Time4aNAPPremium
join:2007-04-09
Des Plaines, IL | reply to BillRoland
Re: Reality is setting in said by BillRoland:They (Sprint) still don't have a clue how to run the iDEN network nor how to deal with the iDEN customer base. Hey. I'll give Nextel props for finding an innovative way to repurpose land mobile frequencies in order to compete with the fledgling AMPS cellular industry. That was a bold move. But let's face reality. Times have changed.
IDEN is a last-ditch effort by Motorola to maintain Nextel as a cash cow. The technology is proprietary, non-interoperable and neither fish nor fowl. It combines all of the worst liabilities of non-cellular mobile telephony, TDMA and GSM, while offering absolutely no benefit whatsoever from either. (What good is a CIM when you must purchase your phone from a single vendor?) It should go away, and give those frequencies back to the land mobile market that needs them badly.
They continue to expend tons of resources on deploying EVDO (which makes little sense to me if you tell everyone you're going to be building out a WiMAX network next year that is going to obsolete your EVDO network) Hold on there, chief. EV-DO has only recently begun to cover major metropolitan areas. Suburban and rural customers are still stuck with 1xRTT. Do you really think that WiMAX is going to just magically appear overnight, all debugged and ready for service? If so, you've been snorting too much WiMAX pixie dust.
The fact of the matter is that EV-DO will still play a very important role in Sprint's mobile data services during the decade or so that it will realistically take to build out a WiMAX infrastructure. Let's not forget that, unlike EV-DO, WiMAX has yet to prove itself in the real world.
Investors are right to be worried, this is a company that has only proved one thing: it cannot execute on anything. I know I'll get bashed by the Sprint faithful, but please understand I'm just telling you the facts of life. One of those facts of life that you have so conveniently glossed over is that it's the investors who control every publicly-held company. Maybe if Sprint's shareholders stopped pretending that they're venture capitalists (yes, I noticed the spin--"investors"), and let the professionals do what they're supposed to do, there would be no cause for concern. As it stands, their only cause for worry is the spoiled fruits of their own meddling.
I have been saying for quite a while now that Sprint WiMAX wasn't going to materialize, or, at least not as it was being presented, so I'm not surprised to see these headlines starting to show up. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it's precisely that kind of defeatist mindset perpetrated by clueless shareholders that has put Sprint in jeopardy. What I can't figure out is why so-called "investors" are so determined to lose their investments. I guess this is one case where ego has overpowered greed. |
