Sprint

» see sprint.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

sprint was a us-only carrier at the carrier layer. in turkey the wireless name on a bill was turkcell first, then vodafone after the telsim acquisition in 2006, with avea sitting in third. sprint sold plans at radioshack counters in kansas city and miami. it did not show up in ankara.

the company started in 1899 as brown telephone, a rural kansas operation that strung copper to towns the bell system did not want to bother with. the name kept changing every few decades. by 1972 it was united telecommunications. by the late 1980s the long-distance arm had taken the sprint name and the falling-coin sound in the ads.

i read about sprint mostly as a brand on cnet articles in the early 2000s. headlines like "sprint launches first 3g network" or "sprint cuts roaming fee." news that did not affect me. by 2020 it was a brand owned by softbank, then no brand at all.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

sprint was the fourth us carrier, sitting beneath verizon and at&t on the coverage maps. its 2005 nextel acquisition for $35 billion became a case study in how not to do a merger. the two networks used incompatible radio technology, and sprint took write-downs on the deal for almost a decade afterward.

softbank bought a controlling stake in 2013 for $21.6 billion. masayoshi son said the goal was to make sprint compete with verizon. it never did. by 2018 the company was burning cash and losing subscribers to t-mobile, the carrier one rank below it on the coverage chart.

~ how it ended ~

the deal that killed sprint was announced in 2018 and approved by the fcc in 2019 after a year of antitrust review. t-mobile paid $26 billion. the merger closed on april 1 2020, four weeks into the us covid lockdown. the brand was officially retired on august 2 2020. existing sprint phones kept working on t-mobile towers, then got migrated to t-mobile plans over the next three years.

~ the long tail ~

boost mobile, the prepaid brand sprint owned, was sold to dish network as a condition of the t-mobile approval, which is how dish became the fourth us carrier on paper. the overland park headquarters campus in kansas is still mostly empty. somewhere in the bell-system genealogy chart, the brown telephone company line ends in 2020 with t-mobile magenta painted over the last sprint sign.

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