At 06 May 2008 19:25:55 -0500 The Bob wrote:

> You need to look at ARPU before making that statement. While churn is
> high, there are still 50+ million paying customers on the books, far more
> than T-Mo can claim. If they were simply looking for pectrum, buying the
> Nextel portion of the portfolio would make more sense.


You're right, of course. What I was trying to say (very badly!) that
Sprint's customer base would have little or no value if T-Mo tried to mass
convert 40+ million customers to GSM, since they could take the opportunity
to shop around if forced to switch to new T-Mo GSM equipment. "Old" AT&T,
and to a lesser extent, Cingular, ran into this during the TDMA-to-GSM
migration- a LOT of ATTWS customers, particularly, who "traded down" from a
robust TDMA/analog network to an unfinished GSM one, ended up jumping to
Verizon or, in lesser numbers, to Sprint.

Frankly, if T-Mo could marry Sprint's spectrum and customer base with T-
Mo's exemplary customer service, they'd be a force to be reckoned with.

The real problem is what to do with Sprint's network- trying to integrate
them and migrate one company's customers to the other would be expensive
and very risky (the "jump ship" opportunity I mentioned above.) If T-Mo
instead forgoes trying to integrate them, but instead leaves them be for
the near-to-mid term, and holds off integrating until they can choose a
single 4G upgrade path for both networks, (like LTE) they might pull it off.