Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We hope you enjoy it!
And without further ado:
Sprint this week announced its second quarter fiscal results, which when compared with the third fiscal results posted by its nationwide rivals (don’t ask) showed Sprint still has a ways to go in terms of being a real rival.
The latest results did show and Sprint was quick to tout its first quarterly increase in postpaid “phone” customers in more than 2 years, though the way it reached that increase was a bit questionable. More importantly, Sprint showed improvements in postpaid customer churn and managed to trim its net losses on a year-over-year basis. (Though, I guess to compare anything with how Sprint was doing a year ago is faint praise.)
Sure, Sprint has a lot (a lot!) of issues it still needs to overcome and the current plans to cut at least $2 billion in operating expenses over the next year is going to bring about a lot of ugly press for the carrier. I know there have already been off-the-cuff comments about changes at company headquarters highlighting those cuts, including a reduction in the number of garbage cans, and doing away with executive limo rides and snacks. (The horror!)
But, this week I realized I have grown tired of using this column to bash Sprint for its missteps. Instead I want to use at least part of this column to throw some love Sprint’s way.
Look, Sprint appears to be making the hard decisions necessary to turn around operations that are still haunted by Sprint’s questionable acquisition of Nextel a decade ago. The people currently in charge of the company were not involved in that decision, but are having to continue the process of cleaning up the mess.
The job cuts associated with Sprint’s expense cutting plans will be the most difficult part of the process to ignore, and trust that RCR Wireless News will not forgo reporting those ramifications as part of our daily news coverage. But, it’s obvious that Sprint has been running a bloated organization for sometime and it appears to finally be in a position to align its operational expenses with its operational needs.
The iDEN network is gone and shuttered, and the Clearwire/WiMAX debacle is also close to being cleared up. Soon Sprint will only be running two separate networks (CDMA and LTE), which at some point will lead to the nirvana of just one network based on LTE.
Sprint is obviously not quite there yet, and there is no guarantee it will ever get there. But, at least for this column, let’s all join in and at least showing a bit of affection for Sprint and get on the love train.
Editor’s Note: Bashing of Sprint will continue next week.
Thanks for checking out this week’s Worst of the Week column. Here is a quick, but satisfying extra:
–Not a day seems to go by where I am not faced with the term “5G” in some form or another. Nearly every telecom equipment vendor has used 5G in some way to tout either what it’s doing now or what it plans to do in the future, despite the fact that there has yet to be any work done on defining the technical requirements for 5G.
I have for the most part attempted to brush aside these moves by putting quotes around the term and making sure that we are RCR Wireless News in some way remind our readers that the current use of 5G is mere marketing hype. It was also heartening this week to see that I am not alone in my anguish over the 5G term as well-known telecom industry analyst Iain Gillott put out his own views on the move with an opinion piece efficiently titled “Please can we kill 5G?”
This week, the “G” thing took a step back as Huawei went gung ho in touting its “4.5G” solutions, even going so far as stating the term had garnered approval from 3GPP. However, when checking in on the 3GPP site to glean more insight into 4.5G, all I could come up with were references to what it was labeling LTE-Advanced Pro, and nothing in terms of 4.5G. So there’s that.
Now, I will give Huawei some credit for refraining from making the 5G plunge in speaking about LTE-based technology enhancements that many of its competitors would gladly label as 5G, but in truth the term 4.5G is probably worse.
There will never be a 4.5G standard. That’s not how the International Telecommunications Union works, and they are the ones who are tasked with establishing the “G” requirements. There was a time when vendors were staking claims to 2.5G, 2.75G, 3.25G, 3.5G and 3.75G, all of which were just different variations of either 2G and 3G or one side of the “technology wars” trying to take a dig at the other side. All very childish, which is its only redeeming quality.
So I will second Gillott’s comments and lobby for vendors to get more creative with the names of their technology advancements. Move above the “G” fracas and turn the attention of your marketing departments away from just copping out with a new “G” and crank up that creativity.
I welcome your comments. Please send me an e-mail at dmeyer@rcrwireless.com.
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