Sprint Nextel Merger

Verizon's lead in gross subscribers and the Cingular & ATTWS merger sure put some pressure on the corporate development offices in both Kansas and Virginia. Fascinating M&A news if you ask me. I'm glad the combed HQ will remain in Reston VA and not Overland KS, congratulations to the State of Virginia.

I've always been a fan of the wireless B2B model, selling to business customers, and I continue to believe that in the long run, this focus will be advantageous to the combined Sprint Nextel as the wireless market matures. There's clearly a further divergence between business wireless needs and consumer wireless needs, not only technologically but also service-wise.

Sprint's lead in rolling out a UMTS voice and high-speed data network gives it a nice little advantage in selling effective 3G services, whereas the new Cingular is only now getting started to build. The merged entity is going to have some hard work ahead, however, including completing the merger, combining the customer bases / billing systems, rolling out EV-DO, building dual-technology phones, and cleaning up the new organization. Andy Seybold thinks that "it will take until sometime in 2007 to accomplish all of this." I hope that's all it takes, not any longer. Right off the bat, I too, like Andy, would love to see Nextel begin offering higher-speed data EV-DO PC cards (from the Sprint service).

From a business perspective, I'm still very curious to see what happens with the folks over at T-Mobile in Washington & Germany. Om points to an article in Forbes about certain such rumours, including talk of Verizon bidding for Sprint. I wonder what the DoJ would think of that combination. Techdirt even points to an article in Business Week about Alltel's fate.