[jdpoole5785]

Bottom line on this thread, it's all speculation until someone makes a move. I'm an Alltel employee and trust me not a corporate kool-aid drinker. Alltel is a debt free company and is moving in the right direction, but we were just bought out by private investment moguls Goldman-Sachs and other various private shareholders.

So when those out there say nobody has the money...someone does.

The reason why it is such a great time for a buyout is because of the 2009 bandwidth auctions from analog TV going bye bye. This is going to make a mad rush because it will allow those who aren't in major cities to enter the market, and those who were shutout of rural areas to enter causing more competition whereas currently the markets are localized to two major providers for any given metro area.

If Sprint's controlling shareholders had any sense at all they would take it private like Alltel, do some damage control, and try to get the hell off of PCS bandwidth.

The likelihood of Sprint merging with T-Mobil is 1/1000000 because it would cost the parent company billions to convert from PCS CDMA to either a dual band, or produce equipment that can bridge GSM and CDMA (ie Blackberry 8830)

More likely "partnerships" AT&T because they're loosing their TDMA network due to FCC mandating Analog turndown and will no longer be able to benefit from CDMA roaming. Verizon because their presense in rural markets is non existant and PCS has a range of appx 200 miles. And finally the lightweight contender Alltel because Sprint has a presence in Chicago, Dallas Ft Worth, Houston, LA...etc...pretty much everywhere we're not.

If Sprint doesn't sell, the WiMax deal better perform phenominally because there are companies with great financial portfolios chomping at the bit to put them in the history books.