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Sprint announced that it has signed a 7-year long agreement titled “Network Advantage” with Ericsson. Valued between $4.5 billion and $5 billion, the deal will deliver “operational efficiencies” to Sprint, allowing the carrier to “focus on delivering a superior customer experience, innovative services and popular new devices.”
Key elements of Network Advantage are: (from the press release)
- Sprint retains full ownership and control of its network assets, and solely owns network strategy and investment decisions.
- Sprint retains full control of the customer experience, customer technical support and services review.
- Sprint retains technology and vendor selections.
- Ericsson assumes responsibility for the day-to-day services, provisioning and maintenance for the Sprint-owned CDMA, iDEN and wireline networks.
- Ericsson will optimize Sprint’s multi-vendor inventory of assets such as spare parts and transmission equipment, and provide processes and tools for managing the national network platforms and operational support systems.
- About 6,000 Sprint employees will become part of Ericsson Services Inc. sometime in Q3 2009. No force reductions are currently contemplated as a result of this agreement.
In a nutshell, Sprint is outsourcing portion of its network management business to Ericsson, so it could focus on getting more subscribers. Hopefully, that will work for them…
About The Author
Dusan Belic
Dusan has been using smartphones since their introduction and is now following the latest trends in the industry. The "convergence" is what he's most excited about, and writing about it is the next logical thing to do. He thinks that using a smartphone is what everyone who cares about their time should do. In addition to his interests in mobile phones, Dusan also loves to experiment with the latest web and mobile 2.0 services. The idea of accessing and managing your information from any device no matter where you are simply amazes him. Whether it's an online to-do list, note taking service or a video sharing social network, he's there to try it out. He admits though, he's still searching for the ultimate web-based organizational tool, which "sings" perfectly with the mobile PIM application. Dusan used to run SymbianWatch.com which later became part of IntoMobile. He lives in Serbia, South-East Europe, from where he edits the site on a daily basis.
