Fair & Flexible’s Gone, So Are 5,000 Sprint Employees
We wrote about Sprint discontinuing its Fair & Flexible calling plans for new customers around the first of the year. The move became official Thursday with the announcement of Sprint’s new Power Pack pricing plans. Other than the 7PM night & weekend rate start time, there’s no gimmick for Sprint to woo new customers - nothing like Cingular’s rollover minutes or T-Mobile’s My Faves.
Sprint also announced brutal news this week for its workforce. That workforce will be shrinking by 5,000 this year. It’s part of the hangover from Sprint’s merger with Nextel, which has been drawn out and painful. The biggest challenge has been hanging onto Nextel customers. They’ve been leaving for other carriers because Nextel hasn’t been able to improve service and coverage as quickly as those customers would like.
Nextel has been fighting to keep those customers by introducing “hybrid” phones that allow Nextel customers to access Sprint’s voice network when Nextel’s own network is unavailable. Sprint Nextel will also invest $8.5 billion in 2007 to add more cell sites and build out its WiMax wireless broadband network. Chicago and Washington will be the first cities to get that new technology.
But Wall Street doesn’t like Sprint Nextel’s overall outlook. The problem for any wireless carrier is, once you lose a customer to another carrier, it takes two years for that customer’s contract to expire before you can hope to woo that customer back. It’ll take Sprint $1.1 billion just to cover marketing and handset subsidies this year, to try to do it. The fact that Sprint doesn’t usually get first crack at the flashy phones like BlackBerry’s Pearl or Apple’s iPhone doesn’t help.
Sprint Nextel and its employees are going through some difficult times. We’d hate to see them cash it in and be merged with some other wireless company. Even those of us who aren’t Sprint customers benefit from increased competition. If 4 major carriers in the U.S. (Cingular, Verizon, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile) were to become 3 carriers, the loss of competition would almost certainly lead to higher rates for us all.
Sprint, Nextel, Verizon Wireless, Cingular Wireless, AT&T, T-Mobile, Fair & Flexible, Power Packs, WiMax, Apple iPhone, BlackBerry Pearl
[via CBR]
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