Next up in new cell phones: Sprint-Nextel
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Nextel Communications and Sprint Corp. reached a tentative agreement to merge, a deal that would create the nation&#39;s third-biggest cellular company, sources familiar with the deal said.
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Sprint has agreed to buy mobile telephone company Nextel Communications in a deal worth $35.17 billion, combining the No. 3 and No. 5 U.S. wireless carriers and creating a new company with about 40 million customers.
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U.S. mobile operator Sprint Nextel has appointed Dan Hesse as president and CEO. He replaces Gary Forsee, who resigned in October.Forsee left as Sprint Nextel fought to retain market share in the face of its two larger rivals, AT&amp;T and Verizon Wireless. The company struggled with integrating the disparate customer bases of its two constituent parts, not least because the Sprint and Nextel wireless networks are based on different technologies.Sprint Nextel&#39;s directors already know Hesse: he most recently served as chairman, president and CEO of Embarq, a company formed from the local telecommunications division of Sprint following that company&#39;s 2005 merger with Nextel.Before that, he held the same roles at Terabeam, a wireless carrier, following a number of years at the head of AT&amp;T Wireless.Hesse will now join the Sprint Nextel board of directors, although unlike Forsee he will not be its chairman. That honor will remain with James Hance, who took the post following Forsee&#39;s departure, the board said Tuesday.Sprint&#39;s two cellular networks serve around 54 million customers, and it also has licenses to build a national WiMax network, leaving it with something of an identity problem. Hesse will have to balance the needs of these networks as he sets out a new strategy for the company.
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PHILADELPHIA/NEW YORK  - Sprint Corp. is close to  an agreement to buy Nextel Communications Inc. for about $35  billion in a mostly stock deal that would combine the No. 3 and  No. 5 U.S. wireless telephone companies, sources familiar with  the situation said on Friday.
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A Sprint-Nextel merger could be announced soon. Will a deal be bad news for consumers and investors? NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - And then there were four?
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The newest in a stream of upcoming slim and powerful cell phones
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Sprint and Nextel announced plans for a $36 billion merger Wednesday, creating a new major wireless phone power with a customer base to challenge its two larger rivals.
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Sprint Nextel will pour more money into the iDEN network it inherited from Nextel, coming out with new handsets and adding features to its popular push-to-talk system.The&#160;struggling mobile operator, whose subscriber base is third-largest in the United States but declining, has been operating two networks since the merger of Sprint and Nextel Communications in 2005. The new company then said it would cap off investment in iDEN after the end of 2007. But even though Sprint is losing subscribers faster on iDEN than on its CDMA network and average revenue per iDEN user is falling, the company last year said it would keep investing in the network until at least 2012.On Tuesday, Sprint reiterated its commitment to iDEN, saying customers would see continued investment and new features. The announcement, in a news release, came about a week after the latest management shakeup at Sprint. The company&#39;s chief financial officer, chief marketing officer, and sales chief&#160;resigned last Thursday.iDEN weighs down an already ailing carrier that is simultaneously gearing up to start a third network using new WiMax wireless broadband technology, according to IDC analyst Godfrey Chua. While rivals Verizon and AT&amp;T prepare for a February shutdown of their aging analog networks, and in AT&amp;T&#39;s case an older digital technology called TDMA, Sprint holds on to iDEN because it needs the subscribers, he said. Those include many loyal businesses that rely on the network&#39;s Direct Connect push-to-talk technology, Chua said.&quot;It just hasn&#39;t been as easy for Sprint to consolidate its network architecture as it has been for AT&amp;T,&quot; Chua said.Sprint had 18.7 million customers on iDEN versus about 34.1 million on CDMA at the end of the third quarter of 2007, the latest period for which Sprint has announced financial results. About 1.2 million customers use PowerSource phones, which include iDEN and CDMA technology. Between postpaid Nextel service and prepaid Boost Mobile, a separate youth-oriented offering, Sprint suffered a net loss of about 757,000 iDEN users in the quarter, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.Direct Connect isn&#39;t standing still. The more immediate change, coming early this year, will be the introduction of a long-awaited push-to-talk system for Sprint&#39;s CDMA customers. It will work on a set of new CDMA handsets, and people will be able to use it between those new phones and all existing iDEN devices, she said.Building on the combination of Direct Connect and Sprint Mobile Broadband services, Sprint is planning new features such as &quot;push-to-x,&quot; which will let people send text messages, images, and other data through a simpler process than current messaging systems, said spokeswoman Stephanie Greenwood.Even as Sprint&#39;s CDMA-based push-to-talk has faced delays, rivals edged in on the feature, which Nextel pioneered. AT&amp;T Wireless has had push-to-talk for about two years, according to spokesman Mark Siegel. Verizon Wireless announced the launch of a push-to-talk service in 2003, though a search of its Web site indicated the carrier only sells one or two handsets for it.While restating its commitment to iDEN on Wednesday, Sprint highlighted two handsets recently introduced for the network. The Motorola i570, introduced this month, is designed for tough environments and offers voice-activated dialing and one-touch shortcuts to phone features. The Motorola i335, introduced last November, is built to military specifications for dust, shock, and vibration.
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Sprint Nextel has launched a new device and service that will improve cell phone coverage indoors.
