After the Sprint/Nextel kerfuffle led to a huge number of angry customers, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse was quoted as saying that the company has been highly focused on improving customer service -- and that they are willing to sacrifice some quantity in subscriptions to increase the quality of their service. The latest effort involves Sprint's Ready Now initiative, which hopes to improve customer service by -- get this -- actually talking to customers and teaching them how to use the device they just bought. From the announcement:A full day of training! Impressive. According to the Associated Press, the company tested the new "talk to customer" system in St. Louis and Pittsburgh in July, and customer satisfaction was so improved they decided on a national launch.

Sprint execs are celebrating the fact that their oft-delayed plans for WiMax deployment are now ahead of the most recently-announced schedule. They had an internal infrastructure target date of having 1000 WiMax base stations on-air which has been met one month earlier than planned.

According to RCR Wireless News, Sprint has dropped the price of their "phone as modem" plan from $50 to $15. However, customers must own a Power Vision (CDMA2000 1x EV-DO) phone with connection capabilities to their laptops. The $15 tethering plan is also only available alongside certain Sprint data plans, namely the Sprint PRO Pack ($30 per month), Blackberry Personal Pack ($30 per month), Worldwide Blackberry Personal Pack ($70 per month), Primary Data Plan ($50 per month) and the Worldwide Data Plan ($70 per month). There are ways to unofficially tether -- just be wary of Sprint's 5GB cap, implemented last May.

Yesterday CNBC jumped the gun, announcing that (according to those infamous "people familiar with the talks") South Korea Telecom was preparing to acquire the troubled Sprint. As it turns out, Reuters quotes the even better known "sources familiar with the matter" who say the two companies are simply in talks to collaborate on technology, not planning to merge. Sprint's stock certainly benefited from yesterday's gossip, jumping as high as eighteen percent at one point.

Atish Gude, VP of business operations for Sprint’s Xohm WiMax unit, talks a little bit about this fall's launch of their mobile WiMax service in Baltimore in a video over at Unstrung. We already know that the service will allow consumers to avoid contracts and early termination fees, but Gude touches briefly on the company's pricing plans -- which includes offering usage "day passes" (a la Wi-Fi). For monthly plans, Gude says they'll "stay within that affordability index of cable and DSL pricing," and confirms they're aiming at less than $50.

Sprint recently teamed up with Samsung to offer a phone called the Instinct which many have said is just a copy of the iPhone with less memory and other drawbacks. Despite these negative initial reports, the phone managed to do well in the market, reaching record-breaking sales in the first week that it was launched. It is believed that this was due to the phone's similarity to the iPhone and the fact that it was released a few weeks prior to the iPhone at a significantly lower price. Some say that these sales are just a temporary thing which will decrease considerably as soon as the new iPhone hits the stores but Sprint and Samsung are hedging their bets the lower cost will keep sales high.

Most people are familiar with the top three wireless carriers in the United States: AT&T, Verizon and Sprint. But not everyone can name the remaining seven in the country’s “top ten”.

Sprint Nextel CTO Barry West yesterday stated that their mobile WiMax service is overcoming initial delays caused by a shortage of decent backhaul bandwidth and some glitches in the project's billing systems. West says that the service will officially launch this September in Baltimore, with DC and Chicago launches coming shortly thereafter. He also says some 575 Xohm WiMAX base station sites are currently live, with a number of devices still in testing.

Way back in 1993, Nextel got a lot of attention for its innovative foray into the first mobile push-to-talk service. This service allows the user to simply push a button and immediately connect a call rather than having to wait for that whole dialing-and-answering process; it’s often compared to the walkie talkie.

Remember Sprint Broadband Direct? Sprint is e-mailing the remaining customers of their line-of-sight-based wireless broadband service to inform them that they'll be terminating the service starting July 31. Made painfully irrelevant by the combination of Sprint EVDO and WiMAX, the 1.5Mbps service, which required a 13.5" diamond-shaped dish, saw mixed reviews over the years from our users.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Embarq will be dropping its wireless resale relationship with Sprint starting next year. That's the second such announcement in as many weeks; Qwest recently announcing they were also dumping their relationship with Sprint in favor for a new one with Verizon.

Computer World runs the Sprint, AT&T and Verizon Wireless 3G networks through their paces and dissects the pros and cons of each. The networks were all tested using 3G cards on a Lenovo ThinkPad X300 notebook at 500 data points at eight different places in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut (not much use to many of you, I know).

It's not particularly surprising news if you've followed the courtship process, but the Wall Street Journal says that Sprint and Clearwire should soon announce a $12 billion joint venture aimed at collaboratively building out the Xohm WiMax network. According to the Journal, Sprint will merge their Xohm division with Clearwire to create an entirely new company, which will be funded by $3.2 billion in outside financing.

Sprint has laid the blame for the delayed launch of their Xohm WiMax service on the fact they haven't been able to find enough high-bandwidth backhaul links, a problem that Unstrung says may not be restricted to Sprint. Copper-based T1 backhauls simply can't handle the bandwidth demand of next generation services, and anybody entering the next-gen game at this point will have trouble finding enough fiber and Microwave-based backhaul connections.

Sources within Comcast tell us that the company has decided to stop offering Sprint Pivot wireless service to new and existing customers starting this week, though an official announcement has yet to be made. According to an internal Comcast announcement, Pivot customers should begin receiving an e-mail by the end of April or May offering them the option to transition to traditional Sprint phone service without an early termination fee.

Verizon claims that Sprint Nextel owes the company $10 million in outstanding interconnection charges that the company has been trying to get from Sprint for years. The statute of limitations on the issue is coming close so Verizon has filed a lawsuit to attempt to get that money.

Some of the security questions Sprint uses to confirm user identity are pretty easy to guess, notes the Consumerist. The questions, designed to prevent identity theft or fraud, are automatically generated and fairly easy to circumnavigate with a modicum of common sense.

Sprint's having a hard time getting their Xohm launch off on schedule. This week the company was expected to announce billions in new financing from Comcast and Time Warner Cable, but that announcement never came.

The Wall Street Journal last week broke the news that Comcast and Time Warner Cable could invest billions in Sprint's Xohm WiMax service, set to launch this Spring. It was expected that Sprint CEO Dan Hesse would announce the deal at the CTIA show this week in Las Vegas, but that announcement never came.

In a recent interview, Sprint Nextel CEO Dan Hesse acknowledged that the company has faced a lot of problems in the past year but assures both customers and investors that those problems can be fixed. Hesse says that rumors about Sprint’s demise are false but that he hesitates to make too many promises about the company’s future because he doesn’t want to make false predictions without putting a more solid plan in place first.

The plans that he does have for Sprint Nextel in the coming months are expected to be revealed when Hesse speaks at an upcoming industry trade show. However, it is believed that what he’ll have to say is fairly predictable. For example, he is expected to address the concern over customer defections by pointing to Sprint’s efforts to entice customers with their new flat rate monthly plan.