As you may have noticed, I'm very against the proposed merger of Sprint with T-Mobile. Just this morning, I was mulling over how it will probably cost tens of thousands of jobs, as the two companies would eliminate duplicate retail sales and support positions and shorten their joint product lines as they combine them into one.

But that's not the topic of the day. I wanted to show you this map from Mosaik Solutions, which makes awesome mobile network maps. It illustrates something I've been saying all along: that if you're looking for a merger to expand Sprint's or T-Mobile's coverage, you're out of luck, as the networks are basically duplicative. Yes, a merger means that the combined company would probably kill off Sprint's CDMA network anyway, but existing network builds still matter, as Sprint's Network Vision towers are designed to be switched over to LTE anyway, and building out into fresh new areas usually means long, expensive permitting and land acquisition processes.

What strikes me here is how much white space there is in this map, even in moderately populated areas. Why does neither carrier cover the top half of Pennsylvania or much of the Southern Tier of New York? They own spectrum there. Although as Sarah Reedy points out in Light Reading, Sprint's coverage position isn't as bad as it looks here, as the company has roaming agreements with plenty of rural carriers in those white areas.

The pro-merger argument, of course, is that a combined company would have more money to build out into more areas. That is, of course, true. Larger companies often have more money. But larger companies with fewer competitors also tend to fell less urgency to spend that money to compete. And claims that mergers are necessary for expansion are often lies: look at how AT&T insisted that it could only cover 80 percent of Americans with LTE unless it merged with T-Mobile, and then came up with a plan to cover 97 percent after the merger failed.

We should look at this map whenever the two companies start talking about network synergies. If a merged Sprint/T-Mobile wants to become a truly national carrier, it'll have a lot of work to do.

Further Reading