Sprint and T-Mobile should be laughed at if they claim their merger won’t hurt competition. Craig Moffett is on target. The almost free offer “is an almost perfect affirmation that the current industry structure is serving customers very well indeed? Sprint and T-Mobile have been test-running a narrative along the lines of ‘if you think it’s competitive now, imagine what we could do if we merged.’ Well, it’s hard to imagine that regulators will be tempted to imagine anything much better than giving away service for free (imagine!).”
The Sprint move is actually sensible because they have far more capacity most places than they can sell. They have ~60 MHz of spectrum unused in most of the U.S., enough to more than duplicate Verizon’s network. They are going to Gig LTE in 2017, a doubling or tripling of capacity, and look to be the first to massive MIMO in the U.S., which is raising capacity 3X to 10X in Asia.