No Merger of Sprint and T-Mobile US, but Plenty of Taunts

When Sprint officially announced that it had abandoned its plans to buy T-Mobile, T-Mobile chief executive John Legere took the gloves off on Twitter. “Is Sprint a melting ice cube? Looks like it to me. Join the cool brand now!” “Join T-Mobile now and jump off the Sprint bus before it crashes.”

The tweets reflect not only the reignited competition between the country’s third- and fourth-biggest wireless service providers, but also a peculiar reversal of fortune for each company. T-Mobile, once considered hopelessly behind the competition, has introduced various new pricing plans that have spurred imitation from its bigger rivals. Sprint, despite having long been bigger than T-Mobile, has had to grapple with steady customer losses as it spends billions of dollars to upgrade its network. And with the prospects of a merger now dead, the carrier and its majority owner, the Japanese telecommunications company SoftBank, must forge ahead alone.