Wireless company iPCS is a legal thorn in Sprint’s side no longer. This morning, Sprint said it would acquire its litigious affiliate for $831 million, including the assumption of $405 million of net debt.
The consolidation of the prepaid cellphone market has begun in earnest. This morning, Sprint Nextel said it will acquire Virgin Mobile USA in a $483 million stock deal that will give the company a clear lead in the prepaid arena, where low prices are becoming ever more popular with consumers beaten into submission by the continuing recession.
Sprint best step up its marketing efforts for the Pre because according to Pali Research, demand for Palm’s new device is slowing, and quickly. During the week ending June 26, Pali estimates that Sprint sold 50,000-60,000 Pre handsets. In the weeks that followed, it sold “less than 40,000,” and then, “over 30,000”–again, according to Pali. Now the research outfit says sales have declined by another 5,000 units.
It’s almost as if Sprint Nextel’s postpaid customers can hardly wait for their contracts to expire so they can jump to another carrier. The troubled wireless carrier lost more than one million postpaids in the first quarter of 2009 amid fierce competition from rivals AT&T and Verizon Wireless.
What a great choice of carrier partner Palm has in Sprint Nextel, eh? A company with a longstanding reputation for lousy customer service, poor network coverage, high churn and Keystone Kops-style management disorganization. A company that lost 1.3 million customers in the third quarter. And now a company that plans to sack 8,000 employees, or 14.3 percent of its workforce, by the end of March–a month rumored to see the introduction of Palm’s new hail-Mary handset, the Pre.
Among the announcements forgotten for a moment amid the shrieks of agony and general keening on Wall Street today, one from Sprint Nextel announcing a single-market launch of Xohm, its new WiMax wireless service. The company lit up Xohm only in Baltimore today, fulfilling its promise to have the service up and running by the end of September. That said, it’s still nearly a year late.
If wireless providers applied the per-byte pricing scheme they use for SMS texting to other data transmitted over their cellular networks, it would cost nearly $6,000 to download a single 4 MB song. Yet the price of text messaging has doubled industrywide in the last three years. Why?
Sprint Nextel is finally reconsidering its $200 early termination fee, albeit under duress. A California judge ruled Tuesday that the company must pay $73 million to the nearly two million class-action customers who sued it for slapping them with early-termination fees.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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