cross pond high tech

A $20 billion deal....expected to be announced Monday morning and while certain details are still being worked out, the boards of both companies have signed off on a transaction under which Softbank will buy $8 billion worth of shares directly from Sprint [S 5.73 -0.03 (-0.52%) ] and tender for another $12 billion worth of the shares from existing holders.

The price of the tender offer is $7.30 a share, a large premium to Sprint's current price. Given the deal's structure, it will not require a shareholder vote.

T-Mobile USA subscribers with smartphones capable of accessing the carrier's HSPA+ 42 Mbps network consume an average of 1.3 GB per month. The figure is almost double the 760 MB per month that T-Mobile said its overall smartphone user base consumes, and it highlights the fact that users generally consume more mobile data if they have access to a faster network.

Click here for Ray's full presentation. (PDF)

According to Chetan Sharma Consulting, roughly 30 percent of all U.S. smartphone users download more than 1 GB of data per month.

T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray disclosed the carrier's figures during a presentation at the NGMN conference in San Francisco. Ray also said that video accounts for almost 50 percent of T-Mobile's overall HSPA network traffic.

Currently, T-Mobile offers an HSPA+42 network covering 184 million POPs in 185 markets, and its HSPA+21 network covers around 220 million POPs. The carrier advertises the network as "America's largest" that provides "4G" speeds. Indeed, independent tests have shown that T-Mobile's HSPA+ 42 network offers download speeds of around 8 Mbps, similar to what Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ) provides via its LTE network.