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I guess Sprint’s $5 a share offer was too rich for Dish’s blood, causing them to fold on their Clearwire acquisition. They announced today via press release that they are now formally withdrawning their bid to purchase Clearwire, with nothing standing in the way of the soon-to-be-Softbank-owned Sprint. This finally ends a brutal bidding war for Clearwire and their spectrum. With a valuation of around $14 billion, Sprint’s going to have to dig deep into their pockets to find the money for Clearwire. Enjoy your victory, Sprint.
Sprint will enjoy it’s victory and we Sprint customers will reap the great benefits for years to come. This by and far the best thing that could have transpired for Sprint and it’s customers.
What phones have the correct radios for the spectrum ? None you won’t notice any difference for a good while.
I still have a WiMax phone… so… you are right! lol
I was wondering the same thing. My inclination is that the current phones aren’t capable of connecting to that spectrum and from what I understand, they’re not even ready for connecting with the additional LTE spectrum that Sprint has been building as part of the Network Vision.
The current LTE phones can indeed connect to the “Network Vision” LTE.
There is a 3rd bandwidth that sprint has been building out. None of the current phones are tri-band.
I heard all they have to do is switch out a board at the tower to make any clearwire tower an LTE tower.
And my understanding is that the phones require radios to connect to the different bandwidths. From my understanding, all current sprint phones are still built with radios accommodating the 2 current bandwidths on Sprint’s lte spectrum, but not a 3rd or 4th. I believe it’s 850 and 1900, but sprint is building out a 800? And clearwire extra bandwidth is 2500? It’s been a while since I read up on Sprint’s spectrum though. So my remembrance of the exact spectrum is hazy.
Yep that is sort of true. The current systems that they are using for network vision are easily upgradable with software and minimum components. I took a tour of one couple months back. They said to get lte advanced will not be difficult at all.
At some towers they had 3 different terminals, one for sprint cdma, one for wimax and one for nextel iden. Now they just have 1 at most upgraded sites that do both cdma and lte. As you know iden has been shutdown almost entirely and wimax is just going to run I think till 2015. Its looking good for sprint. I just hope they manage it correctly.
Tri-Band LTE (800/1900/2500) data devices should start showing up in the next couple of months, while similar phones should be out by the end of the year.
Congrats to all SPRINT customers.I couldn’t wait for their upgrades/4g LTE any longer & switched to T-MOBILE 2 months ago.Of course last week,they finally officially announced my area for 4G LTE.Oh well,that’s how it usually goes……………
Perhaps I’ll check them out again should they get a super kickass phone exclusive.
I almost did the same thing and my town just got lte couple weeks ago. I was going to give them till end of year to get things straight but now I will just wait till end of my contract. this is really good news.
I hope you’re right and it doesn’t translate to Sprint having to charge consumers a lot more, due to the additional spectrum purchased, to make up costs.
I definitely hope this is true. I have been with sprint for 10+ years through the bad then the great and then bad again. Now that lte is turned on in my town but I still have bad data speed I’m looking forward to an influx of money so they can make it better and keep introducing new lte marktes. Can’t Wait.
They’ll get the money from Softbank to finish the deal. We could see Sprint/Clearwire/Softbank as the first LTE-A carrier in the U.S. if they get the ball rolling when the deal is done.
Sprint, Softbank, Clearwire? So does that mean their new name will be spankwire? Oh wait…….
I think Tmobile is already starting LTE-A. They just didnt turn it on.
From the front page, the second half of the sentence: “Dish has formally declared defeat, withdrawing their bid to buy Dish.”
I didn’t know they were buying themselves. :)
good news! <3 SERO P
So what does this deal REALLY mean?