Skip to main content

Sprint, Nextel Complete Merger

Sprint and Nextel today announced they had completed their merger after receiving final federal approval earlier this week. The new company, to be known as Sprint Nextel, will begin trading on the NYSE Monday under the symbol S.

The combined company now brings together more than 44 million subscribers, according to a press release. The new business serves a mixture of consumer, business and government customers. Customers using existing services from either former company will continue as is with their current phones, service plans and features.

As far as name branding goes, Sprint Nextel will go to market using the Sprint brand name, with the Nextel name continuing as a product brand.

Editors' Recommendations

Digital Trends Staff
Digital Trends has a simple mission: to help readers easily understand how tech affects the way they live. We are your…
Take-Two completes its massive Zynga acquisition
take two completes acquisition of zynga farmville 3

Take-Two Interactive, the video game publisher that owns Rockstar, 2K, and Private Division, has completed its acquisition of Zynga, the mobile game developer behind the popular Facebook game FarmVille.

On January 10, Take-Two announced it was going to acquire Zynga for $12.7 billion in its effort to expand to the mobile gaming market. On Monday, the company closed the deal without a hitch, successfully merging its gaming library with Zynga's entire library of mobile games that have been downloaded more than 4 billion times, including FarmVille and Words with Friends.

Read more
T-Mobile delays shutdown of Sprint 3G CDMA network
The T-Mobile logo on a smartphone.

Folks using Sprint’s legacy 3G CDMA network may have just won a slight reprieve, with a new report revealing that T-Mobile has pushed back the date of its shutdown by another two months. T-Mobile, which merged with Sprint in 2020, had planned to decommission the aging 3G network on March 31, 2022. However, The T-Mo Report has discovered that the carrier has quietly extended the deadline to May 31, 2022, instead.

The change initially came to light via a post on Reddit, where someone noticed the new date on the website of Softbank, which previously owned Sprint. Although T-Mobile hasn’t made a public announcement, The T-Mo Report confirmed that several Sprint customers with older phones received an email directly from the carrier. Those with phones that can’t use LTE were told that they now have until May 31, 2022, before the Sprint CDMA network shuts down. However, even this date may not be final. A footnote on the Softbank page adds that “there is a possibility that the date of May 31 will be rescheduled in [the] future.”
Sunsetting legacy 3G services
T-Mobile initially wanted to shut down the Sprint 3G network on January 1, 2022, but delayed it to March 31, when its partner, Dish, raised concerns that it didn’t have enough time to migrate its legacy customers over to the Boost Mobile network. When Sprint merged with T-Mobile in 2020, it was required to divest itself of its prepaid services, Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile, which were sold off to Dish to ensure the industry remained competitive. Regulators hoped that Dish could rise from the ashes of Sprint to take over the vacated fourth-place spot on the top carriers list.

Read more
I’ve paid for 5G for more than 2 years and it has been a complete waste of money
iPhone 12 5G announcement

In September 2019, I signed up for a 5G contract on a brand new phone. It was an exciting day as the phone was the original Samsung Galaxy Fold, and I was about to start life with it connected to what was billed as the latest and fastest cellular connection available.

More than two years later, I now know one of these two technologies would reveal itself to be exciting, enjoyable, and beneficial, while the other would turn out to be a massive waste of time and money.

Read more