We think Sprint and Dish's bids for Clearwire are insufficient.
Like many others we wrote an analysis of Dish's Clearwire bid as if it was Sprint's adversary. Sprint's press release certainly seemed adversarial.
While Dish was pleading for its spectrum at the FCC, Sprint took $114 MM of Dish's money to settle spectrum issues. Within a few weeks Sprint invented some new ones. The result of pressing on these new issues was that Dish effectively lost about 1/8 of its spectrum. By our estimate, this translates to a little less than $1.0B. Charlie Ergen, Dish's CEO, is not likely to forget what Sprint cost his company.
Sprint though, may now regret its many statements castigating Dish's bid. After all $3.30 is not that far from Sprint's $2.97. If nothing else Sprint could affirm Dish's offer while striking a deal to host Dish's spectrum. Sprint may have served itself better by praising some of Dish's bid than castigating all of it.
Disclosure: I am long S, CLWR.