Sprint Corporation (1899-2005)

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Sprint Corporation

Type	Defunct (merged)
Founded	1899
Headquarters	Overland Park, KS
Key people	Gary D. Forsee, CEO & Chairman
Industry	Communications Services
Products	Telecommunications
Revenue	$27.4 billion USD (2004)
Employees	60,000
Slogan	One Sprint. Many Solutions.
Website	www.sprint.com

Sprint Corporation (Former NYSE: FON) which is now known as the Sprint Nextel Corporation, was one of the world's largest telecommunication companies. The company was a global communications provider and a major competitor in the American cellular phone market, through its Sprint PCS service based on CDMA and PCS. In addition to that Sprint Corporation was also a local telephone service provider in some smaller markets Sprint Nextel spun off this segment which now goes by the name Embarq. Sprint Corporation was also a Tier 1 internet service provider under the name SprintLink.

Sprint formerly maintained its nationwide PCS presence with the help of affiliates. These smaller companies, in agreement with Sprint, build network infrastructure as well as operate retail stores. In exchange, the smaller companies receive usage of Sprint's brand, radio spectrum, customer service and billing. In most cases, these affiliate carriers were transparent to the end user or consumer. Alamosa PCS was the largest of Sprint's affiliate carriers, the others are Ubiquitel, iPCS, Shentel, Enterprise, Gulf Coast Wireless, Northern PCS, Swiftel, and IWO. In July of 2005, Sprint announced a deal that it would acquire one of its affiliates, US Unwired, for approximately US$1.3 billion.

In the year 2003, Sprint had begun to recombining their business units namely the – local telecom (LTD), long distance/wireline (Global Markets Group), and wireless (PCS) – into a new company, and thereafter marketed the combined company as "One Sprint". In April 2004, the once separately traded wireless tracking stock was reabsorbed into the FON ticker. However, the "One Sprint" initiative was essentially dead, once the announced Sprint-Nextel merger was released; Sprint had decided to spinoff their wireline business to a separate company, while maintaining the long distance and wireless business units into a single company along with NEXTEL Communications.

The Sprint Corporation was based in Overland Park, Kansas. The headquarters housed about 14,500 Sprint employees within approximately four million square feet (400,000 m²) of office space on 240 acres (1 km²). Sprint had also maintained a large presence in Southern Johnson County, Kansas and in the Kansas City Metropolitan Area. Among employees at the campus, the headquarters building was said to often be referred to as 'The Prison' due to its brick design, with nothing to distinguish the buildings from one another.

The soon to be constructed Sprint Center in downtown Kansas City, Missouri is currently the heart of a major controversy whereby a faction of municipal tax payers accuse that the Sprint Corporation, DST and Anschutz Entertainment Group intend to reap major profits via a deal with municipal authorities and then saddle the city's taxpayers with the bond floated to pay for the project. What hasn't been explained by this faction is how Sprint Corporation would reap any profits, as Sprint was supposed to be paying $50 million over twenty years to attach their name to that arena.

1 Executive Team
2 History
3 Major competitors just prior to merger
4 External links

[edit] Executive Team

Chairman and CEO, Gary D. Forsee, 54
President; President and COO, Len J. Lauer, 46
EVP and CFO, Robert J. (Bob) Dellinger, 43

[edit] History

In 1899, Cleyson Brown founded the Brown Telephone Company in the small town of Abilene, Kansas. That company changed its name to United Telecommunications in 1972. In 1986, the company launched its long distance services under the Sprint brandname.

Prior to that Southern Pacific Communications Company (SPCC), a unit of the Southern Pacific Railroad began offering their dial-up service shortly after the Execunet II decision late in 1978. The Railroad had extensive rights of way that could be used to lay long-distance communications. Prior attempts at offering long distance service were disapproved by the Federal Communications Commission, though the company's fax service (SpeedFAX) had been permitted.

The history of the name Sprint is, for the most part, wrong in most telecommunications resources. The "SP" in Sprint had no relation to Southern Pacific whatsoever.

In the late 1970s a contest was created by C. Gus Grant, then President of Southern Pacific Communications, and won by a secretary by the name of Susan Guehrig. The award was a cash prize, which Gus ended up paying out of his pocket. He had no account to charge it to so he was never reimbursed for the payout.

At the time SPCC was only permitted to provide Private Line service and not switched services. With MCI recently releasing EXECUNET SPCC went to court with the FCC to get the right to offer switched services. The reason for the contest was to name the new switched service. The name was derived from Switched PRIvate Network Telecommunications. An advertisement dated 7/76 confirms the source of the name.

The SPRINT service was first marketed to six metropolitan areas, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Anaheim. The switches were located in Los Angeles and New York. A customer was required to have a Private Line connection to one of these switches in order to use the service. An access fee was charged per Private Line. The customer was then billed at 2.6 cents per tenth of a minute increment.

Southern Pacific Communications became part of GTE(Now Verizon Communications) in 1982. In 1986, Sprint was merged with US Telecom (the long distance arm of United Telecom) to form US Sprint. This was a partnership owned by GTE and United Telecom. In 1989 United Telecom purchased controlling interest in US Sprint. In 1991 United Telecom completed its acquisition of US Sprint. That same year United Telecom changed its name to Sprint (dropping the US).

On October 5, 1999 Sprint and MCI WorldCom announced a $129 Billion dollar merger agreement between the two companies. The deal would have been the largest corporate merger in history at the time. The new company was to become WorldCom and would be the largest communications company in the United States. The merger at the time would have put AT&T in the number two spot of largest communications companies in the US for the first time in history. However the deal did not go through because of intense pressure from the US Department of Justice and the EU on concerns of it creating a monopoly. On July 13, 2000. the Board of Directors of both companies acted to terminate the merger. Later on in 2000, MCI WorldCom renamed itself WorldCom without Sprint being part of the company.

On December 15, 2004, Sprint and NEXTEL announced that they would merge and create Sprint Nextel.