In the middle of 2013, the then Sprint-Nextel made a major move. They cut the Nextel iDEN network down, and removed any aspect of Nextel from the company. In this move, Sprint lost millions of subscribers, and they are now looking as to just how they will get back into the game. There have been rumors floating around for about the last month or so that Sprint may be looking to bring back the Nextel brand in an effort to lure enterprise customers back to them. A Sprint spokesman, John Votava, killed these rumors off when he told TechCrunch that “there is no plan to bring back the Nextel brand.”
Sprint’s new majority owner, SoftBank, is a strong believer in the power of the enterprise business, and feels that it is a critical point that Sprint needs to address as time progresses. SoftBank and Sprint have some uncanny similarities. SoftBank used to be the number three operator in its home markets that went through a technology transition. SoftBank looks to alter Sprint’s approach in order to appeal to as many people as possible, including the enterprise markets. The biggest innovation that they are suggesting is Sprint Spark, which is the up and coming tri-band LTE service that is in its infant stages as of now. Spark will combine their 800MHz, 1.9GHz, and 2.5GHz LTE spectrum. This service looks to provide very, very fast speeds, though it remains to be seen just how fast they will be in a real life situation. While they project that it will reach around 50-60 Mbps, it remains to be seen just how well it will actually do. Sprint is projecting that they will cover over 250 million people with their LTE coverage by the middle portion of this year.
Since Sprint closed their Nextel iDEN network, which used the 800MHz spectrum, they can now use that to improve coverage. Even though Sprint is current in third place in the mobile carrier market, they are remaining optimistic. What they are hoping for is the fact that they have a very large ‘buffer zone’ for handling increasing mobile traffic, while their competition, according to Sprint, does not. Being a former Sprint customer, I can say that I was not pleased with their service at all, and is why I decided to switch to T-Mobile. However, as I say in most of my articles regarding an innovation or advancement, all I can hope is that Sprint does in fact succeed in improving their networks, and that through the wonders of capitalism we get better deals for better services. Do you have any thoughts on the matter? Should Sprint leave Nextel behind it, as they clearly intend to do? Do you think Sprint will be successful with its plans? Let us know below!
Source: FierceWireless