How you know you’re an industry nerd: You eagerly await the day that MetroPCS and Leap Wirless, parent company of Cricket Communications, merge. Everyone in the industry basically knows it is inevitable; they provide very similar services at similar prices, and have few, if any, overlapping markets. Combining forces would help fuel expansion and offer unlimited prepaid calling to more parts of the country. And, gosh darn it, it’s high time they have service in our area. Well, that might not be a stretch of an idea. According to socialTECH.com, Leap has received a proposal from Metro. Few details are currently available, though we know it’s a stock-for-stock merger worth about $5.5 billion. Of course, we don’t know what that technically means, but from what we’ve read it seems like a reasonable proposal. A great quote on the proposal from MetroPCS: the merger would provide the companies with “meaningful operating cost savings through a combination of market-level operating efficiencies and corporate overhead reductions.” Nice. Financial outlets like Bloomberg and CNN Money have been covering Metro and Leap a lot lately, so we can expect to see more detailed reports there during the course of the day. But we’ll credit socialTECH for the initial story, since we saw it there first. [socialTECH.com]]>
