Following the recent appointment of Dan Hesse as CEO, Sprint Nextel is considering laying off a few thousand of its 60,000 total employees, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The carrier, which has suffered through customer defections and ongoing corporate strife related to the Sprint Nextel merger, cut about 5000 jobs last […]
The cost of industry consolidation over the last few years was not just limited to the deal prices quoted to Wall Street. 2007 was the year that the telecom began to deal with the ongoing cost of consolidation, such as technological and corporate integration. The most obvious example at the carrier level was Sprint Nextel’s […]
The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times both reported that Sprint Nextel had rejected a $5 billion investment offer from South Korea’s SK Telecom and Providence Equity Partners. That bid also included the promise of former Nextel Chairman and CEO Tim Donahue being installed as CEO of Sprint Nextel. In today’s economic […]
Amazon has launched an eBook device, called the Kindle, that makes use of EV-DO for over-the-air (OTA) downloads. The Kindle Store will initially offer more than 90,000 books, including nearly all of the current New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases, for $9.99. Monthly newspaper subscriptions cost anywhere from $5.99 to $14.99 per month […]
According to a report over at TMCnet, rumor has it that Google is mulling whether to acquire Sprint Nextel, which Barron’s evaluates at $67 billion in terms of market cap and debt (but without acquisition premium). The rumors reportedly gathered some momentum late last week when Sprint announced plans not to work with Clearwire on […]
Sprint Nextel has agreed to give departing subscribers the means to unlock their phones for use on competitors’ networks, as part of a proposed class-action settlement. The California suit accused the company of anti-competitive practices like forcing a customer to buy a new phone when switching carriers. A similar suit in Palm Beach County, Fla. […]
Embarq, the independent telco spun off from Sprint Nextel last year, acknowledged it was beginning to offer voluntary separation packages to some employees. The company recently consolidated two call centers and cut about 170 jobs. It hasn’t announced other cuts, but it appears that Embarq is trying to be proactive about reducing costs, as the […]
Sprint Nextel interim CEO Paul Saleh admitted that the company has lost focus but isn’t about to scale back its WiMAX plans–at least as it relates to rolling out Baltimore/Washington D.C. and Chicago by year-end. Saleh told The Washington Post that the company will be working on simplifying the business as well as improving customer […]
Vonage agreed this morning to pay Sprint Nextel $80 million to settle a patent dispute. A federal court in Kansas city awarded Sprint $69.5 million in damages to cover the revenues Vonage generated with the violated patents. The $80 million settlement is said to cover past and future use of the 100 or so patents […]
Sprint Nextel’s Chief Executive Gary Forsee is feeling pressure from activist investor Ralph Whitworth who told The Wall Street Journal that investors have lost confidence in the leader.
Since gaining a stake in Sprint earlier this year, Whitworth has rattled the cage with management regarding its investments in WiMAX as well as what he calls poor […]
