Tracy Nolan, president and general manager of Sprint’s Midwest region, joins Episode 13 of Inside Telecom Careers
This episode of Inside Telecom Careers is brought to you by Nexius.
In this week’s episode of Inside Telecom Careers, hosts Karla Macias and Jeff Mucci go inside Sprint Chicago’s $150 million expansion plan and 1,000-plus person workforce expansion. Nolan joins this episode to give us insight into the expansion plan and her role as Sprint’s first local market president.
Nolan describes why Sprint chose Chicago, including the city’s diversity, its focus on technological innovation and the great relationship Sprint has with the city’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Nolan has 21 years of experience in the telecom industry including service as the vice president of HYLA Mobile and president of a joint venture that started the trade-in program at Verizon Wireless, which Nolan mentions has prepared her for the challenges ahead in her new role.
Mucci and Nolan focus on discussing Sprint’s specific initiatives, including deploying a new technology like LTE-Advanced, the three-pronged distribution strategy and building a centralized tech center.
Nolan explains how carrier aggregation is bonding together different spectrum bands to create both higher rates of speed and more capacity. With the recent announcement of the new iPhone launch, Nolan said that this will be the first iPhone to support the tri-band and LTE-Advanced network experience.
Nolan proceeds to explain the distribution strategy that features a new customer engagement model called Direct 2 You. The program provides delivery of handsets and other services straight to the customer, be it at home or at work, by a Sprint rep. Chicago responded very well to this type of customer service and it is becoming a new way of shopping for wireless. The new expansion with RadioShack, creating many new stores within a store will also help drive the distribution strategy.
Lastly, Nolan talks about the 1,000 jobs that will be available with Sprint’s new expansion, including 200 in the centralized tech center. The new tech center will be housed in downtown Chicago and will include network engineers, people working on real estate coordination and project management. The tech center will focus on how to deploy network infrastructure with an emphasis on speed and efficiency.
Wrapping up this episode, Mucci also shares his experience launching new markets and hiring hundreds of people in a short time frame.
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