The last time Sprint made a major acquisition in the wireless space, it turned out to bean unmitigated disaster for both its own customers and for the company itself. Sprint’s 2005 merger with Nextel was the start of a downward spiral for Sprint that saw it lose millions of wireless subscribers to AT&T and Verizon and that saw it fall far behind in the race to deploy LTE due to its decision to instead use WiMAX as its 4G technology.