Dean wrote:
> Believe it or not, I'd really rather not see Sprint go belly-up.
>
> I'm sure competition is a major reason VZW still offers decent
> value-for-money. Not a bargain, mind you, but at least a fairly decent
> package.

Sprint has thus far avoided getting into a real price war, other than
its SERO program which not many people know about. They may want to
think about going low-overhead and not having _any_ standalone stores,
and then competing agressively on price.

One big problem for Sprint is that they are so heavily dependent on
Verizon for roaming in areas where Sprint has no presence.

If Sprint's market value and market share continue to fall, then they'd
make a good acquisition candidate for Verizon, but not at the current
valuation.

> Around here (NW suburb of NYC), Nextel is considered to be a "work phone" or
> "electronic leash" for PTT with mediocre phone capabilities, T-Mo is for
> kids, and Sprint is hardly on the map. Very few people I know have Cingular,
> though I know they are huge too.

Remember, Cingular had no NYC network until they partnered with
Voicestream/T-Mobile back in the 1990's, and did an agreement where
T-Mobile got to use Cingular's western 1900 MHz GSM network, and
Cingular got to use T-Mobile's NYC network. At the same time, AT&T
Wireless was suffering from huge capacity problems in NYC with their
TDMA network, and was hemorrhaging customers to Verizon, which had the
advantage of CDMA technology which can carry a lot more voice calls in
the same bandwidth. These are the reasons why Cingular and AT&T are
relatively weak in the NYC area, even though they've since solved their
capacity issues.