the battle in $$, Softbank won the war at a high cost. It wouldn't be surprising if Dish/Ergen's huge ego keeps a thorn in Sprint's side though. It might not be over.

Those special message boards are still predicting a new bid from Dish and Google and Carlos Slim etc. Then Clearwire will skyrocket to its supposed real price.
After the dust settles Dish will swoop in picking up the tattered pieces of the worthless Sprint,
Ergen is a real American and a disruptor all hail Ergen. We wont vote yes on Clearwire for less than 10 a share. But it is worth even more. Sprint and Softbank are worthless Ergen is our savior.
Then we will have 24/7 poker feeds blasting through the unlimited bandwidth that is Dish/ Clear. The network will be femtocells and the backbone will magically appear. Dish installers will rule the Earth.

Not sure if serious or sarcastic.

To some who are day traders it sure seems real. Now if you are looking at it from a customer perspective and which company has the real brainpower needed Softbank.
Yet those investment firms and day traders love turmoil and Dish is providing it.

If Clear wants more and Dish is willing to pay (they are only going after 25% of Clear), Sprint should just give 25% of the spectrum to Dish and go after 600Mhz auction.

Those message boards have Ergen coming in with Google/ Slim / God and paying large sums for Clearwire not just 25% and then Sprint goes belly up, Son then falls on his sword. Or even if he gets 25% it is the rights of the minority shareholders above the ones that have the majority. He is Ergen his 25% outweighs Sprint 51% . We are the day trading lawyers.
Ergen becomes the new face of Google. Ergen changes the wold with 24/7 streaming poker to all. The shareholders also get a stake in the new Dish/Google/Slim conglomerate and the price soars to the moon.
But for now Ergen will bid at least 7 if not more on his next poker raise, We are the day traders. We are billionaires and create the world from our basements.
Plus Ergen can not lose. If Sprint is forced to out bid him he can sell his current Clearwire shares at a large profit so either way he wins and takes down Sprint which is his main goal. Everyone knows Sprint sucks and Ergen is just putting them in their place the poker winner he is.
Now 10 plus no less. Or was it 20 plus?

I think it's telling that CLWR is only a couple cents above SPrint's offer. The market doesn't think that there will be another round of match-and-raise.

As far as Carlos Slim goes, that my friend would be more of a foreign ownership issue than SoftBank. At which point Ergen is shown for the two-facd fiend that he is.

Then again, why am I replying to this? There's no way that Google would want back in on Clearwire, after the money they sunk in and flat-out lost awhile back. Nor would they allow Ergen to be their figurehead, even if they've collaborated with him on the past (first-gen GoogleTV).

Yes but they just wanted out of Sprint/ Clearwire. Now that Dish is in on it they are backing Dish as Ergen is a winner. Sprint is the one that was the loser not Dish. That is what those boards think.

If Sprint is the loser then they overpaid for CLWR. Which means that investors aren't going to get their $10/share. That, or CLWR is undervalued and Sprint is getting a decent deal at $5/share.

Personally, $5 is a bit much, but if it gets the deal done then so be it.

As for Google + Dish, give me a link or it's not happening.

How is sprint worthless??
They have the best cell phone plans.

The only reason I don't use them is my company pays for my cell phone, if I had to pay I would be with sprint as they don't pretend you need to have limited bandwidth like the others do.

According to the day traders Clearwire has all the good spectrum plus towers, network,etc. Everything that Dish needs to stream his video content. Any contracts Sprint has on its contributeed spectrum are worthless as they are alos lawyers and even if Dish gets 25% Ergen gets all the spectrum. daytraders love the poker player as he is one of them. Crest will also not sell them out. To the moon 50 dollars a share no less.
Heck the price is already trading over the sprint bid in hopes of Charlies knockout punch.
Sprint is a loser and so is Hesse. Losers forever. Ergen is a real man a poker player. He will keep raising and bringing the day traders riches.

Everything Dish touches turns to crap. They roll high on borrowed money. Blockbuster was just another company to get them the ability to borrow more. They then let the company go to crap with bad policies to cannibalize Blockbusters death (you can get Blockbuster online only if you sign up for Dish first).

