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

Oh Sprint...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:Oh Sprint...

[ArmoredDragon]

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.

Re:And they recombine...

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

They'll just need to be torn down, again... Rinse, lather, repeat. It's going to keep going until we force real change.

I agree with everything you said, but shouldn't it be "lather, rinse, repeat"?

How can I rinse if I haven't lathered first? A conundrum worthy of pondering...

Re:They did it to themselves

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

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. You can tell when a Sprint rep is lying because his lips are moving.

I remember trying to switch to Sprint

[_xeno_]

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?

Re:And they recombine...

[unrtst]

Yes! Let's do the exact same thing again that didn't work! It will work this time for sure!

I can't tell... are you commenting on the exact same thing being the merger of the individual networks/companies, or the divestment of the local exchanges into RBOC's?

IMO, the problem is simple. The mergers had to be approved, and we (through the FCC) approved them. That was dumb. We had the means to keep them from growing too big, but, instead, we approve huge mergers (and I'd include the merger of Sprint and Nextel from 2004, which were the third and fifth largest at the time).

History is bound to repeat itself. Or, in this case, at least we can hope :-)

Re:The useless and redundant

[silas_moeckel]

Thus why Ting is the sprint network just everything else completely better.

Want to drop 2.5b ditch every mall store.

when Sprint dropped NASCAR

[turkeydance]

THAT'S when the pin dropped. link:https://www.ama.org/publications/MarketingNews/Pages/fast-track-loyalty.aspx

Yeah, they're doomed...

[sirwired]

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.

Why lay off people?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

They could sell the access credentials to their credit checking partners experian, equifax databases to Ukranian mafia and raise some real dough.

Re:Why lay off people?

[Qzukk]

How much do you think they'd get for that? T-Mobile gave that away for free!

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.