Ending what's been a long and often thorny relastionship, Sprint has agreed to acquire Sprint affiliate iPCS for $426 million. The Schaumburg, Illinois based company was the last major Sprint affiliate, offering Sprint service to roughly 700,000 customers in the Midwest. In 2008 iPCS legally got Sprint to stop advertising its Nextel service in iPCS territory, arguing it was a breach of contract. iPCS also filed an unsuccessful suit to stop Sprint's creation of the spun-off Mobile WiMax Clearwire venture. The companies will freeze all ongoing litigation "with a final resolution to become effective upon closing of the acquisition," according to Marketwatch.

Following closely behind the Mobile WiMax launches of their spun-off Clearwire unit, Sprint this morning announced that they've launched "4G" wireless broadband services in ten additional cities. According to Sprint statements, the faster broadband service is now available in Salem, Oregon; Milledgeville, Georgia; and the Texas cities of Amarillo, Killeen-Temple, Corpus Christi, Lubbock, Waco, Wichita Falls, Abilene and Midland-Odessa.

Sprint was the first wireless carrier to embrace femtocell technology, their Airave service debuting back in 2007 and allowing unlimited mobile calls over a user's home broadband connection for an additional $15 per month. Now Sprint tells Unstrung they'll be the first to offer 3G femtocell service, allowing not only improved voice signal strength in the home -- but improved EVDO/data phone connectivity as well.

Like the iPhone, the Pre doesn't officially support tethering, which leads people who just spent a significant amount of money for a "next-generation" device to naturally explore how to make it happen. Pre Thinking notes that Palm has "politely" warned the folks behind the Pre Dev Wiki that they can't talk about unofficial Pre tethering -- for fear of angering the people at Sprint.

According to rumors posted by Phone News, the Pre may be dropping on either May 17 or June 29, depending on stocking and sale logistics. According to the Pre Thinking blog, employees are busy being trained for the launch. Meanwhile, on the PR front, Sprint has ditched the ads featuring Sprint CEO Dan Hesse and is now running a somewhat more playful ad campaign. The company is hoping the Pre launch can play a central role in restoring their brand image after the botched Nextel acquisition resulted in a significant number of annoyed customer defections.

Not too surprisingly, Sprint's 4G phone buildout is largely going to mirror that of their spun-off Clearwire mobile WiMax venture, according to a press release issued by the company this morning. Earlier this month, Clearwire announced they'd be deploying their network -- currently only available in Baltimore and Portland -- into eight additional markets this year.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Sprint is canning their new series of ads, which feature Sprint CEO Dan Hesse waxing poetic about the nature of mobile broadband. The ads were chosen by Sprint at an interesting time -- with the company facing customers backlash due to their dysfunctional acquisition of Nextel, and consumer faith in executives at a low point because of the financial meltdown. Hesse says that the ads have been successful for brand recognition, but that they were cut because consumers will "get tired of seeing that guy."

Early last year, mobile carriers began fighting for customers by offering $99 unlimited service bundle plans, which included national calling, unlimited SMS/MMS, data, text, e-mail, and Web-surfing. Sprint's $99 "Simply Everything" plan at the time didn't include PAM/DUN tethering or data card access, so this morning they unveiled a new $150 Simply Everything plan that includes 3G data for laptops. It's not a particularly mind-blowing deal, though Sprint was at least nice enough to stop making references to "unlimited data" and cite their new 5GB usage cap (implemented last August) clearly in the press release.

JD Power and Associates has released their latest Customer Care survey, which tracks wireless satisfaction among some 13,000 customers. The rankings place T-Mobile highest in wireless customer care performance with a score of 755 out of 1,000, thanks largely to short hold times.

Sprint Nextel this morning announced that the company is cutting about 8,000 positions in an attempt to cut costs by around $1.2 billion. Sprint, still suffering from their botched acquisition of Nextel, says it will complete the layoffs (which account for 14% of their 56,000 employees) by March 31. Sprint says they haven't completely decided where all of the cuts will come from, but will try to avoid reducing customer support staff. "Labor reductions are always the most difficult action to take, but many companies are finding it necessary in this environment," proclaims Sprint CEO Dan Hesse.

