Sprint Nextel has long been mired in a distant third place in the race for dominance in the cell-phone-carrier market, losing more than $41 billion over the past five years alone. Part of the firm’s problem has been its lack of resources to build out and improve its network, causing it to fall further behind rivals Verizon and AT&T. Enter Japanese telecom conglomerate Softbank, which announced a plan in October to buy a 70% stake in Sprint Nextel for roughly $20 billion, promising that $8 billion of that sum will go toward capital investment. Sprint knows very well that large mergers don’t always go as planned, as evidenced by its own widely panned acquisition of Nextel in 2005. But if Sprint has a chance to break the duopoly of Verizon and AT&T, it may just be the deep pockets of Softbank that help it achieve that goal.