Dish offers $25.5B for Sprint Nextel

Associated Press

NEW YORK

Dish Network Corp. is trying to snag U.S. wireless carrier Sprint Nextel away from a Japanese suitor, the latest sign that satellite dishes are losing their relevance in the age of cellphones that play everything from YouTube videos to live TV.

Dish offered $25.5 billion in cash and stock Monday for Sprint, which Dish says beats an offer from Japan’s Softbank Corp.

If the Dish deal goes through, it would create a unique combination of pay-TV and wireless operator. Dish’s hope is that it would lure customers with the promise of a TV service that they can take with them out of the house, on their phones. It already has broken ranks with the pay-TV industry by providing a set-top box that can send recorded shows to iPads.

“You want to be in your home with video, broadband and data and voice, and you want to be outside your home with those same things,” said Charlie Ergen, Dish’s executive chairman. “And while the cable industry does a really good job in your home, and the current wireless industry does a really good job outside your home, there’s really no one company on a national scale that puts it all together. The new Dish-Sprint will do that.”

Sprint Nextel Corp.’s stock jumped on the news, as investors anticipated a bidding war between Dish and Softbank. Sprint had accepted the Softbank offer and was expecting to close on it this summer. Sprint, the country’s third-largest cellphone carrier, said it would evaluate Dish’s offer.