Sprint to cease service on its iDEN network as early as June 30, 2013; Company continues to facilitate migration of iDEN customers to Sprint Direct Connect Service *Press Release*
What does Sprint plan to do with the newly freed up 800Mhz spectrum? I think one of Sprints big problems was that they ran their main business (CDMA) on 1900Mhz and had the better 800MHz spectrum for their lesser-used iDen (yes, I know the iDen was acquired later). If Sprint can roll out LTE on 800Mhz in a quick and efficient way, they could possibly resurrect themselves from the miserable position they've been in the last few years..
The FCC will allow LTE on the iDEN 800 MHz. Here is an article about it. FCC ruling on 800MHz band a boon for Sprint 1st paragraph and here is the press release from the FCC:
While you can say they had some very miserable years since the Nextel merger I don't believe the last 2 years have been that bad actually. They've been losing iden subscribers left and right but despite the iden fiasco they still managed to be in overall positive territory for customer additions (which is getting harder to do with market saturation). They've been very competitive with handset offerings and managed to land the iPhone. Customer service has improved light years as evident in some of the latest surveys. They have fared much better than some of the other carriers like T-Mobile as of late and considering they have to compete with 2 giants that have gobbled up many carriers along the way, I think they have managed to hang in there fairly well.
