T-Mobile Exec: Sprint Merger 'Logical Ultimate Combination'

Maybe after they use just LTE and VoLTE. Trying to merge when they still use CDMA and GSM is a train wreck waiting to happen.

what could possibly go wrong with a carrier with the same amount of customers as the Big 2?

Seriously -- has Sprint learned nothing from the Nextel acquisition? So long as they're using differing baseband protocols, a merger is a very bad idea.

I still don't understand at all how the T-Mobile and MetroPCS merger works. Did either network actually gain expanded coverage from the merger? Or was the goal of the move purely political?

Its a great idea but would they convert all to gsm or cdma?

Use all towers of each

Wish I could be an exec with T-Mobile. The only idea they can ever come up with is to merge with a competitor. I can recommend that and collect a million dollar salary.

No, but mainly because it has been proven from European countries that you get near zero competition with 3 national carriers only. Retrofitting Sprint towers for GSM would not be such a big problem,especially because most Sprint towers are, like TMO's, in metro areas and a large number of them could be shut down or sold.

They better stay GSM. CDMA is useless.

GSM is to CDMA what VHS was to Betamax.

Betamax was the superior technology at the time. VHS just won the war for other reasons.

CDMA is hardly useless. At a fundamental level, CDMA is the superior technology. However, GSM rules the world, thus GSM is and will continue to be the standard going forward.

I don't see the Feds allowing it unless one of them is having major problems. Stagnation may not be enough. Could be a few years away if at all. Technically may make sense when both are on VoLTE but could be many many years before CDMA/GSM is fully retired.

On CDMA you cannot use voice and data at the same time ... how is that for superior? GSM also allows you to buy an unlocked phone and use it with whatever GSM service you would like throughout the WORLD. Try buying a new phone somewhere else and bringing it to Verizon.

except for range how is it better? being limited to 3mbps is a HUGE setback in my opinion

That's not actually true, it's just true of the implementations we see here. SVDO exists (even on phones such as the Sprint HTC Evo 4G LTE).

Good point, but in reality it does not change anything.

CDMA has more coverage in the states, and has many other advantages. Call quality and reception in more places are benefits that I can't ignore. Verizon & Sprint both have "4G" phones that can talk/surf... No way you could pay me to take a GSM phone. VoLTE makes the most sense as a compromise and will hopefully benefit everyone, eventually.

A Sprint/T-Mobile combo would be more effective at competing with Verizon and At&t on even footing. Assuming they used that merger as means of service the 1/3 of the US they currently ignore.

I don't see 4 major carriers.

Tier 1 Verizon, at&t
Tier 2 T-Mobile, Sprint
Tier 3 everyone else.

Sprint and T-Mobile aren't even in the same ball park as Verizon and At&T. Heck they aren't even in the parking lot.

You do realize everyone is going LTE.

it was more spectrum in the areas t-mobile already had, so they could roll out LTE

CDMA will be going away for Sprint anyway as all wireless providers move to LTE exclusively over the next 5 yrs.

Most likely GSM. CDMA (at least the CDMA that Sprint uses) is a dead technology.

When most people say CDMA they talk about CDMA2000. Sprint and Verizon both use CDMA2000. EVDO which both Verizon and Sprint use, is just a later evolution of the CDMA2000-based 3G 1xRTT technology that came before it.

T-Mobile and AT&T both use a technology called UMTS which stands for Universal Mobile Telecommunications System which if you look at the underlining signal encoding scheme you would find (surprise!) CDMA, just a different version of CDMA that CDMA2000 uses.

UMTS is completely different from what was once known as GSM. UMTS may have its roots in GSM but most if not all of what was once known as GSM was dropped from the UMTS standard to be replaced with CDMA as the base signal encoding scheme. UMTS was simply a natural next step in terms of network evolution when it came to legacy GSM-based networks due to the fact that both UMTS and GSM networks could easily co-exist with the same back-end provisioning and network management hardware.

Things get dicey when you start mixing CDMA2000 with LTE because the two network types use completely different network management and provisioning techniques. Verizon and Sprint had to implement something called eHRPD or Evolved High-Rate Packet Data.

Think of eHRPD has a "bridge" that "bridges" the two network types together so that those providers that are still running older incompatible CDMA2000-based networks alongside LTE can continue using their older network infrastructure. The problem is that eHRPD is a very fugly hack that has proven to be a very fragile system.

The reason why this is so is because an LTE-based network expects a GSM-like or UMTS-based back-end provisioning network. eHRPD implements enough pieces and parts of a UMTS-like provisioning system, enough to be able to fake a UMTS network to the LTE network for LTE to coexist with it.

Let's not talk about call quality. After being with Verizon for 8 years and moving to AT&T, it's like someone took a knife and finally cut the tape off of my mouth. VZ's call quality has been absolutely horrible lately. Way too much compression. However, I think this may be more isolated to VZ than CDMA.

While it is true that CDMA2000 allows for a less densely deployed network which translates into less towers that have to be deployed to properly cover a particular area, you still run into a situation in which you only have so much spectrum to use. Because of that, you only have so much bandwidth to use to transport voice data so in order to put more calls "in the air" you have to compress the voice stream. More compression means more calls can be put "in the air" but that also means less voice quality.

I know in my area when I was on Verizon (which in my area their coverage is piss poor), people often told me that I sounded like I was in a tunnel.

Sounds like a poor solution to the problem. More like a Band-Aid if anything. They should have just gone UMTS instead of EVDO.

Honestly, I'm not sure why anyone would want to deal with CDMA in America. With all the limitations CDMA carriers have, it's simply not worth it to me.

The problem is that at the time the modern cell networks were being built in the USA, two competing digital network technologies were vying for control of the digital cell phone network market; GMS and CDMA2000.

Technically speaking, CDMA2000 was in fact the better network technology at the time when it was competing with GSM.

Now, we have to go back in time a bit for this story so let's take a trip down memory lane.

Back when the modern cell networks in the USA were being build, what was once known as GTE (which later became what we know as Verizon Wireless today) was building the networks. CDMA2000 proved to be a better standard to use at the time because it required less capital expenditures to deploy a network to sufficiently cover an area due to the fact that CDMA2000 networks didn't require as dense a network build-out as GSM required. So from a capex standard, CDMA2000 was a win for the then GTE.

GSM requires a much more densely deployed network than CDMA2000 thus required more capex to handle the same amount of traffic that a CDMA2000 network could handle.

So now you have the reason why carriers such as Sprint and Verizon Wireless have CDMA2000-based networks.

Fast-forward to today and now UMTS which has its roots in GSM which was the standard from which LTE borrows much from now rules the cell phone network market.

Actually, I have more problems to understand people on CDMA phones than on GSM and the things get worse when I use a CDMA phone myself for that ( I have a CDMA as a back up) regardless of carrier.
It is true that CDMA carriers have much better rural coverage, but that has nothing to do with the system itself.

Completely agree. That's what I said in my post, lol.

except that it will take 10 years before they have everywhere the same coverage with LTE and the old system can retire.