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As expected, Sprint Corp. and Nextel Communications announced their &quot;merger of equals&quot; Wednesday--with Sprint as the slightly dominant partner--and revealed some unexpected details of the combine: Nextel&#39;s
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Sprint, the fourth-largest US cell phone operator, has started a $3 billion network upgrade, with $1 billion earmarked for a wireless broadband service to launch soon in selected cities, a Sprint executive said Tuesday.
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Sprint Nextel says it will keep enhancing its iDEN network and push-to-talk service.
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NEW YORK - Sprint Corp. is buying Nextel Communications Inc. in a $35-billion US deal that will create the third-largest wireless phone company in the US.
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US mobile firm Sprint has detailed what it will spend on upgrading its network and getting it ready for 3G services. The big winners are Lucent, which gets $1.5bn over three years, Nortel, which gets $1bn
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By Jason Gertzen, The Kansas City Star, Mo.  Jun. 8--On-the-go shoppers looking for the best price or a store stocking a hard-to-find product now can tap on their Sprint phones for tips.   Sprint Nextel Corp.
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NEW YORK 07:30 EST - It&#39;s official. Sprint and Nextel is becoming &quot;Sprint Nextel&quot; in what is being described this morning by both companies as a &quot;merger of equals.
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Sprint Nextel and its hardware partners sought to convince a small audience at the Consumer Electronics Show that their WiMax plans are on track, despite the recent departure of Sprint&#39;s CEO and the dissolution of its partnership with Clearwire.&quot;We are exactly where we said we&#39;d be,&quot; said Barry West, Sprint Nextel&#39;s CTO and president of the company&#39;s Xohm WiMax business unit. Sprint is in the process of soft-launching in Chicago and Baltimore, he said.Executives from Nokia and Samsung said they both expect to have user devices ready for the second-quarter launch. In addition, Motorola said it is working on a device that will operate over Sprint&#39;s EvDO (evolution, data optimized) cellular network, Wi-Fi, and WiMax.Since the&#160;ouster of Gary Forsee, the former CEO and chairman of Sprint Nextel, who was thought to be a champion of the company&#39;s WiMax plans, onlookers have speculated that the network might not roll out as planned. In addition,&#160;Sprint Nextel ended a partnership with Clearwire&#160;to jointly deploy WiMax, a further cause for uncertainty. Sprint has been hemorrhaging mobile subscribers and recording declining revenues since its purchase of Nextel.Beyond the unrest internally at Sprint, the company faces critics of WiMax who say that the technology won&#39;t work as well as cellular technologies in a mobile environment and that it won&#39;t support international roaming as easily as the cellular standards.But in describing the reasons why Sprint chose WiMax and why it intends to aggressively pursue the network, West further sought to soothe market qualms about the future.&quot;Being first to market is a huge advantage,&quot; he said. &quot;And WiMax technology is here, now, and mature.&quot;While an investment in a totally new technology requires a strong reason for change, this won&#39;t be the first time Sprint&#39;s doing it, he noted. WiMax doesn&#39;t follow on the upgrade path for CDMA, the basis for Sprint&#39;s cellular network, so it requires a totally new network.Sprint did that first when it moved from an analog cellular network to digital, West said. The same went for the move to third-generation technology, although in that case Sprint stuck with the CDMA path.Sprint also considered LTE (Long Term Evolution), a fourth-generation mobile technology, but one big disadvantage is that it&#39;s not yet available, he said.Moving to WiMax represents a shift to a new air interface technology: OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) instead of CDMA, which is the basis of the current 3G technologies. According to West, when CDMA is deployed in a wider section of spectrum, which helps boost throughput, the computational complexity required goes up exponentially. That requires higher-performance chips, which come with a steep price tag, he said.With WiMax, Sprint plans to use a wide section of spectrum that can dynamically switch from carrying data up or down, depending on user requirements, he said.Beyond the radically different network technology, Sprint envisions a very different business model than cellular, one that will support any kind of standard device.&quot;Look at the cellular model. It was very successful but also very frustrating,&quot; West said. He was referring to the business model in the United States where operators subsidize phones and then require long-term subscriptions from users.With Xohm, Sprint will allow any WiMax-compliant device to run on the network, he said. End-users will buy the devices themselves, probably at a variety of retail stores and hopefully for a low price because vendors expect the cost of WiMax chips to drop dramatically, like Wi-Fi. &quot;Since I&#39;ve got no money in you, I don&#39;t need a contract,&quot; West said. That opens the door to a wide array of new pricing scenarios. End-users could pay for the day, week, month, or on a regular subscription, he said.While West declined to cite specific prices, he said a monthly subscription to Xohm will be comparable to existing DSL rates.Initially, Sprint will sell PC cards and modems, but by the end of this year as many as&#160;10 different kinds of devices could be available, he said. Navigation and gaming devices are possibilities, he said.If the market has any doubts about Sprint&#39;s plans for the network, it should rest assured that, regardless, the future of WiMax is more certain, panelists said. &quot;WiMax is bigger than Sprint,&quot; said Sriram Viswanathan, vice president and general manager for Intel Capital and for Intel&#39;s WiMax business.Motorola alone has 17 contracts for networks and is involved in 60 trials, said Fred Wright, senior vice president and general manager at Motorola. &quot;This technology is real, it&#39;s not a fairy tale,&quot; he said.