Sprint to Pay Back $65 Million Due to LightSquare’s LTE Bust
With LightSquared’s hopes of building an LTE network hanging on a thin tearing thread, it looks like the wireless ISP won’t be taking the hit alone. Once officially dead, Sprint will have to pay back $65 million that LightSquared paid last year as part of their partnership that was originally set to run for 15-years. With the FCC gearing up to give LightSquare’s rebuttal a thumbs down, it looks like Sprint will be making a run to the billionaire’s ATM to square things up.
Source: WSJ
Boo Sprint. With the money sprint paid to apple to carry that crap and now this deal falling through I’m extremely worried to be staying with the company in their promise with true 4G.
This decision should have little effect on Sprint’s LTE rollout. It was stated on October 7, 2011 that initial LTE devices launched in 2012 will only support Sprint’s own 1900Mhz A & G bands. As far as the $65 million? As of October 7, 2011 Lightsquared had paid Sprint $290 million.
With this news, I hope we get some kind of statement from Sprint on the status of their LTE. I’ve been following the Lightsquared and Sprint LTE postings, but there seems to be a lot of different information floating around the net on Sprint’s LTE future.
It would be great if Sprintfeed or someone on here could give us an educated analysis and prediction of what the Lightsquared issue this means for Sprint.
Why?
It doesn’t matter whether we like the iPhone or not, carrying it is a necessity for Sprint. It reduces churn from customers leaving Sprint for carriers that do offer the phone, as well as helps attract new customers to Sprint. Both are critical. As far as the costs of the device, are they really that out of line with what AT&T or Verizon are paying? Not likely.
$65 million breakup fee is a pocket change. Lightsquared was only once piece of Sprints 4G plan. They are adding 4G/LTE to their own network, 1900Mhz this year, 800Mhz next year once they finally kill Nextel. Lightsquared and Clearwire are intended to add capacity or bandwidth for Sprint, above and beyond their own network.
As far as their 4G plans, Sprint’s Network Vision upgrades are chugging along with six of the first ten markets already announced. Also the first three LTE capable devices were announced at CES in January, with more possibly announced later this month at MWC and at CTIA in May.
Excatly what I was thinking, technically, it’s not costing Sprint anything. LS gave them $65M, now Sprint is giving it back?
It means very little to Sprint’s LTE plans. Lightsquared was the supplemental ‘plan b’ with Clearwire being the fallback.