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.

Comments

Bad signs for a long time

[evilviper]

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.