T-Mobile looking to Purchase Sprint Nextel
A tip from jpquezada gently reminds us that we haven't addressed the reports that Deutsche Telekom is looking to purchase Sprint Nextel. Yes, good ol' Deutsche Telekom (who also owns T-Mobile USA) has been eyeballing the purchase of Sprint for a while now. But just recently some new information indicates that they have actually been looking to make a move.
If the deal goes through (and there are many questions about whether it can or will), it's not entirely clear what Deutsche Telekom will do with Sprint or what it would mean for the industry and Sprint customers. T-Mobile is a GSM carrier while Sprint is CDMA - not to mention Sprint's Nextel bands. Would T-Mobile and Sprint merge or simply be owned by the same company? Would Sprint move to GSM (a move perhaps eased by the fact that Sprint has been busy virtualizing their company and divesting themselves of pesky physical assets and then leasing them back). Would Catherine Zeta Jones start appearing in commercials next to Dan Hesse? Would Sprint and Palm lose their BFF status, since neither T-Mobile USA nor Deutsche Telekom have been very Palm-friendly in recent memory? Would it also help drive up wireless costs across all carriers?
That's a lot of questions - and if we were Palm, we'd see the same answer behind all of them: time to diversify and get webOS devices on other networks, pronto.
