In football parlance appropriate to a week filled with college bowl games, Softbank founder Masayoshi Son, saw a terrific hole in the front line of American telecom and rushed right through. Son also saw a broad swath of U.S. spectrum controlled by Clearwire just ripe for plucking at a bargain basement price. It's the same 2.5 Ghz on which he offers a service in Japan that is blindingly fast compared to anything now offered by U.S. carriers. He saw a duopoly and he saw an FCC that wants a strong third competitor in the U.S. marketplace. He saw a weak ill-managed Sprint at a price decimated by Sprint's own management while it was trying last year to push Clearwire into bankruptcy and trashed its own stock in the process. And, Son also saw a huge block of spectrum that ATT and Verizon would love to have if anti competitive forces weren't at work here preventing them from acquiring it.
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