As a customer of one of their cheaper prepaid brands who can barely avoid it, I vote for lowering prices with Softbank, if that's the choice.
However, I am not sure it's a question of directly lowering prices with Softbank versus offering more features with Dish. I think it's a question of Softbank expanding infrastructure, improving infrastructure, and having a stronger more competitive cell phone network that increases overall competition in the market (indirectly lowering prices, perhaps) versus Dish taking over, being financially unable to make those infrastructure expansions and improvements, while using large chunks of bandwidth for television purposes, further clogging an already clogged network to the point where it's unusable and collapses under it's own weight, leaving us with an even less competitive cell phone market place.
If Dish wants to get involved in the cell phone business, great, build some towers. Give us five main networks backbones plus all the small companies that rent from them, instead of what would ultimately wind up being only 3 if Dish buys Sprint and sinks it. Sprint also has many of the larger differently branded prepaid carriers like Boost and Virgin Mobile on their network right now. You let Verizon and ATT have a duopoly over most of the country and watch what happens to prices and service. T-Mobile will just have to price things a little below them and will do fine. If we don't want to take a step backwards and take cell phones away from a lot of people, we need someone who is going to keep improving an expanding Sprint and it's subsidaries and partners
as a cellular service company, and that's Softbank.
Charlie has said he believes the pay TV business as it exists today is failing, and he's attempting to buy up things at random in a desperate bid to not be primary a pay TV company when the you know what hits the fan. That may be in his best interest, but it's not necessarily in anyone else's. Sprint is at a point where it can either step up and start competing effectively with Verizon and ATT, or it can collapse into irrelevancy and possibly bankruptcy. I think a Dish acquisition puts it on the latter road, at least as a cell company. Charlie is likely mainly buying it for spectrum he can use to offer home TV and Internet and will start cutting off third-party cell carriers and raising rates on the owned brands to clear space. It's in America's best interest to have the Japanese company own Sprint, ironically.
Also, I think Sprint employees will be happier working for Softbank. Dish employee surveys show very low job satisfaction levels. If I worked for Sprint and a Dish deal went through, I'd put my resume online the same day hoping to bolt before things got bad.
