T-Mobile will start phasing out the Sprint brand this summer

[Shawn Knight]

Bottom line: Newly minted T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert said during an investor event this week that the company will start winding down the Sprint brand this summer. The Sprint name has been around for decades but as is common in the wireless industry, the brand will soon be set out to pasture.

Sievert said that on the consumer side, the plan was always to make the transition during the summer. Covid-19, however, prompted executives to push the timeframe back into mid-summer from early summer. “This is when we will essentially be advertising one flagship postpaid T-Mobile brand as well as operating a unified fleet of retail,” Sievert added.

The retail aspect is what ultimately made T-Mobile pump the brakes a bit, he noted.

T-Mobile wrapped up its merger with fourth-ranked Sprint on April 1 after clearing a number of regulatory hurdles. Upon closing, longtime CEO John Legere stepped down, passing the baton to Sievert to had previously served as chief operating officer.

We’re still waiting to see what Legere’s encore career consists of. Considering the stellar job he did with T-Mobile and the overall impact he had on the wireless industry, most any company would be fortunate to have him at the helm.

When asked about the competitive landscape, Sievert said he views T-Mobile as the insurgent. “That’s our mindset every day when we come to work. It’s how do we change the game and be able to rescue people from AT&T, Verizon and big cable. Nothing’s changed about that… we’re just a little bigger now.”

Big cable could indeed mix up the field in the wireless industry. Comcast launched its Xfinity Mobile service in 2017 and the T-Mobile / Sprint merger paved the way for Dish Network to try its hand at wireless.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/85248-t-mobile-start-phasing-out-sprint-brand-summer.html

 

[QuantumPhysics]

I've never had good memories of Sprint. Back in the 90's and into early 2000's it was nothing more than terrible customer service and ruining people's credit.
I had considered buying into Sprint because of the 5G evolution and treating it as a 5G stock, but now, thanks to Techspot, I'm absolutely not doing that!

Thanks Techspot!

 

[mctommy]

Previously worked at T-Mobile.

The salespitch of creating jobs through the merger is BS. Sprint outsourced its call centers pre-merger, the new T-Mobile is bringing those jobs in-house thus "creating jobs". Quite a bit of stores will have to close since they are literally next to one another so CSR jobs at those stores will be lost. Covid19 is only going to accelerate the end of those stores.

Merger was always about buying Sprint for its spectrum.

Dish Network as a 4th wireless competitor is a joke. They will be glorified MNVO for years to come seeing as you don't deploy cell towers overnight... not in 3 years... not in 5 years.

It will never be viable for T-Mobile to become a home internet provider... because utilization of bandwidth on their tower goes through hardlines which are in part owned by the telco (verizon, comcast, AT&T, Centurylink, etc...). So giving people 500gb/month to have wireless home internet will not be making them any money or it will cost the end user more than your comcast internet bill.

Jobs will be temporarily gain for third-party vendors that are handling the infrastructure decomm of the cell towers, the decomm of the stores, and the consultants brought in to "optimized" the workforce (aka layoffs).

 

[PEnnn]

Good riddance to Sprint. Many telcos are nasty, but Sprint takes the crown.

 

[Fuzzy Dunalap]

Good riddance to Sprint. Many telcos are nasty, but Sprint takes the crown.

Thats because after it bought out Nextel (a move motivated by greed), the folks that owned and ran Sprint had no idea what they are doing. Softbank bought it and THEY still didn't know what to do and thats the problem.

Companies get greedy, dont know what the hell they are doing, and it's the consumers that lose. T-Mobile STILL has no idea what it's doing. And I mean aside from offering a service that sometimes work (yes, they have serious coverage issues outside of cities and major population centers).

Like someone said, they did a piss poor job of investing into their own infrastructure and still couldn't get the job done. They are looking for ways to stop the bleeding so they bought Sprint.

In three years, they are going to be looking for someone to either buy them out (again) or drum up major investments. Because Sprints network is horrible.

 

[candle_86]

Good riddance sprint, you will not be missed. Now if TMobile would just retire metro everything would be ok.

 

[toooooot]

What will happen with all the CDMA towers? Will they just be dismantled/upgraded to GSM?
Anyone with the field experience knows?

 

[Hardware Geek]

Can't wait for the merger to be complete so I can hopefully access the t-mobile towers on my sprint phone.

 

[ShagnWagn]

People on Sprint's own headquarters have always been having to use internal wireless because their Sprint cell phones don't get signal. Will tmobile finally fix it to where headquarters finally gets cell signal? lol