Apple has begun shipping Time Capsule, its latest external hard drive that is pretty much the only game in town if you want to do wireless Time Machine backups from your notebook. via CNET News.com
"The CTIA Educational Sessions are designed to explore the complex issues impacting the wireless industry"
The International CTIA WIRELESS 2008 Educational Sessions are the most comprehensive in the industry, addressing the most important issues facing wireless carriers, mobile device and infrastructure ... via SymbianOne
Wall Street fell in early trading Thursday after a pair of reports showed that the economy nearly stalled in late 2007 and that unemployment claims rose last week. via Athens Banner-Herald
Sprint has written down nearly $30 billion related to their 2005 merger with Nextel. That’s “B” as in Boy. Which is pretty much what they paid for Nextel. According to The Wall Street Journal, it’s the ‘Deal From Hell’
The company reported a net loss of $29.45 billion, which is more than its market capitalization. It also suspended its dividend and wrote down an additional $29.7 billion related to the 2005 acquisition of Nextel.
Each side had a market capitalization near $33 billion when they first agreed to merge — now the whole company’s market cap is $25 billion. Sprint’s shares fell today to $7.75, the lowest level since October 2002.
In the years after the acquisition, there was a lot of finger-pointing among the Sprint and Nextel. In the end, it was Sprint’s board that approved the merger.
Nextel started out as simplex (push to talk service) for taxis and other dispatch services, using one or two hill-top, community towers. Then the FCC authorized Nextel to enter commercial cellular service, using multiple neighborhood antennas. But Nextel frequencies adjoin public service frequencies, unlike cellular frequencies.
The Nextel interference problem started when Nextel was allowed to expand into cellular service. As Nextel built out cell towers, nearby, low-power police radios were drown out. The FCC said it wouldn’t be a problem.
Under the Consensus Plan agreed to in 2004, public service agencies will gain use of the 700 and 800 Mhz bands currently operated by Nextel that were causing interference:
Nextel is now consolidating everything into one block of 800 MHz and one block of 1.9GHz frequencies. Nextel agreed to give the Treasury $4.8 billion (for no additional spectrum), less $2.5 billion for their estimated moving costs. Nextel is now shifting their current interfering frequencies to clear contiguous blocks at 800MHz and 1.9 GHz.
But 1.9GHz is currently used by television broadcasters for live microwave links. So Nextel agreed to pay all costs associated with corporate media’s “rebanding of 2 GHz“. Broadcasters pay nothing for their new gear or microwave frequencies.
The frequency move has not gone well, says the Wall Street Journal. All sides acknowledge they hadn’t anticipated just how difficult making changes would be.
As if that weren’t bad enough, Qwest could take its 824,000 wireless subscribers from Sprint to rival Verizon Wireless next year when its current mobile virtual network operator agreement expires, reports RCR News.
Related DailyWireless articles include; Sprint-Nextel to Merge, Sprint-tel: Done Deal?, Sprint Forces Forsee Out, The OTHER Public Safety Band, Nextel Accepts Consensus Swap.
With the revenue drop, Sprint said it would stop paying quarterly dividends to stockholders for the foreseeable future.
"The fourth-quarter financial results reflect the challenges facing our wireless business," said new CEO Dan Hesse, who has only been at the helm for two months. "To be perfectly frank, the issues we face are more difficult than what I had expected to find."
Sprint is in the process of making significant changes to improve execution, stabilize the customer base and deliver on the opportunity provided by its infrastructure and spectrum assets, Hesse said. "Additionally, we are taking steps to increase our financial flexibility and mitigate refinancing risk by borrowing funds from a revolving credit facility," he added.
Customer Defections
Sprint's wireless subscriber base lost 108,000 customers in the fourth quarter. What's more, the carrier's post-paid subscriber churn now stands at 2.3 percent -- the highest rate among North America's top wireless networks.
"Most important to our brand is delivering a good customer experience across all touch points," Hesse told financial analysts during a conference call. "Improving the customer experience is job 1 at Sprint."
"We are taking the customer-defection issue very seriously and we are addressing it with great urgency," Hesse said. "Not only does it cost us money to answer calls to customer care, but it also means a customer is not happy with something and is likely to leave us."
Removing Barriers
Though the company's deteriorating business conditions are more than he expected, Hesse indicated he is ready to fight. To stem...
C/Net says last week’s spy satellite shootdown left some questions hanging in the air.
Was the mission really necessary? Was it worth the cost? How much of a threat was the hydrazine fuel, really? Did we escalate a space weapons race? Here are some opinions:
DailyWireless has more here and here. Wired’s Danger Room had the best coverage. Noah Shachtman has a passion for the subject. Blog Runner has more.
I know nothing about rocket science.
But I can search the internet and read The Washington Post, The New York Times, Center for Defense Information, and Aviation Week — just like everyone else.
Skeptics say the administration had other reasons to shoot down the satellite — to destroy secret equipment onboard or to test ASAT defenses. Those seem like legitimate reasons.
I understand there has to be a judgment call. There are often serious, negative political repercussions to being honest. Sometimes a “cover story” simply has to be concocted.
But it could have been handled better, with less dismissiveness to the general public.
It made NASA look stupid. Why should we believe anything they say. The agency now seems more like an arm of the military. Soon a disaffected contractor may expose NASA for what it actually is.
That story will now have a lot more credibility. NASA did it to themselves.
WiMAX.com has a global map of WiMAX deployments from Maravedis, which operates the WiMAXCounts site.
More than 250 trials and deployments of WiMAX technologies exist today, according to Intel and the WiMAX Forum.
The WiMAXCounts online subscription service tracks over 250 broadband wireless access (BWA) operators around the world. Each operator profile includes the company’s spectrum holdings, deployment cities, service offerings, and pricing.
Science educator Roy Gould and Microsoft’s Curtis Wong give an astonishing sneak preview of Microsoft’s new WorldWide Telescope. Yes, it’s the demo that made Robert Scoble cry.
WWT combines feeds from satellites and telescopes all over the world and the heavens, and weaves them together holistically to build a comprehensive view of our universe. Blog Runner has more.
Sprint has joined the $99/month club, for unlimited mobile connectivity. But it’s not just unlimited voice — like AT&T and Verizon, or voice + SMS — like T-Mobile, it’s everything — voice, data, text, Sprint TV, GPS and more.
“Simply Everything” is available today to both CDMA and iDEN customers, and is open to existing and new subscribers.
According to Dan Hesse, president and CEO, Sprint Nextel, “Wireless today is about much more than just voice. It is about data services - texting, email, video, pictures, music, navigation, surfing the Web and more. Customers want these applications, but without complexity and without having to worry about their bill”.
DailyWireless has more on the Unlimited War.
Sprint Nextel wrote off $29.7 billion in the fourth-quarter as the struggling wireless carrier acknowledged how much its business has eroded over the past couple of years.
The Overland Park company on Thursday reported that sales for the fourth quarter were $9.8 billion, down 6 percent from a year ago.
Sales for 2007 totaled $34.7 billion, down 1 percent from 2006.
The company said it is 'discontinuing declaring a dividend for the foreseeable future.'
Earlier this year Sprint warned investors that it was preparing to take a massive accounting charge, saying it would involve 'a substantial portion and possibly all' of the $31 billion in goodwill it carried on its books. Read more
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