That’s not all cash, of course, but quite a bit of it actually is. The bid consists of $17.3 billion in cash and $8.2 billion in stock. This is a bigger bid than the $20.5 billion that Softbank announced it would be willing to offer for a 70% stake in Sprint. Based on these figures, Dish would effectively be paying $4.76 per share for Sprint, which is still lower than the $6.22 at which the stock closed on Friday evening.

The goal is to get some cross-promotion action going on. Dish Network only has a customer base of 14.2 million people, but Sprint has 47.5 million subscribers. If Dish is able to convert some of those Sprint customers away from their current TV providers and over to Dish instead, they come out as quite the winner. Of course, they’d have no problem promoting Sprint to their existing Dish subscribers, too. This kind of cross-promotion is nothing new.

What’s interesting is that whether or not Dish is able to successfully acquire Sprint, it will likely still want to get its beak wet in the wireless business. Dish has already expressed interest in merging with T-Mobile USA and it also had a look at Clearwire. And let’s not forget that Dish owns 40MHz of spectrum in the 2GHz band with no network to run it on.

[Source]

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The total deal sounds like it is worth $39 billion with about $25 billion coming in way of cash and the remaining $14 billion in company stock. That gives Deutsche Telekom, the current parent company of T-Mobile USA, about an eight percent stake in the now significantly larger AT&T. Combined, they expect to earn nearly $80 billion per year.

Forgetting for a moment about the convoluted past of AT&T (being split up only to recombine again), we are left asking what is going to happen to the two GSM networks. T-Mobile uses AWS 1700 bands for its 3G service and AT&T does not. Based on some comments on HoFo, it sounds reasonable that the bigger firm will essentially combine the two 3G networks into a mega-network, not unlike what Rogers did when it acquired Fido. This should help with the already congested AT&T network.

Also, it will create pressure on manufacturers to make more pentaband chips, which may or may not be good for consumers. It does help for Canadian importers, though, since you can import one phone and have it work on both Wind/Mobilicity and Rogers/Telus/Bell. And let’s not forget about their LTE plans moving forward too.

It’ll be interesting to see how the federal governing bodies rule on this deal. Could we see a mega-AT&T only to see it split up (again)… only to see it recombine (again). Makes you think of T-1000, doesn’t it?

The post AT&T to Buy T-Mobile, Creating Pentaband Network? appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

By merging, Toshiba and Fujitsu could shave significant costs out of developing phones. The increased level of consolidation would make them more efficient, making it easier to make it to market with newer technologies.

This follows in the footsteps of other Japanese handset makers. Three years ago, there were ten. A successful Fujitsu-Toshiba merger would wittle that down to four, joining the merged ranks of NEC-Hitachi-Casio, for instance.

Don’t expect Fujitsu-Toshiba (or Toshiba-Fujitsu) to become monumentally huge, however, as Japanese makers only have a combined three percent global market share.

The post Toshiba and Fujitsu to merge mobile divisions? appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

As such, there are rumors going around that Palm is available for sale and it already has two very interested suitors. Even though these acquisition rumors are just that — rumors — the Palm stock price shot up about 10% today based on the news.

As it stands, Palm is worth about $1 billion, but a bidding war could increase that price. From what we hear, both Lenovo and HTC are interested in purchasing Palm, since the acquisition could bode well for their respective smartphone businesses.

HTC could do very well by buying Palm, not only to get its hands on webOS, but also all of those smartphone and other device patents that Palm holds, which could help with HTC’s legal battle against Apple.

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From what I can gather, the two brands will continue to operate semi-independently, but a number of redundant jobs are being removed. More specifically, the Alltel office in Little Rock is getting some major slashing. Verizon has cut an unspecified number of corporate positions at that office.

The Alltel people getting the pink slip would be coming from departments like finance, legal, and marketing. This is becuase Verizon already has their own people doing that kind of thing. So, what becomes of these poor laid off (fired?) individuals?

All is not lost. It’s not like Verizon is going to boot these people onto the street without a place to go. Instead, Verizon is offering them entry-level positions in the call center. Right, because handling all the legal things for Alltel pays exactly the same as listening to Verizon customer complaints, right?

More importantly, what will become of poor Chad?

Source: BGR

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