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It’s unlikely “Swan” and “Loop Telecom” would ever be “penalized heavily”. Tata and Ambani, even though being summoned by PAC, would be asked to “pay up the damages”; some crores dealt here and there, permanent stock holdings to some prominent members and post retirement lollies as directors.

It transpires that Swan was a front for Reliance and Loop for Essar. Indeed, the idea was to bid for scarce spectrum, their holdings held in off shore accounts and laundered.

It is a dirty world indeed.

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This is equivalent of Vodafone India buying up Loop/Videocon + other smaller players who got in the “telecom business” because they could encash the spectrum deal. It is a basic premise, should not take long to understand.

A lot of “influential idiots” are not happy about it because it spoils their ecosystem. The big network wheelers and dealers would have deal with a giant monolith and they would not be able to get the same “rates” as they would get otherwise.

Its difficult for me to base any comment on the merits of the case since I am not an expert nor US market is the focus. But it is a bad omen for this country to have international players in the country (can anyone give me any reason as to why BSNL cannot be made proactive) and they are messing up with public property.

I agree to an extent that teledensity has improved with entry of private players. Yes, BSNL has been a failure. Its a pathetic useless company to deal with. But at least it’s publicly owned. The point here is that BSNL could have been made to sweat out, be made to work. It wasn’t done. And then, you don’t have a legislative framework to keep the consumer interests paramount. The regulators have their heads up their ass.

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According to a new Bloomberg report, Deutsche Telekom AG has held talks with Sprint about selling T-Mobile and combining the nation’s third and fourth largest wireless operators. That’s really not new, considering Sprint was responding to the same rumors of a T-Mobile merger last Summer, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse at the time suggesting such a deal “makes sense.” According to this new report, the talks have been “on and off,” and a final deal may not be reached. Piggyback this on our exclusive report from earlier today about Sprint letting Lightsquared piggyback on Sprint’s LTE build, and Sprint has been very busy with their Clearwire alternative contingency plans. Bloomberg’s sources frame a Sprint merger or Clearwire spectrum purchases as an either/or proposition:

So, talks have included discussion of Deutsche Telekom owning about 50 percent of a combined T-Mobile USA-Sprint, or T-Mobile continuing on their own using spectrum acquired from Clearwire to fuel further network upgrades. It’s not clear where any of this leaves Clearwire, though you can expect all of this to be sorted out within the next three to six months, and we may have some juicy Clearwire inside information shortly.
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