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Sprint To Begin Layoffs, Cut $2.5 Billion In Expenses
An anonymous reader writes: Sprint's struggles to remain a major carrier continue. Just a few days after announcing that it is dropping out of a major low-band spectrum auction, the company now says it must cut between $2 billion and $2.5 billion in costs over the next six months. The cuts will need to be aggressive — according to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Sprint "had $7.5 billion in operating expenses during the three months ended June 30," even as it cut $1.5 billion over the past year. The only good news for Sprint is that its subscriber base is still slowly growing, though not quickly enough to keep pace with T-Mobile, let alone Verizon or AT&T.
Seriously, it's not like it can get any worse. If they're spending ANYTHING at all in that department, it's a waste.
I really don't want to see even less competition in the US cellular market; but 'Sprint' has basically been 'Verizon, incompetently' for long enough that I'm continually surprised they are still as alive as they are.
We broke these bastards up once. They're just recombining - you know that they're going to end up being purchased by AT&T or someone. This time it's "mobile" and "internet connectivity" sectors. They'll just need to be torn down, again... Rinse, lather, repeat. It's going to keep going until we force real change.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Capitalism works best when things are not perfectly oiled.
More and more companies becomes leaner and more efficient. The crud gets cut.
I have never been treated so poorly or lied to so much by any other company than Sprint. They will basically tell you what ever you want to hear with absolutely no basis in fact. I find it hard to believe they have any customers.
I remember when Sprint was running a campaign where you could go unlimited everything for about what I was paying AT&T. I tried to switch to Sprint at that time. They rejected my credit card.
I'm not sure why they rejected my credit card. It wasn't like there wasn't enough money to cover the cost of a new phone and the initial fees. In fact, they managed to put a hold on the account for the amount they wanted, but even with the hold, they wouldn't accept the card. Customer support couldn't help me, and my bank (which happened to be right next door to the Sprint store) couldn't figure out what was going on with them.
So I stayed with AT&T.
There's really no point to this story other than I remember trying to become a Sprint customer and being unable to do so. I wonder how many other people Sprint has rejected over the years due to broken systems?
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
you can hear a pin drop.
No really, it's not just an advertising gimmick. I recently switched to Sprint and got a new iphone. Whenever I talk to another person with a Sprint iphone, the call quality is phenomenal. I really feel like I can hear a pin drop.
THAT'S when the pin dropped. link:https://www.ama.org/publications/MarketingNews/Pages/fast-track-loyalty.aspx
Sure, Nextel phones were bricks with slow-to-no data and a UI that was rudimentary at best, but at least iDEN supported real push-to-talk. I know that it's not really a consumer feature, but for business use it was the best thing ever. Essentially a full-featured two-way radio that would work nationwide with someone else supplying the repeaters. As I recall, they could also fall back to peer-to-peer for PTT only if a tower was out of reach but your target was in range. For managing a team doing out-and-about work, there is still no good replacement. And NO, the crappy CDMA and/or app-based PTT solutions are NOT a workable substitute.
Given that Nextel/iDEN customers had by far the highest ARPU of any carrier, I wouldn't be surprised if they could manage to be a profitable, but smaller, company by getting out of the consumer business entirely and deploying a next-gen iDEN focused on business use only.
Cut 33% of operating expenses and fail to invest in fixing their lackluster network? This is what a company that just wants to be put out of their misery does. They're is no clearer signal they just want to be bought out for their spectrum at this point.
They could sell the access credentials to their credit checking partners experian, equifax databases to Ukranian mafia and raise some real dough.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Why did they invest so much into a failed corpse when they can't afford their own cost without having the radio shack weight around their neck
Stupid
Sprint hasn't made a profit since 2007. In 2008 they book $29 Billion lose. They've lost at least $2.5 Billion each year since then.
side not: Companies mostly pay taxes based on their profits. If you have no profits ....
The company I work for had been offering discounted group cell service. While the billing was through Ting, the service was provided by Sprint so they indirectly had us as a customer.
Then Sprint corporate sales recommended we look for an alternative to Ting because we could probably get better terms. However, the terms which Sprint themselves provided wasn't better. Instead, Verizon was willing to match all of our requirements. We probably wouldn't have even considered switching if Sprint didn't push the issue.
Also, the main selling point Verizon could provide that Ting couldn't was we could use newly released phone while they are new! Sprint requires a phone to have been on the market for at least a year before Ting could offer it. This Sprint policy is a death blow to Sprint resellers trying to keep Android users. Most Android manufacturer would stop releasing firmware updates after the first year. So, almost no phones from the Sprint service reseller where capable of running the latest version of Android.
If Sprint needs to grow their subscriber base so badly, maybe they should stop sabotaging their own service resellers.
