Not a week passes by now without new clues of Sprint's fate appearing; will Sprint even be around as a relatively significant brand in five years?
Following the news of Sprint seeing a decline in subscriber numbers in the first quarter of 2008 and subsidies being slashed on select cell phones, a user on sprintusers.com today posted an interesting piece of information:
"Sprint reserves the right to limit throughput speeds or amount of data transferred and to deny, terminate, modify, or suspend service if usage exceeds 5GB per month in total or 300MB/month while off-network roaming. Check your subscriber agreement rights on Sprint.com"
At first sight, even a trained eye could take this as a way of alienating its data subscribers, but is that Sprint's real intention? We don't think so. In the long run, there's no point in offering attractive tethered modem services via EV-DO at the same time as you're going to sell subscriptions for a new nationwide Mobile WiMAX network. So this could be a sign of Sprint streamlining its current services, before adding another.
However, if we have the option between a boring Mobile WiMAX device with limited possibilities on a Power-Vision-Xohm-Nextel-Direct-Connect subscription, and a fancy Mobile WiMAX device with unlimited possibilities (we assume Google will ensure openness) on a Clearwire Mobile WiMAX subscription, we'll obviously choose the latter.
Only time will tell whether we in five years own and use a Sprint branded device. And that's the main reason why Sprint owns 51% of Clearwire. They'll win either way.
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