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from Breakingviews:
MetroPCS owners can forget a standalone option
By Robert Cyran and Jeffrey Goldfarb
The authors are Reuters Breakingviews columnists. The opinions expressed are their own.
MetroPCS owners should forget about a standalone option. Dissident investors John Paulson and Peter Schoenfeld persuaded two proxy services that the cellphone operator is selling out on the cheap to rival T-Mobile USA and that independence is a better option. While the agitating may bring a sweeter bid, MetroPCS is unlikely to prosper or exist for long on its own.
The activists claim - and Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis agree - that the merger short-changes MetroPCS shareholders. They will wind up with just 26 percent of the combined company. An integral part of the evaluation is $1.5 billion MetroPCS raised in 2010 to buy wireless spectrum that has gone unspent.
The cash is being returned to MetroPCS investors as part of the deal. P. Schoenfeld Asset Management argues that deducting this amount before calculating the equity split is unfair since all cellular companies need to buy spectrum. Leave it in, and MetroPCS should get 37 percent, assuming both companies are worth about five times estimated EBITDA.
from India Insight:
Telecom companies woo women with angel stores
(Any opinions expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily of Reuters)
Walk into the Vodafone store in Mumbai's Prabhadevi neighbourhood, and it doesn't look any different from the others across India. It's crowded with customers waiting to pay their bills, lodge complaints and buy new mobile phone connections.
from Expert Zone:
Time to create a holistic mobile ecosystem
(Any opinions expressed here are those of the author, and not those of Thomson Reuters)
Mobile phones have transcended various phases of evolution since the time they began their journey. They have come a long way from being simple feature phones, which were meant for making calls and sending text messages.
from Expert Zone:
India to ring in 2013 in the mobile sector
(Any opinions expressed here are those of the author, and not those of Thomson Reuters)
For many of us in the mobile industry, 2012 has been a year with a lot to celebrate and a lot to be concerned about. Restrictions and regulations are growing. As we all know, that can cut both ways: too much regulation and we might see constraints on growth.
from Breakingviews:
China’s telco suppliers can’t escape spying row
By John Foley
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Earning the trust of Americans is proving a Sisyphean task for Huawei. The Chinese telecom supplier has consistently fought reports of too-close ties to the People’s Liberation Army and undue influence from Beijing. Now a panel of U.S. congressmen has publicly labelled the employee-owned group and its rival ZTE a security threat. True or not, the accusation is a serious blow.
from The Great Debate:
Why your cell phone is ripe for spam texts in 2012
In the late 1970s, the cutting edge of communications technologies was the autodialer, a machine capable of calling up scores of people in one shot, with little human involvement. It was innovative, and annoying. By the early '90s, Congress had had enough. “Computerized calls,” railed South Carolina Democrat Fritz Hollings from the Senate floor, “are the scourge of modern civilization.”
And so, Congress legislated. But the focus was on commercial calls. Mindful of the free flow of speech and – let’s be honest – interested in self-preservation, lawmakers exempted political calls from its Telecommunications Consumer Protection Act. But Congress decided that some phones were too sensitive to get even autodialed political calls: those in hospitals, those designated for emergency purposes – and those in our pockets.
from David Cay Johnston:
Phone service for all, no matter what kind
The guarantee of landline telephone service at almost any address, a legal right many Americans may not even know they have, is quietly being legislated away in our U.S. state capitals.
AT&T and Verizon, the dominant telephone companies, want to end their 99-year-old universal service obligation known as "provider of last resort." They say universal landline service is a costly and unfair anachronism that is no longer justified because of a competitive market for voice services.
from Unstructured Finance:
Phil Falcone’s ray of sunshine
By Matthew Goldstein
Leave it to Phil Falcone to find a glimmer of good news to relay to the beleaguered investors in his Harbinger Capital Partners. A day after U.S. securities regulators threatened to sanction the billionaire hedge fund manger for alleged trading irregularities, Falcone told investors in his roughly $4 billion firm that not all is lost.
In a note emailed to investors the day after Falcone officially learned the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is considering charging him with a number of securities law violations, the former Harvard hockey star told them that nothing the SEC is looking at involves his beloved LightSquared.
from Expert Zone:
Pricing a Gig
(The views expressed in this column are the author's own and do not represent those of Reuters)
How to price a gigabyte of data is a dilemma confronting India's mobile operators as they steadily build up their 3G subscriber bases.
from Unstructured Finance:
Lightsquared loans suffer from interference
By Matthew Goldstein
It looks like the problems that Phil Falcone's upstart wireless network may cause with some airline navigation systems may be impacting the price of the more than $1 billion in high-yield debt LightSquared has sold to hedge funds and mutual funds.
Over the past two weeks, the prevailing market price of LightSquared''s four-year term "junk" loans has slumped to about 95 cents on the dollar. That's still a solid price for the high-yield offering that carries a 12 percent coupon. But it's down considerably from late May, when the loans were fetching as much as 102 cents on the dollar.
