Many of the problems started before the merger. The culprit of many of the network problems that were experienced can be placed squarely on boost taking off. Boost went beyond any expectations and pulled the network down. The IDEN system just couldn't handle the load and then rebanding was just around the corner as that hit. Tim knew he had to do something as the price of both of those issues was just enormous so he found an idiot to buy what was a network running into a wall. I'm not saying the network or IDEN was bad it just had some huge hurdles and costs to overcome and Nextel and Tim didn't want to deal with it. Look at all the money that has been spent moving everything around and rebanding still isn't done. It was a mess in the making for a long time and Sprint just got caught up in it. Sprint was already heading downhill when the merger took place and this just accelerated things.