Sprint continues to expand its in-home sales and service effort, making a trip to its retail stores a thing of the past. The carrier's Direct 2 You home delivery option is heading to seven more cities: Charlotte, Cincinnati, Las Vegas, Nashville, New Orleans, Pittsburgh and Salt Lake City.
Sprint today announced that the carrier will begin throttling the company's "unlimited" wireless data customers after they consume more than 23 GB of data in a month. According to a Sprint blog post by Sprint CTO John Shaw, users on unlimited data plans will be throttled after 23 GB for the remainder of their billing period, but only in instances where there's network congestion.
Back in April Sprint announced that the company was testing a program to make house calls named "Direct 2 You" in its home town of Kansas City. According to the company's original announcement, "Sprint Direct 2 You" technicians will set up an appointment to come to your home, after which they'll install and configure all your devices, including the transfer of all old contacts, devices and apps.
As we've noted for some time, Sprint is poised to shut down its now outdated Clearwire network as it shifts all of its customers to LTE and refarms that spectrum. While most customers are simply making the jump to Sprint's LTE network (or a competitor), Sprint is now facing a new lawsuit (pdf) claiming the shutdown will harm hundreds of thousands of low-income Americans by severing a current deal Clearwire had with two non-profits, Mobile Beacon and Mobile Citizen.
The two non-profits own spectrum that was granted to them by the FCC to aid educational connectivity. Both outfits struck a 30 year deal with Clearwire back in 2006, before it was acquired by Sprint. Under this deal, the non-profits leased their spectrum to Clearwire, in exchange for payments and discounted mobile hotspots and service.
The FTC today announced that Sprint has agreed to pay $2.95 million for violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act. According to the FTC, Sprint failed to inform those consumers who were placed in a special program for those with lower credit scores -- and charged an extra monthly fee. Customers with bad credit are placed in the company's Account Spending Limit (ALS) program and are charged an $8.00 monthly fee, something Sprint failed to disclose.
Sprint today took the wraps off a $20, unlimited wireless broadband data option the company claims "beats all national carriers." Looking at the company's press release, users on these new Starter Unlimited Data Plans can pay $20 for unlimited LTE data, but after 1 GB of usage users will find themselves throttled back to 2G (read: 50-100 kbps or less) speeds for the remainder of their billing cycle. Additional data is $15 per each gigabyte.
As part of the company's attempt to trim $2.5 billion in operating expenses, Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure has started not only laying off employees, butcutting back their severance packages. Claure's even been demanding that employees "manage their own trash," as Sprint claws its way to profitability. There will be no raises this year at Sprint, and out of pocket health care costs will be going up for most employees, contributing to an air of annoyance among carrier rank and file.
SoftBank, Sprint's Japanese parent company, made a ton of profit over the last three months, but not as much profit as people were expecting. That's largely due to it having to carry Sprint on its back, since the network has gone from plucky bronze medalist to sitting in the doldrums of fourth place in America's hotly-contested carrier wars. In order to try and reduce the amount of red printer ink that Marcelo Claure (pictured, right) has to buy, SoftBank has ordered a "sustainable run rate reduction" of more than $2 billion. In order words, the company is about to have to learn how to do a lot more with a heck of a lot less cash.
Way back in 2004 I wrote about how a technology named WiMax was being over-hyped. Intel execs, after all, at one point proclaimed it was the "greatest invention since the Internet itself," and insisted it would revolutionize the telecom industry. Eleven years later Wimax has been well-supplanted by LTE technologies, and Sprint today is shuttering the last vestiges of the Wimax legacy: the remaining dregs of the Clear network.
The majority of the network gets shut down today, and Sprint will repurpose the spectrum for use in its LTE operations.
As we noted yesterday, a small portion of the network will remain operational after a Judge filed an emergency injunction on the behalf of several non profits, who were leasing Sprint spectrum in exchange for discounted service Sprint planned to discontinue offering -- without a new arrangement.
Sprint tells Fierce Wireless that the company started notifying customers of the shutdown several years ago, but admits a "small percent remain on WiMAX."