Anyone who has been paying attention has been scratching their head about Sprint for a long, long time. They seem to make ever technical decision WRONG... and not just wrong, but mind-bogglingly, inconceivably wrong. It seems like they are NEVER looking forward...
Of course they chose WiMax, but they also sat back and had Clearwire do all the work for them... and very poorly. And when Clearwire was failing miserably, instead of Sprint using their tenuous connection to advantage and letting their creditors take the hit, Sprint spent the money to buy them out... a useless network.
Sprint actually had great network coverage... by accident. They bought Nextel, whose 2G iDEN network was every bit as good as the big guys. Perhaps because of the lower frequency, 800Mhz spectrum, you could get a good signal EVERYWHERE. Sprint was required to keep it running under terms of the merger, and sold cheap access to it as Boost... When they were allowed to shut-off iDEN, it was a no-brainer to use the frequencies for their new LTE radios, but instead they announced they'd use them for their CDMA/3G network... Existing phones couldn't use the frequencies, and people aren't looking for good coverage on their 3G network, today. It made no sense.
Then Network Vision came along. Sprint was going to basically replace all the equipment in their entire cellular network... Awesome... Except with all that work, they were just replacing legacy equipment to keep it operating cheaper. It seems crazy they didn't include installing LTE on all their towers as part of the project. It was an obvious opportunity to get them back on a good footing, and they squandered it.
And on a similar subject, they announced they weren't interested in deploying VoLTE, yet. A perfect opportunity to get people off their legacy 3G network, so they don't have to spend money upgrading it and can focus on LTE, and they say no, folks should keep on making calls over the old 3G network.
Their pricing is insane, too. They've got rock-bottom prices for MVNOs, but sign-up for Sprint direct, and their prices are nearly as high as Verizon/AT&T, despite their horrid coverage, speeds, etc.
They're a perpetually backwards company, and mystifyingly so. Obviously always taking the wrong steps, which is why they've fallen behind tiny T-Mobile, which simply hasn't been so idiotic.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I was a contractor at Sprint for 9 months a long time ago. I, and about 9 other people, were hired to work on a project to replace sprintpcs.com with exactly the same thing, only running on IBM WebSphere. It was a huge project, with IBM people all over the place. Sprint had made a deal with IBM, and the first order of business was to spend $140MM to convert their existing codebase to work with IBM's stuff.
One day, I was shown how to launch WebSphere Studio (as if I didn't already know how). The next day, and on subsequent days, I was... ignored, as were the other 9 people. We eventually got really bored. I walked across the street to a computer store one afternoon, and bought myself a laptop. I worked on a project of my own, for something to do. Then a co-worker and me started going over to a nearby bookstore during the afternoons, drinking coffee, dicking off, and reading books and magazines.
There was an on-call rotation. When it was my turn, I was given the phone to take with me. When I got home that afternoon, I called my home number to ensure I would get signal (I lived 30 miles outside the city). I heard the "ringing" sound, then an automated voice answered: "Your Sprint phone has been deactivated because you have not PAID YOUR BILL."
Sprint used CVS for source control at the time. They had amassed a huge amount of source code, and had built tools for dealing with it. It actually worked pretty well. One afternoon, someone came into our cube area and said "We're moving off of CVS, need to be on an entirely new system by next week." The new system was called "CodeStream Paradigm Plus" or something totally idiotic. Apparently, one of the Sprint higher-ups had been treated to an evening of drinks and skeet shooting by a salesman from "CodeStream Paradigm Plus", enjoyed himself, and had decided that it should be used by the entirety of Sprint. We set to work and found that in order to preserve the commit history, each source file would need to be imported into the new system separately, and each impor would take ~3 minutes. Total time for conversion: 1,426 years, 7 months, 4 days, 3 hours, 8 minutes. "So, not next week, then?" "No." "Okay, I've decided we'll stay with the CBS or whatever."
I finally lost patience, and went to work somewhere else. My co-worker/friend stayed on for a while, and took 7 weeks off to ride a motorcycle to Vegas and back. When he told his manager he would be gone, he said "Fine, just keep billing, this is about headcount."
Before or since, I have never seen a company so efficient at: A) sucking the living souls out of people, and B) burning money.
Its not helping them. The entire market needs to integrate and using incompatible tech that isn't employed much elsewhere... and doesn't especially offer any benefits is not a fantastic idea.
At the very least, sprint should transition to 100 percent hybrid phones and networks.
I'm not touching any carrier that I can't just use a sim card for at this point. I'm also done with contracts etc.
I'm happy to sign up to pay X per month every month. However, I'm not agreeing to be bound for X years into that contract. Its month to month or no deal.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Us guys think this is measured as 2000cm^3, but, women say it's more like 2000mm^3. Why is that?