Hyper inflated bonuses are something you usually hear about when you see guys on Wall Street cashing in their checks, but these days it’s pretty much anyone with a high enough profile job. Take Sprint CEO Dan Hesse for instance. His bonus has been raised this year by $720,000 or nearly 18%, assuming he hits all his targets. One of the targets he used to have was to get as many people as possible to sign up for Clearwire’s 4G services as possible. Sprint holds a majority stake in Clearwire so you can see why this crucial. Dan will no longer be responsible for that. What does mean for Sprint’s 4G service as a whole? Clearwire is in trouble, we all know that, but there’s too much money pumped into the venture at this point to pull the plug this early in the game. There’s talk that Clearwire will sell some of their spectrum to T-Mobile, or at least partner with the operator, and let’s not forget the LTE tests that showed a whopping 90 Mbps download speeds.
Sprint is in a tricky position. They’re the 3rd largest operating in America, one of the two to offer CDMA products, but that whole move to back WiMAX is really coming back to bite them. Verizon decided to go with LTE, which the entire mobile industry is supporting. T-Mobile on the other hand is taking a page out of their European playbook and milking 3G technology for as long as they possibly can thanks to HSPA+, and aren’t even thinking about what’s going to come after that just yet.
Does Dan deserve an increased salary? He already makes over $10 million a year, which is plenty to live off of … unless you want your own jet. Tone it down a little Sprint, and maybe you’ll save your precious 4G network.