To me this makes a lot more sense than the T-Mobile At&t merger that failed to go through.

Sprint is a pretty dead brand and provider. They were actually giving away a year of free service without any obligation (you only had to pay $2 tax/fee) and people still would not switch to it.

T-Mobile has pushed the other carriers to bring back unlimited plans and they've separated the phone cost from the plan itself (allowing people to more easily switch carriers and bring their own phone).

Allowing T-Mobile to get more customers and a stronger position might be a good thing in order to compete with Verizon and At&t.

US Antitrust law is among its most archaic, even though they are relatively young. Even the term Trust speaks to an a term that is no longer in common parlance. As there is discussion about 'breaking up' Facebook and others, the murkiness of the law is painfully clear.

They should be referred to as competition laws, and they should be plainly understood and work at preventing and penalizing anti-competitive behavior. De facto digital monopolies have emerged as they have been freely allowed to act against their competition in ways that would have never been tolerated in meatspace.

Why do people think Sprint is so bad, and what does that say about our cellular market? It looks like I can get 5 lines for $150/month, with a 50GB soft-cap and 50GB of hotspot. That's less than half of what I pay for Verizon.

Such a lower-cost alternative should be able to attract customers in droves. Why can't Sprint?

Key quote, showing that it's not official yet. "The DOJ's approval is not the last one T-Mobile and Sprint need, because 13 states and the District of Columbia sued the companies to block the merger."

How are the towers going to be handled post merger? T-Mobile's GSM based service vs. Sprint's CDMA service means someone is going to have to win if they're serious about consolidating spectrum and towers.

We are currently in "merger insanity". I'm wondering how many companies will be left before this ends?

Assuming T-Mobile continues their multi-year policy of never raising prices on existing customers I'm all for this. One stronger competitor to AT&T and Verizon is much better than one almost competitor and an almost-dead-but-still-owns-bandwidth one.

I'm already on T-Mobile. I'm for this mostly because the Sprint network plugs some significant holes for me in places I travel, like northwest Iowa. When they put their cross-roaming agreement into effect earlier this year, I suddenly had coverage all along that corridor. Otherwise, I'm stuck with the extremely small data roaming allowance they provide.

Meanwhile, tmobile.com has been down (at least intermittently) for more than a week. Purely coincidence I'm sure.

I'm not loving this, but there are far bigger problems. Unless we're preparing to undo the mergers that made Verizon and AT&T huge, it wouldn't be fair to stop a couple piddly little companies from merging. Maybe they need to merge for survival.

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Awful decision. It won't cut consumer costs. Not even Bork would approve.

Does anything stop Dish from selling that spectrum back to the new company?

Consolidation is bad as it causes prices to rise.

I hate mergers like this, but the option is Sprint goes out of business and either AT&T or Verizon feasts on their carcass and we still only have three providers.

Matt Stoller has some harsh things to say about this, saying this is only happening because of Trump's friendship with Masayoshi Son: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/trump-antitrust-going-aft...