Sprint/Clearwire if acquired by Dish will be borrowed against to the MAX then run into the ground. When there isn't anything left of a viable company they will sell the cell bandwidth to the highest bidder of AT&T/Verizon.

IE strip the company of all cash, borrow against it to the max, and sell it's wireless assets when there is no hope of it succeeding and the company is to bad off for government to intervene.

Sprint made comments before that they were broke when they bought all of those iPhones that never sold as they expected. I'm not sure where the money for NV is coming from but if its completely funded they have some major issues in upgrading as slow as they are going, they could be hiring an outside company to come in and take over the network build out. Although this is 100% Sprint's fault that this happened. Years ago under XHOM's brand, Sprint could have kept the company and kept building out on their own as they were doing. They decided they did not want to and SOLD everything. Now they want their cake back to eat. They should have to pay Clear's shareholders what they paid, plus what the network is worth before they even get anything. This is how Sprint works and has always.

Sprint has hired three different companies (Samsung, Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent) to do the Network Vision upgrades. You are completely unfamiliar with the plans, yet you post as if you are an authority on the matter. This is a huge undertaking and it cannot happen overnight. If you care to educate yourself, head on over to S4GRU.com and feel free to read up on everything going on.

Just thought you should know. First off, Sprint did HIRE Ericsson to do jack. They took bid on and won the contract to maintain Sprints network which pretty much put all network services in Ericsson hands. Lucent? Gee, Lucent has been supplying Sprint with it's network gear before 1999 (and they still do). Samsung? Sprint is installing Samsung gear so part of that deal is Samsung installs it and the what-use-to-be Sprint techs and now Ericsson employee's are the ones who maintain it. Matter of fact, one of the Samsung guys use to be a switch tech for Sprint till he joined the ranks of being laid off. In 2009, Sprint canned 8000+ people and turned the network over to Ericsson. There are no SPRINT people at ANY (aka, all) Sprint/Nextel switch sites or working on the towers. Just thought you should know.

Unfortunately, he does that all of the time.

Nice tip. Enjoying the site now.

Can you please cite where Sprint stated that they were broke? Also, can you cite where Sprint indicated that their iPhone sales weren't as expected? Thanks!

Customer service is the big waste of money.
Besides the initial setup, I never had to call my cell provider in the last 10 years. Plan changes happen through the website.
If I were a cell phone company, I would lower everyone's bill and charge people who call customer service for stupid troubleshooting issues they could solve themselves or on the website.

Customer service is only needed for initial setup, billing errors, and reporting out of service. People should be charged when they call for stupid issues.
Putting less money into customer service does not affect 80% of the customers.

Seriously, dish and ergen are just douchebag trolls at this point. He's costing everyone more money.

That is his roll in life.

Tmobile stock went up at first in anticipation that Dish would now pursue them (though it went back down). DT always wanted to get out of the US market with ATT deal that fell through but now that SoftSprint will likely be harder to compete with, they may dump Tmobile if Dish can offer enough. If Tmob goes on sale on the cheap, cable companies might bid too.

I think the likelihood of TMO selling TMO US to DISH are pretty good.

The catch with T-Mobile is that they don't have enough spectrum to do fixed wireless broadband, which is what Dish wants.

That said, if Dish wanted to buy T-Metro, or maybe just DT's stake in the company, I don't think DT would mind one bit.

DISH has its own significant spectrum holdings to add to TMO's.

True, but 20x20 of AWS-4 starts to feel small if you want to deploy fixed wireless over it. Maybe you can throw in AWS 1700/2100 that T-Mobile is already using but you have even less capacity there for another 1-3 years (they have to kick out AWS CDMA and move around HSPA+ to get 20x20).

