Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We hope you enjoy it!
And without further ado:
In case you are not aware, Charlie Ergen really, really, really wants to get into the wireless business. I am not just talking about opening up a kiosk at the local mall so he can sell some Hello Kitty iPhone cases. I am talking he wants to be all-up-in-it.
That unhealthy desire ratcheted up a notch this week when Ergen thrust a $25.5 billion offer to acquire Sprint Nextel into the limelight. This, of course, followed his previous – and I am assuming still valid offer – to buy Clearwire for a few billion dollars and his semi-successful fight with the Federal Communications Commission to re-use some satellite spectrum for terrestrial service. These are not things done by someone who is just sorta-interested in wireless. This comes from a person who may need an intervention, or maybe Ergen has just been watching one too many Rodney Dangerfield movies where the affable rich guy goes around throwing money for our enjoyment.
Either way, the entertainment value of these antics seem to be in direct proportion to the half-crazed manner in which billions of dollars are being thrown about. And when it comes to entertainment, Ergen’s latest move propelled the rash of mergers and acquisitions in the mobile space from your basic, afternoon soap opera to a full-blown, prime-time saga that you can’t not watch. Go ahead, I dare you.
Even better is that all of this is over Sprint Nextel, which perhaps is finally shedding the hands-off stigma it acquired when Sprint decided it just had to have Nextel for, oh, I don’t know … all the money in the world. And, maybe people have finally forgotten about that whole WiMAX thing. Wait … someone thought it was a good idea to throw money at a WiMAX deployment?
I think I have a new marketing slogan for Sprint Nextel:
“Sure, we’ve made some mistakes in the past, but look how sexy we are now!”
Further spicing up the proceedings were reports that Verizon Wireless has put in an attempt to acquire some of Clearwire’s 2.5 GHz spectrum, because … why not? All this whole sorted mess was missing was another multi-billion-dollar company looking to throw around some of those billions. Thanks Verizon Wireless!
Don’t get me wrong. These sort-of theatrics are golden and are as good for reporters as Dan Quayle was for late-night talk shows. Comedy gold!
Let’s just hope that these billionaires never lose their sense of adventure or for that matter come to their senses.
OK, enough of that.
Thanks for checking out this week’s Worst of the Week column. And now for some extras:
–Juniper Research finally put all this “data explosion” talk into words I could understand when it noted recently that by 2017, mobile devices would generate data traffic equivalent to “42 quadrillion tweets.” A-ha! Now I get it. For some reason I was expecting the amount of data traffic generated by mobile devices in 2017 would be the equivalent to 429 circus bears riding unicycles.
–Finally, Huawei’s desire to garner a greater foothold in the device space looks to be taking on a certain demographic turn as the Chinese vendor announced recently that it would be sponsoring the “highly-anticipated Jonas Brothers Tour.” That’s right; “highly-anticipated” and “Jonas Brothers” were mentioned in the same sentence and that sentence was not from a 9-year-old girl.
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