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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.
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.
Thus why Ting is the sprint network just everything else completely better.
Want to drop 2.5b ditch every mall store.
No sir I dont like it.
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.
I was with Sprint for 10 years, and during that entire 10 years it was "oh we have really good upgrades right around the corner". They even had this bullshit website that showed the upgrade status for their towers, and each one would range from 3 months to a 12 months for the next "upgrade". If you checked back 3 months later, you'd still see the same numbers there, and if you called to complain about the service, the rep would go to this website and read those same bullshit numbers to you.
Meanwhile, the service continued to deteriorate with increasing dropped calls, their 3g was so terrible that your phone would quickly drain its battery if you had no wifi around, and they never offered 4G in Phoenix, which is quite a populated city. Even when they did finally offer 4g in a given area, it was spotty at best, more closely resembling what other cities called a soft launch (i.e. service is available and turned on in the area but not finished, and they don't announce it to the public until its been optimized to be contiguous across the coverage area) and it never reaches the full quality of a hard launch, even though they announce it as such.
Sprint is and always has been perpetually a "coming soon" network, has never been the "now" network that it claims to be.
Anyways since their service is so bad, I'll bet that if they go out of business, nobody will even notice. In fact it will likely be an improvement because somebody who actually knows how to run a company might buy their assets and completely throw out their management, engineers, QA, and support teams. It very likely won't be another carrier that buys their assets though, instead it will probably be somebody like Dish.