Sort of what I was wondering. Fixed wireless with lots of spectrum may be great. Still have to get it out in the field close enough to use. I do not see how say with the current cell density everyone could watch 24/7 poker channel on demand. Then if he pushes it closer to the end users where does he get the many fat pipes to do that?
A cable company or a telco would have a better shot at that as have those last mile pipes most places.
Even Sprint has not burned as many bridges as Dish and would have a shot at renting those last mile pipes.
That is the other thing mobile data has a place and even some streaming video. Yet as some are cheering Dan has the content I do not see the need for video content. In the current technology and setups too much on demand video content would break the system.

Current stock buying price of low volume sales is 100% irrelevant.
A company negotiates their own buy stock price based on how they value the company they are buying, not by low volume sales of stock on the stock market.
What you see on the stock ticker does not matter much.

Understood, was referring to these kinds of reports that there was interest in Tmob now that Dish may target them...
»www.theflyonthewall.com/ ··· rint-bid

now that is a classic Charlie play!!... wouldn't shock me if this whole clearwire, sprint, & who ever else wasn't just a smoke and mirrors ploy to get others misdirected from his actual play.

but don't get me wrong he wanted the clearwire deal to go thru just to be a thorn in sprint's side. and for the spectrum of course

Actually if everyone wants a competitor to the supposedly duopoly of at&t an Verizon then they should let Sprint and T-Mobile merge. Of course they must also force the new company to actually build out in the 25-35% of the US the now completely ignore. Then once you have 3 companies that can say they serve at least 95% of the US each then you'd have competition. And with 3 carriers instead of 4 there would be plenty of spectrum to go around.

These talking heads suggest Dish options and going after Tmobile but suggests DT probably wants to eventually sell to Sprint and use Dish as leverage to cause a bidding war.

»www.bloomberg.com/video/ ··· pid=yhoo

I don't see the Feds allowing Sprint/Tmob merge unless one of them is in dire straights, near bankruptcy. Probably eventually they merge but in the next couple of years? Would surprise me.

Seems like Charlie Ergen never wants something until someone else wants it.

Is it me, or is there some degree of sympathy for Sprint in this thread?

Does not history demonstrate Sprint is a company that comes up with innovative ideas but repeatedly fail to competently implement? A few examples: ION, Sprint+Nextel, Sprint providing MVNO quad or triple play for cable companies, and most notably Clear.

Regarding Clear:
1. Sprint held 54% of the combined Sprint Xhom + Clearwire,
2. the merger was funded and backed by the biggest US technology companies (Google, Intel, Time Warner, and others)
3. yet Clear has been an absolute disaster.

Perhaps someone in the know can explain how Sprint can be majority owner of Clear but when it produced the same results as most other Sprint projects, Sprint blames two different executive teams at Clear. Sprint, maybe it is you.

In the event Dish/Charlie wins Clear, Sprint is out of RF resources and cannot compete as a national carrier. That would be a horrible blow to their HQ communities in Kansas and their hard working lower level staff around the country. If Softbank wins, IMHO Sprint as an enterprise has a better chance if Son cleans house at the executive level and acts as Chairman + CEO.

I am curious to know what Alcatel, Ericsson, and Samsung would say (if they could) regarding how organized and competent Sprint has been supporting each of them on Network Vision. My guess, Sprint is performing at historic expectations.

Sprint is like the family dog Fido, you know what will be produced in the end.

Well I didn't go through the bad years. Just in the last half year switched. I do figure that network vision and LTE will pan out relatively soon. Now if you were a long time customer yes they went through crap.
Only thing that worries me is Dish. If they get Sprint or Clearwire it will be messed up again and under debt load. Softbank seems like they will continue with the current good stuff and maybe add some fun twists later.
Sprint is currently on a turn around. May not fast enough and too late for those that waited forever. When complete say within a year new customers will notice.
Plus once Nextel is gone and 800 spectrum reprovisioned even at first to voice then later LTE Sprint will complete.
Softbank would see it through and any hiccups along the way. Ergen does not have the technical experience or management experience to see this through.
Now if I had a Verizon grandfathered data plan I would not have switched.

YES! Someone who gets it. OHNO is right on target and go back to 1999 and you will see that 2 REALLY big projects that fell on it's face. ION and the NEXTEL boondoggle.