SK Telecom in talks to purchase Sprint Nextel?
By Sean Cooper 
posted Jul 26th 2007 5:20PM
posted Jul 26th 2007 5:20PM
Well this should shake up the market a tad, Korea's monster provider is purportedly in talks to acquire Sprint Nextel. No details have been released yet -- nor any solid confirmation from either side -- but we're seeing it and hearing it all over this morning. It would indeed be interesting to see Korea's largest carrier get into the market over here -- well, aside from Helio -- if only so we can get at some of those slick, slick, Korean handsets. It seems that Telecom mergers are the new black, with Bell Canada and Telus' attempt eventually falling off the rails, we'll see how SK Telecom and Sprint get along.
That'd be pretty awesome if they were to buy them out and convert them to HSDPA, which is why SK Telecom is doing in South Korea.
You have no idea what you are talking about do you...
This is a STUPID idea. We dont need nor want more foreign companies owning important telecommunications companies in the US. Especially coutires that may flip the hell out politically.
Why would they flip the hell out? It's South Korea not the evil and completely crazy North. They actually are far more developed in wireless telecom than we are. More wireless broadband than we have wired broadband.
Sprint Motorola firmware + SKT Java VM = Match made in Hell
maybe, sprint will be rebranded to Helio
lmao love the mock up logo
hmmm... rumors rumors rumors... heard this one like 2 weeks ago. apparently sprint is neither confirming nor denying anything about being bought out by this smaller company. but some kind of investment in sprint by sk may turn out good overall... esp. in the development of wimax and more advanced handsets. only time will tell...
SK Telecom may not necessarily be smaller. For accounting purposes many large Korean conglomerates split up into smaller companies. That's why Samsung's Korean phones are branded Anycall- that's separate from their othe businesses. So SK Telecom may be bigger than Sprint- we just have to see what other companies are part of it (or what it's a part of).
That would be a dream come true if SKT would buy Sprint and convert to GSM/UMTS. This country could definitely use more GSM operators. Two nationwide ones is not enough.
No clue what gives you this idea. SK Telecom operates a CDMA network in South Korea. That and network infrastructure isn't the kind of thing that suddenly changes overnight, especially with millions of deployed Sprint CMDA handsets.
I read that SK Telecom said a report claiming the company is trying to buy Sprint Nextel is not true. Recently, SK Telecom has pursued efforts to expand overseas into China, Vietnam and the United States, where it has acquired around 100,000 customers in the since its U.S. launch in May 2006.
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/58237.html
Satur9ine,
I'm just commenting to the first post. If you look at gsmworld.com SK it shows that SK Telecom also operates UMTS 2100. I don't know how extensive it is (or if it's even deployed commercially). SKT's website also mentions HSDPA so they must have some kind of services within that technology. And as far as the CDMA-UMTS conversion... I know it's not a matter of simply flipping the switch but even though I do not know the full technicalities behind network hardware I don't think it would be as big of a deal to switch from CDMA to UMTS (which as You know is based on a flavour of CDMA...W-CDMA) as it would be from CDMA to just basic GSM (which again is based on TDMA)
satur9ine
SK has deployed full 3G HSDPA natiwide service in south korea
but they still have CDMA EVDO cause there are still alot of people who use old CDMA phones.. it will take some time for 20 million people to switch..you know..
Holy Crap. That's going to be revolutionary O_O
How about Sprint Nextel to aquire SK Telecom! Now that's a smart move!!!!!!!!!!!