An acquisition by Deutsche Telekom, helped by the strength of the euro over the U.S. dollar, would leapfrog AT&T and Verizon Wireless and create the largest cell phone service provider in the United States. The challenge for T-Mobile would be to sort out the various wireless standards utilized by the different providers. T-Mobile uses the GSM standard while Sprint uses CDMA and Nextel iDEN.

Sprint has been struggling to integrate Nextel into its network and recently wrote nearly $30 billion off of its $35 billion acquisition price of Nextel.

Meanwhile, Sprint has been talking with its on-again, off-again partner Clearwire about deploying WiMax; also reported to be talking about joining the WiMax combine at different times are Comcast, Intel, and Time Warner.

The Wall Street Journal said Deutsche Telekom has become more interested in Sprint as the dollar weakens against the euro and as Sprint's stock has plunged. The acquisition speculation, however, drove Sprint up in early trading Monday morning.

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Sprint already has CDMA/GSM Devices. I have purchased some of their Dual Service Blackberry Devices and they work well. So Sprint already has the backbone support to make the merger work.

My company cellphone is an AT&T. But my personal family account is Sprint. I have been happy with their service and will be happy to see something that will make them a strong competitor again.

Posted by Reidan, Wednesday, May. 7th, 2008

Technolgy wise, I don't know if this makes any sense to me. In the end, how would they integrate IDN, CDMA, and GSM? I imagine they would have to drop down to one standard sooner or later.

Posted by brat1475, Tuesday, May. 6th, 2008