For a carrier still plagued by its notoriously crappy handset selection, the fact that Sprint Nextel confirmed it will finally begin offering CDMA/WiMax phones later this year is good news. And that was just about the only good news to come out of Sprint's fourth quarter and full year 2007 report on Thursday.
Just when you thought things couldn't get any worse, the company reported a $29 billion net loss this past quarter, due largely to an enormous value write-down of its Nextel unit. It also continues to bleed customers at an alarming rate, losing 683,000 post-paid subscribers during the fourth quarter.
CEO Dan Hesse warned Wall Street not to expect much different for the next few quarters from the struggling company, as the issues Sprint faces are, in his words, "more difficult than what I had expected to find."
Even Sprint's most recent attempt to stay competitive with AT&T and Verizon fell flat. The company announced on Wednesday a new $100-a-month service plan that will let its customers get unlimited voice and data access. The funny thing is that Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile (reacting to the mere rumor that Sprint might make such an announcement this week) all announced their own unlimited plans last week.
While Sprint undoubtedly needs to clean up its core wireless-phone business, at this point a big part of its future success seems to be linked to being first to market with a 4-G network (WiMax). Let's hope the promise of "a three-year head start" and "true wireless broadband with multi-megabit speed" is enough to help pull the company out of the quicksand.
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