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back to article Softbank boss promises 'massive price war' if he can buy T-Mobile US

The billionaire boss of Softbank, which owns US network Sprint, has promised a price and technology war with American mobile market leaders AT&T and Verizon – if he's allowed to merge with T-Mobile US, of course. Masayoshi Son made the promise during an interview with PBS' Charlie Rose, as embedded below. Son said Verizon and …

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  1. Steve Knox
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    T-Mobile US HAS to compete on technology and price.

    Because they don't have a network worth shit in this country. Put it together with Sprint and you may have half of what you need to compete on network coverage, but there's enough overlap that I doubt it.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Because they don't have a network worth shit in this country." I am captain Obvious. Network is tech.

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  3. Rampant Spaniel

    With dish amassing spectrum they could form a new 4th player and buy tmo's site leases (which sprint realistically won't need the majority of over time) or enter a network sharing deal with the newly merged company. Sprints network vision sites are designed to be able to easily support more bands and different tech (gsm, lte ca etc).

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  4. EJMF

    Blah, blah, blah

    Wasn't Softbank supposed to be an industry disruptor when they bought Sprint? It's eight months later, and nothing's changed. Now if they buy T-Mobile, they're going to have a price war? Yeah, sure

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    1. Rampant Spaniel
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      Re: Blah, blah, blah

      They sped up network vision, they decided to keep virtually all the clear sites to increase site density rather than decommissioning them as planned, they launched 'framily' etc. Son has managed to shake some things up but I think he has been fighting the culture at sprint which is why we are seeing senior staff leaving and not add much progress as anticipated.

      I'm not sure the merger will help much, tmo's spectrum is generally over committed although the do have 50MHz of mid dial spectrum in most markets and there would be significant savings. The technology difference is minor given the move to lte, newer phones would just have a couple of extra bands and keep the legacy gsm / cdma voice carriers and a small 1x/ hspa commit for a few years. It will be very interesting to see what Dish does, they may prove key.

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  5. Tom 13

    How do you know when a CEO is lying?

    His lips move.

    It may be old, but it is sadly also too frequently true.

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