10 | Industry Voices — Moore: A farewell to Sprint | ----------- | |
FierceWireless: Wireless | 2020-08-01 08:00 | ????0? | |
Sprint traces its origins to the founding of Brown Telephone Company – a local phone company – in Kansas in 1899 and to the communication unit of the Southern Pacific Railroad, which used railroad rights-of-way to compete in the long distance market against AT&T. A nationwide fiber network was built, and Sprint Corporation was founded in 1987 as a combined local phone company and long distance provider. Some may recall actress Candice Bergen appearing as “The Dime Lady” in Sprint commercials during the 1990s, pitching long distance at 10 cents per minute, as seen here.Between the third quarter of 2007 and the third quarter of 2010, Sprint lost postpaid subscribers in every quarter. It was ugly. Dan Hesse was Sprint CEO during 2007-14. In quarterly employee meetings, Hesse used to liken Sprint to a hospital patient, recovering from a deadly disease. Signs of improvement were there, including a return to customer growth and a marked improvement in customer care rankings.However, during 2013-14, Sprint undertook an overhaul of its network, dubbed Network Vision. It did not go well. During 2013 and the first half of 2014, Sprint lost more than 3 million customers, with most of these being Nextel customers, as detailed by Fierce Wireless in August 2015. I recall hearing about customers lining up at Sprint stores to switch to other carriers. The iDEN network was shut down in mid-2013 and this had issues as well. Sprint’s replacement CDMA-based push-to-talk solution was excellent, but it was delivered via mid-band spectrum, which lacked the excellent propagation qualities of Nextel’s low-band 850 MHz spectrum. Some customers no longer got an adequate signal and hit the door.Japan-based SoftBank acquired Sprint in July 2013, and in 2014, Hesse was replaced as CEO by Marcelo Claure, the founder of wireless services company Brightstar. Claure also attempted a turnaround, promising switchers 50% off competitor rates for switching. Sprint gained retail space at 1,400 RadioShack stores and launched Direct2You, an effort at home delivery of cellphones. In 2016, former Verizon pitchman Paul Marcarelli was brought on board, saying he had switched to Sprint, and he dominated advertising during Sprint’s last four years.Perhaps the fatal blow was struck in August 2016. T-Mobile announced that it was completely focused on unlimited data plans. The following winter, Verizon and AT&T moved to focus on unlimited data plans as well. Unfortunately, unlimited data had been Sprint’s only real point of differentiation. In Sprint’s twilight years, the carrier could only focus on discounting, promising savings versus competitors. Amid mounting debt, this did not work out well. -- ???????? | |||
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