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Comment by Aloha | Hacker News Reader

Sprint has a pretty solid network in most markets, but they also have a metric crapton of debt.

What it comes down to, is there isnt enough spectrum to have three fully competitive carriers. The merger of T-Mo and Sprint will give them a huge leverage point on spectrum. T-Mo bring 600, AWS bands, as well as 1900 PCS blocks, Sprint brings 2.6, 900 and 1900 PCS blocks.

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I did the cellphone module for the EO PDAs back when there was just the "A" and the "B" ('Bell') carriers. I recall reading academic papers at the time pointing out that, technically, it would be most efficient to have a single swath of bandwidth assigned to a single company; instead, half went to 'A' and half went to 'B' -- guaranteeing a suboptimal technical solution. It's interesting to me that, at the time, they were able to get away with only 2 carriers per region.

AMPS was designed prior to divestiture being a thing, but even with that in mind, no one really knew how fast cellular usage would take off, and so the carriers were caught somewhat flatfooted.

Consider that most cellular networks were originally built with omni antennas, not panel antennas, so the ability to reuse channels and channel-per-site density was noticeably lower.

I agree, but only in areas that Sprint has band 41 deployed. In areas that Sprint only has band 25 and band 26, its data speeds are at the bottom of the pack...

Sprint does have a lot of debt ($33 billion), but AT&T does also: ~$180 billion.

Last I looked Sprint was much more leveraged than AT&T was however.

They both have debt roughly equal to their yearly revenue, but AT&T has dramatically better margins. Sprint has repeatedly gone years without a single profitable quarter.

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