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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."
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.
True. I agree that leaner companies are better. Sadly, the marketers get in the heads of the decision makers and convince them they need to have all the dancing baloney or they will lose out to the competition. Sprint needs to not compete with AT&T and Verizon, but rather, offer the best service to its customers. I actually like Sprint as a customer, but they are too bloated and try too hard to be everything the others are. All of this "my dick is bigger than yours" marketing crap does nothing for the customers, it only feeds the egos of the marketers and the CEO (temporarily).
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.
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
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
Capitalism naturally leads to monopolies/duopolies. The marginally more profitable company can undercut, outbribe, and outscale the smaller competitors who eventually go out of business or get absorbed. Once it is down to a couple players it is easier to compete with just barely enough gusto to keep regulators at bay, but not enough to drive prices down or performance up. Without some threat of intervention a pure monopoly is the natural result once the key players end up with enough power to corner
See stagnant intel vs. crumbling AMD lately.
See cable TV lately.
See standard oil.
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
They also now do GSM on the t-mobile network, FYI.
See standard oil.
You mean, the Standard Oil whose monopoly resulted in a massive decrease in oil price, and made many competitors rich as Standard Oil had to keep buying them out, and they just took the money and started a new company that Standard Oil had to buy out?
You mean that Standard Oil?
Back in the real world, the reason there are so few phone companies is because the government gives them a monopoly on use of radio frequencies. Then you complain that there aren't many phone companies, and the government MUST DO SOMETHING! It's because the government DID SOMETHING that the problem exists.
Regulation reduces competition and innovation, and creates monopolies. That's what it's for. That's why big corporations love it.
Back in the real world, the reason there are so few phone companies is because the government gives them a monopoly on use of radio frequencies.
Umm, no. The reason that there are so few mobile phone carriers is that it is really f***ing expensive to put up 40,000 or so nationwide towers and all the network infrastructure and BSS/OSS needed to support them. Never mind care, devices, sales channels, marketing and all the rest. Cellular services simply don't work well with unlicensed spectrum (capacity planning is a NIGHTMARE if you don't know who you're sharing spectrum with and what their loads are), so you also need to have the money to buy spectrum licenses. (That's right, none of the carriers were "given" a monopoly on their spectrum, they had to buy it. For a lot of money.)
This is what business school professors call "high barriers to market entry." If you don't have giant piles of money in quantities starting with the letter "B," you naturally can't play. Sure, there are lots of MVNOs which can be stood up comparatively cheaply (as in the tens of millions of dollars startup cost), but those aren't new carriers, they are just resellers of one of the "big four." If you want to be a local wireless company where you don't need many towers etc. then you can do that - there are dozens of those in the US, primarily serving rural areas where the "big guys" don't see a good enough return on investment - but they have no pretensions of being competitors on a national scope.
It's like asking "why aren't there more car companies?" It's not because of regulation (though I am not personally a big fan of government regulation of wireless), it's because it costs a metric f***ton of money to become a company that builds its own cars.
"95% of all Slashdot
Yep, but not on the same phones unfortunately (if I'm not mistaken, some phones can do both). And from what I can tell in my area, Sprint has significantly better coverage.
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.
Yes because the alternative is allowing multiple companies to use the same radio frequency. What could possibly go wrong?
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.