Clearwire Board Now Recommends Sprint Buyout Offer

Sprint has raised its buyout offer for Clearwire Corp to $5 per share, causing the board to reverse course again, and recommend that shareholders accept the Sprint offer, after previously recommending support for the Dish Network offer of $4.40 a share. 

In addition to reversing course again, Clearwire also postponed a June 24 shareholder vote until July 8, meaning there is yet more time for more developments in the see-saw battle between Sprint and Dish Network for control of Clearwire and its spectrum. 

As fixated as investors might be on the outcome both of the SoftBank and Clearwire acquisition efforts, some might say it is time for the deals to be finalized, so the eventual victors can try and gain some traction in a U.S. mobile market that Verizon and AT&T simply dominate. 

And there are precious few new accounts to be activated in the U.S. market. In the first quarter of 2013, 1.1 million net new mobile connections were activated, a decline of 60 percent, year over year. But most of those net additions were of the prepaid variety.

U.S. operators added 200,000 postpaid subs and 1.2 million total net new subscribers. Verizon got 720,000 of the net adds. AT&T got 291,000 and T-Mobile added 5,000.

So between them, Verizon and AT&T accounted for 86 percent of the net adds.  

On top of that, Verizon and AT&T have at least 66 percent share of the U.S. mobile market, by customers.