Thanks to tough state-level laws, the occasional mean Attorney General and class action suits, wireless carriers have been forced to change their ETF policies, and now usually reduce the early termination penalty by a certain amount each month you're under contract. Carriers still faced class action laswuits in several states, which they unsuccessfully tried to kill by lobbying the FCC to pass wimpy federal-level guidelines that would pre-empt tougher state laws. When that didn't work, carriers began to settle -- Verizon settling their suit for $21 million, while Sprint yesterday settled for $17.5 million in an effort to derail a nationwide $1 billion ETF suit.

Sprint and Clearwire today announced that they've completed their merger of Clearwire and XOHM, in order to create a new nationwide mobile WiMax operator. The companies repeated that the new company hopes to deliver wireless broadband service to 140 million people within thirty months. The completion of the network will be greatly aided by a $3.2 billion investment Comcast ($1.05 billion), Intel ($1 billion), Time Warner Cable ($550 million), Google ($500 million), and Bright House Networks ($100 million.)

Things are already fairly tense at Sprint, the company last quarter losing 1.3 million customers, witnessing a 12% drop in revenue, and battling a midwest CDMA affiliate named iPCS over WiMax and 3G deployment rights. Now John Garcia, president of Sprint Nextel's CDMA business unit, has "abruptly" left the company for undisclosed reasons. Sprint is also facing a new class action lawsuit by employees who claim they were cheated out of sales commissions because of a Sprint computer screwup. Employees believe they're owed in excess of $5 million in lost commissions.

Sprint's battle with a midwest CDMA affiliate named iPCS probably isn't what the struggling carrier needs right now. Just last week iPCS managed to force Sprint to shutter their Nextel network in eighty one markets where iPCS operates. Earlier this year iPCS also filed suit to stop Sprint's plan to create a national mobile WiMax business, aka New-Super-Mega-Ultra Clearwire. This week an Illinois court blocked iPCS's effort, though Telephony Online reports the fight is far from over, and iPCS could block deployment in any of their markets such as Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Sprint's third quarter earnings indicate that customers continue to flee from the struggling wireless provider, the company losing 1.3 million net customers -- slightly more than Wall Street analysts expected. The company posted a net loss of $326 million, their churn (or customer turnover) rate jumped from 2 to 2.15%, and the company's quarterly wireless revenues fell to $6.8 billion (total revenues were $8.8 billion), down 3% from last quarter and 13% from last year. Most of these numbers will likely be made worse when Sprint finally gets around to pro-rating their ETF system later this year.

Earlier this week, we noted that due to some tough state consumer protection laws (and resulting lawsuits by State Attorneys General), most wireless carriers had started pro-rating their early termination fees (ETFs). Except Sprint that is, who claims that billing system complexities have prevented it from happening. Critics charge that Sprint, already reeling from their botched Nextel deal, simply didn't want to take the subscriber hit. Responding to criticism that Sprint was slacking, CEO Dan Hesse yesterday promised the Associated Press they "could" have pro-rated ETFs in place "as soon as December," which is probably code for Spring.

Sprint's acquisition of Nextel was one of the worst telecom decisions in recent years, with the merger offering consumers little more than an endless stream of customer support headaches. The Wall Street Journal called it "the deal from hell;" the company being worth $35 billion when acquired in 2005, compared to a value of $5 billion today. It now appears that Sprint is ready to sell Nextel to Latin American service provider NII Holdings and private equity firms, provided a buyer takes a significant chunk of Sprint debt with them.

Some 600 Motorola WiMax base stations are ready for operation in Chicago, the next market set to launch after Sprint introduced the service in Baltimore on Monday. Additional reviews are coming out that seem pleased with network performance, but unsurprisingly gripe about network coverage. Meanwhile, in response to consumer advocate complaints that XOHM's AUP gives Sprint the right to throttle P2P, Sprint says "We are not targeting specific applications or services." Like most ISPs, Sprint isn't being any more specific on how exactly they'll tackle network congestion, but gives themselves ample leeway in their AUP's fine print.

Laptop Magazine gives Sprint's new XOHM mobile WiMax network in Baltimore a test run using a Nokia N810 WiMAX tablet. The reviewer put XOHM head to head with Verizon EVDO service, and not too surprisingly, XOHM came out on top across the board.

After Comcast's run-in with the FCC over their throttling of upstream P2P traffic, consumer advocates would have you believe a major battle was won and we've entered a new phase of ISPs being completely transparent about how and when they manage network traffic. The reality is that even ISPs that do exactly what Comcast got slammed for doing (TCP packet forgery, like Cox) can apparently get away with continuing the practice -- as long as they include nebulous language in their acceptable use policies.