Sprint had outdated technology w.r.t their infrastructure and cell towers, so an outside acquirer didn’t make as much sense. It needed an existing player with more advanced infrastructure to take on the customer base, or a large investment in upgrading it’s own infrastructure.

Pretty much this. Sprint bet the farm several times on ultimately dead-end tech (CDMA, WiMAX) and were too focused on other things to get ahead of technical evolution. They ended up saddled with debt by the end of it, which hampered any ability to actually upgrade their networks (another poster already pointed out the technical issues with running LTE without UMTS). By the time of the merger, the only things of any value they had was the spectrum and customer base to be moved over.

An external acquirer would almost have to build from scratch after absorbing all the legacy costs and run the risk of inheriting Sprint's bad business decision culture or spending an enormous sum building out a new team. Of course, they'd still have to support the old and new setups at the same time for awhile as the new stuff was built out. The ROI would have been decades at best.

With a merger with another telecom, people can be migrated over already existing infrastructure (with some upgrades to deal with new traffic) and have sprint's old spectrum slowly merged into the existing infra.

I'm oversimplifying of course, but one gets the idea.

By the time they merged with T-Mobile, they had a fully modern LTE network - I know because I helped to deploy it.

That never would have happened without Softbank buying them however.

In an infinite universe of possibilities, you're right: a failing brand with a household name being acquired by a competitor is not the only possible outcome.

But it is historically far and away the most likely one.

Isn't that circular reasoning? Regulators have to allow the merger because other outcomes are unlikely, but they are unlikely because regulators always allow the merger. If the merger is blocked, the probability of that outcome falls to 0, and the others' increase, no?

You're assuming anybody else would have wanted to acquire a debt-laden company with an enormous infrastructure deficit as they mismanaged the move to 4/5g. Sprint essentially was only valuable to a company with a better LTE/5G network already in existence that users could me moved to and then Sprint's old spectrum repurposed. Anyone else would have been left with many tens of billions in network upgrade costs.

If the merger was blocked and no one else wanted to buy it whole, then their assets would get sold off and the proceeds divied up by creditors (and if anything was left after that, to shareholders), same as any other company. Why is this an unthinkable scenario? There would have been some market-clearing price for the Sprint brand name and CDMA network (possibly separately, or even the network itself parted out) and even if that price was zero, then it was the shareholders (and possibly creditors) who should have taken the bath, not the entire phone-using public.

Allowing an anti-competitive merger simply because the alternatives for Sprint shareholders were bad is a bailout by any other name.

The sprint shareholders already took a bath going from over $80/share in 2000 to $5. Hard bankruptcy and selling off its network would have been disruptive to their remaining customers, more complex/expensive to unwind (causing more of the money to go lawyers), and would still result in 1 less major carrier, resulting in essentially the same thing. The results would have most likely been most Sprint customers eventually being part of the other carriers anyways. If there was a market clearing price for sprint, a private equity firm would have snapped it up - that didn't happen because there was too much debt to go on as its own entity.

Could things have been done differently? Sure. A condition of the merger could have been guaranteeing MVNO access or selling off a portion of the spectrum (maybe that happened).

But T-Mobile, combined with Sprint, went from being a distant competitor in subscriber numbers competitive. If sprint was "sold off" separately, T-mobile would most likely eventually run out of steam and end up like Sprint. They just wouldn't have the number of subscribers to amortize costs down the way AT&T and Verizon could.

Keeping struggling, small players going somehow would likely of only delayed the inevitable.

I have to say I don't actually care or know very much about the merger, but the fact remains that there were other possible outcomes than the merger going through as it did. If regulators had blocked the merger, one of those would have happened instead. AFAICT there is no way to refute this argument. Possible futures at that point in time were are F_1 through F_n. If we had eliminated F_1, we would instead have F_2 through F_n. Maybe F_2 through F_n all entail a complete collapse of the US and world economy, or maybe they would have better outcomes. I don't know, but one of them WOULD have happened.

Yes, obviously "something" else would have happened had regulators blocked the merger - I don't know why you're hyper-focusing on that. My point is that it would almost certainly have been an even worse outcome for everybody involved.

Unless you can show me how a cellular company that and backed itself into a technological dead end (and built up enormous debt during said process that sapped most of the money it earned to service) and needed quite possibly multi-tens of billions to even catch up to the others, you're not really adding to any conversation. If it was possible, business-people with more money and brains than either of us would have leapt at the opportunity.

The only alternative I can possibly think of is taxpayers ponying up - but that would in the end mean that consumers would "pay" indirectly, to say nothing of the moral hazard costs of government bailing out private businesses (works so well in the financial industry, doesn't it?).

Sorry, I thought we were just talking about what we were taking about. Have a good day.

To be honest, I truly do not know all possible ends, as I'm not an oracle. Based on the information I had at the time, I felt that this merger was the best option out of all of the ones being explored at the time. I'm happy to have been wrong about this if they went a different direction and it worked out better, but history is history.