December 10, 2004 - Mergers and acquisitions are the hottest trend in wireless right now. Sorrent buys Macrospace. InfoSpace buys IOMO. But this potential buy-out tops those. According to the Wall Street Journal, Sprint and Nextel are in merger talks that, if successful, would make the new carrier the third-largest carrier in America.
This isn't the first big carrier merger. Cingular recently bought AT&T; Wireless, catapulting its past Verzion Wireless to be the largest carrier in America. That deal was worth $41 billion. The Sprint-Nextel merger is more in the $30 billion neighborhood.
The merger talk comes right after Sprint's announcement of 3G equipment from Lucent, Motorola, and Nortel. If Sprint does launch a 3G network, that puts it significantly ahead of Nextel's current network capabilities. Nextel still operates a good deal of its network on 800MHz frequencies -- which are far lower than the 1.9 GHz frequencies used by most carriers.
The merger talk comes right after Sprint's announcement of 3G equipment from Lucent, Motorola, and Nortel. If Sprint does launch a 3G network, that puts it significantly ahead of Nextel's current network capabilities. Nextel still operates a good deal of its network on 800MHz frequencies -- which are far lower than the 1.9 GHz frequencies used by most carriers.
