Comments are posted immediately and will not be edited. But please use good taste and courtesy. Absolutely no foul language or name-calling of others posting comments. It's unimaginative and besides, you can do better just making your point clearly and quickly.
Absolutely no spoofing; presenting yourself as another person is grounds to delete your account. Although we are not responsible for the content of the comments, we reserve the right to remove comments that are threatening, libelous, obscene or otherwise objectionable. To emphasize, this means no profanity or vulgarity, racially or sexually offensive speech — even if you’ve substituted part of the words with symbols.
The Sprint Connection is a blog of The Kansas City Star. If you have questions, comments, concerns or news tips for Sprint Connection please send an e-mail to sprintconnection@kcstar.com.
Palm today reported its fiscal first-quarter earnings, noting a smaller after-costs loss than analysts expected, likely on the strength of sales of the touch-screen Pre.
Palm said it shipped 823,000 smartphones during the quarter, which ended Aug. 31. That’s a 134-percent jump from the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009, when the Palm began selling the Pre, and a year-on-year decrease of 30 percent.
Sprint Nextel Corp. said late today that it priced its note offering but for a batch of $1.3 billion.
The company's notes will pay 8.375 percent, and the sale is expected to be completed Thursday.
In a registration filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission early in the day, Sprint highlighted a $500 million offering of 8-year notes due in 2017. A Sprint spokesman was not available.
FierceWireless reports that Sprint Nextel reported higher device subsidy payments as a percentage of revenue from device sales in the second quarter, according to the company's 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The carrier said that its subsidy payments rose to 170 percent of its revenue from device sales, up from 146 percent in the year-ago quarter. The percentage is the average for Sprint's devices, and does not necessarily reflect the subsidy on any given device, such as the Palm Pre. For the first half of 2009, Sprint's subsidy payments rose to 177 percent, up from 129 percent in the first half of last year.
Local telephone company Embarq Corp. is suing the government for $31.6 million in income taxes it says it mistakenly paid for the tax years 1990 through 1994.
The Overland Park-based company says it filed federal income tax returns in those years that erroneously included as taxable income government payments it received from the so-called Universal Service Fund.
The fund helps cover the cost of extending telecommunication services to high-cost rural areas, low-income customers, schools, libraries and rural medical facilities.
Paetec Holding Corp., a telecommunications company based in Fairport, N.Y., has settled a patent infringement suit brought by Sprint Nextel Corp. over Sprint’s voice-over packet technology.
Terms of the settlement were confidential, but in a regulatory filing Paetec said it included a license of Sprint patents covering “certain of Paetec’s activities.”
Paetec said the terms of the settlement would not have a material impact on its financial statements.
On the eve of Sprint's release of first-quarter earnings, new talk is emerging that the company will shift thousands of jobs in an outsourcing deal with Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson
The Wall Street Journal is offering an update to reports that we began writing about here at the SprintConnection this past November and again earlier this year.
The Journal said Sprint is in final negotiations in a deal that could shift 5,000 to 7,000 U.S. employees to the vendor in a cost-cutting move.
Even if they are not saying nice things, at least they are still talking about you, right?
The reviews are in from last week's mega-gathering of the wireless industry's glitterati at the CTIA Wireless 2009 conference in Las Vegas. It is the show where a year ago Sprint CEO Dan Hesse flashed the then-new Samsung Instinct and garnered attention for his company's high-profile initiatives to regain stability.
Turns out that not everyone considered Sprint’s 2005 purchase of Nextel Communications to be a raging success.
You definitely can count Cora Bennett among that group. She just filed a lawsuit stating that “the merger turned out to be a disaster” and raised concerns that she thought the company continued to “play down and conceal Sprint’s problems with its network and with its customer service issues and subscriber base.”
Cut costs. Boost marketing.
These appear to be Sprint Nextel’s primary twin goals at the moment, William Power, an analyst with Robert W. Baird & Co., reports this morning.
“Sprint has increased marketing over the past several months to improve subscriber results, while remaining focused on its liquidity to cover future debt requirements,” Power wrote in a research note.
Bob Brust, Sprint’s chief financial officer, met with investors Monday during a gathering Baird organized.
Faced with a court order to shut down or sell its Nextel service throughout much of the Midwest in less than a year, you have to think Sprint CEO Dan Hesse is about ready to reach for a checkbook.
Buy iPCS, as Sprint did with a series of other smaller, regional affiliate carriers, and the court order threatening to wreak havoc with part of its Nextel service would go away.
iPCS shares shot up nearly 18 percent early in the day before closing at $8.75, up $1.20 or 16 percent. Are investors that pleased with the company’s performance or do they expect Hesse to swoop in and buy the company any minute?
So Sprint Nextel CEO Dan Hesse spends much of 2008 stirring speculation about whether he was about to jettison Nextel.
Sprint’s keeping Nextel, Hesse finally said late in the year. Rejuvenating it and everything.
Apparently not everyone is satisfied with such an approach. Can’t Sprint find something to cleave and sell, Wall Street analysts inquired this week. How about the wireline portion of Sprint’s business?
Not a good idea, Hesse replied during his conference call with the telecom industry mavens yesterday.
Bad headlines.
Sprint Nextel CEO Dan Hesse said today that of all the challenges his company faces, misperceptions about its financial strength continue to pose some of the greatest problems.
As Sprint spreads the word about its improved customer service and new phones, those messages often are overshadowed by headlines questioning Sprint's finances, Hesse told Wall Street analysts this morning.
Sprint is financially sound, generating positive free cash flow and in a position to pay off its debt for many quarters to come.
Investors appeared to take notice of that message.
Sprint Nextel's CEO Dan Hesse just addressed the company's fourth-quarter performance and outlook with Wall Street analysts this morning.
SprintConnection covered the one-hour call with a burst of liveblogging.
Here are some of the points he covered:
Big customer losses: 1.3 million
Churn, a measurement of customer loyalty, held at 2.16 percent, down from 2.29 percent in the same period a year ago.
Sprint Nextel said Thursday that it lost 1.3 million subscribers in the final three months of 2008.
This marks an 8 percent decline from the 53.8 million total subscribers Sprint had at the end of 2007. Notably, it also dropped Sprint below the 50 million mark.
Verizon Wireless, after surging ahead in 2008 and adding to its subscriber riches by recently gobbling Alltel, claims the top spot in the industry with more than 80 million customers.
Sprint Nextel will cut 8,000 jobs as the company seeks to preserve cash among growing customer losses.
Additional moves reportedly being considered include shifting thousands more Sprint workers to other companies in outsourcing contracts, but the company didn't make any announcements on that point Monday.
The Sprint board signed off on the move to cut labor costs by $1.2 billion a year late last week. Robert Brust, who became Sprint’s chief financial officer in May 2008, has been signaling for weeks that a major shake-up was coming early in the new year.