Sprint is dead. Long live Sprint When any big company goes down, it's impossible to point to any single cause and say "that's it, that was the mistake." There are always a hundred "if but for" examples you could point to. I have often pointed to Sprint's gigantic bet on WiMAX as the 4G technology of the future when LTE is what ultimately won out. I think that hurt Sprint's chances but I also recognize that it's an oversimplification to just say that WiMAX did it. You could do the same thing with the Nextel acquisition, too. So rather than a post-mortem, I want to celebrate Sprint's glory days. Because once upon a time, Sprint was by far the best carrier for nerds who were into smartphones. I'm talking about the days before and just after the iPhone — so yes, this is praise for a time that's more than a decade behind us now. But in those mid-to-late-aughts days, there was no better place to be a smartphone user than on Sprint. Verizon was literally turning off GPS and limiting Bluetooth while Cingular (soon to be AT&T) was struggling to figure out how to prepare its network for the iPhone onslaught. Both charged a lot of money to use their networks. And T-Mobile, well, it was doing its damnedest to get sold off to AT&T. Sprint, meanwhile, had a really solid CDMA 3G network, charged less than its competitors, and didn't try to break smartphone functionality left and right in a bid to upsell you on its own services. If there was such a thing as "uncarrier" in those days, it was Sprint. And actually, I want to just mention that Sprint was more willing to work with people who had questionable credit, too. Sometime that could feel a little predatory, but often it meant that people who would otherwise not have access to a cell phone could get one. I base that observation not just on my own experience (I was very bad with money!), but on what I saw in the community that formed around Sprint. In those pre-Reddit and pre-Twitter days, we hung out on various vBulletin forums — shout out to Howardforums in particular. Many of us came to those communities because we were looking for the not-so-secret program called SERO — the Sprint Employee Referral Option. It was a way to save some money on your bill and it wasn't that hard to acquire if you could talk to the right person. But while you were hustling your way into a SERO plan, you discovered a group of people who were just as excited about the latest Windows Mobile or PalmOS smartphone as you were. It sounds (and is) quaint, but the combination of all of these things was a big deal. Sprint genuinely made technology more accessible to a wider swath of people than other US carriers. Were it not for its prices, its openness to new technology, and the communities that formed around those two things, I probably wouldn't be writing these words to you right now. Sprint even had 2008's version of a disruptive plan, the "Simply Everything" plan that offered unlimited voice, texting, and data — a relative rarity in those days. Whatever fight was in Sprint dissipated ten years later as it quietly prepared itself for a T-Mobile acquisition. Sprint was never mighty and never quite managed to compete successfully against its larger competitors. But for a time it served an underserved group of people when other carriers wouldn't. Ex-T-Mobile CEO John Legere deserves credit for turning that company around and taking up much of the work that Sprint started. He got attention by cursing while wearing a bright pink T-Shirt. But take a moment to remember that ex-Sprint CEO Dan Hesse got attention by calmly walking the streets of New York in black and white. Rest in peace, Sprint. | 
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