The US's third biggest wireless phone and data carrier announced its latest financial results and the numbers were not good. Bloomberg reports that Sprint Nextel had a net loss of $847 million for the quarter that ended on June 30, well below the estimates from Wall Street analysts. This is the 15th straight financial quarter that the company has recorded a loss. The company also said it lost 101,000 wireless customers that had monthly contracts for the quarter which again was below the estimates of losing 25,000 customers.
Sprint is losing customers rapidly to the two biggest wireless carriers; Verizon, which added a whopping 1.3 million customers last quarter, and AT&T, which added 331,000 customers in the same quarter. Both Verizon and AT&T are now selling the popular iPhone which Sprint currently does not have access to sell from Apple. Sprint is currently the only major wireless carrier that offers a truly unlimited monthly data plan for new customers. Sprint has also expressed its opposition to AT&T's proposed merger with the US's fourth biggest wireless carrier T-Mobile.
In related news, Sprint has finally and officially announced a deal with the wholesale wireless company Lightsquared. The 15 year deal will start with Lightsquared paying Sprint $9 billion in cash and $4.5 billion in credits to help construct Lightsquared's 4G LTE based network. In exchange Sprint will provide network services and other help to Lightsquared and can use the credits to purchase access to some of Lightsquared's LTE network. Currently Sprint uses a WiMax based network for its 4G access.
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