8:00 AM – T-Mobile is already changing the game with no contracts and many other things that major carriers have not offered. While T-Mobile is trying hard to change the game and it seems 2013 was their year, Sprint CEO Hesse has something to say about 2014.
On Tuesday at an investors conference in New York (via CNET), Sprint CEO Dan Hesse stated that while Sprint has been bleeding customers, he believes that 2014 will be the year the carrier makes a come back. He also goes on to state that 2013 has been a year for Sprint to initiate a rebuilt process, and 2014 is when the company will truly start to shine and get back in the game.
“What we are going through right now is a massive buildout that is causing some short-term pain for long-term gain,” CEO Hesse said. “This is personally painful for me. We have worked so hard to improve customer satisfaction.”
The company’s biggest advantage over AT&T and Verizon is unlimited data. Sprint has been offering ‘truly’ unlimited data to all of its customers for quite a while now. The company’s LTE network is very limited right now to specific big markets, however this new Sprint Spark technology is a new hope for the carrier. While the company does offer unlimited data, it’s quite useless if the data speeds are not there. Sprint’s 3G network is utterly useless with data as the CDMA network support average speed of 2-3 MBPS downloads and even slower uploads. The company’s LTE network performs well, but is limited right now.
“What’s been frustrating is when we come out with something like ‘unlimited data for life,’ and then we have network issues,” CEO Hesse said. “Unfortunately, we have to go through this hard period of time, so we face a headwind that our competitors don’t have.”
The carrier plans to deploy Sprint Spark to over 100 large cities in the United States. Currently, the markets that already host the service are New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Tampa, and Miami.
Sprint also received a very large investment of $21.6 billion from SoftBank. After Shareholders approved the investment, fast forward six months, we are finally starting to see some change in the company’s attitude. SoftBank controls around 80 percent of Sprint, has given the No. 3 carrier a mandate to build the fastest and most robust LTE network in the U.S.
So is 2014 really the year for Sprint?
