Sprint Terminates Relationship With LightSquared - The UpStream

Sprint Terminates Relationship With LightSquared

posted Saturday Mar 17, 2012 by Scott Ertz

Sprint Terminates Relationship With LightSquared

It would appear that this week the end to a very short but very tragic story has been written. LightSquared, the company that Sprint had announced a LTE network partnership with in October, has lost its never-existent partner. Sprint has announced that it has ended its planned partnership. This is a decision that we have expected to hear considering the problems that LightSquared has had and the money that Sprint has poured into its other 4G partner, Clearwire.

Over the past few months, as Clearwire has had more and more financial problems, plus losing most of its partners, Sprint has been the knight in shining armor, twice. With all of the money that Sprint has given to Clearwire, there was no doubt in anyone's mind that it indicated Sprint had lost faith in its new partner and was moving to focus on repairing its relationship with Clearwire.

What does Sprint have to say about all of this? Hit the break to find out.

In a press release, Sprint representatives said,

Sprint has been and continues to be supportive of LightSquared's business plans and appreciates the company's efforts to find a resolution to the interference issues impacting its ability to offer service on the 1.6 GHz spectrum. However, due to these unresolved issues, and subject to the provisions of the agreement, Sprint has elected to exercise its right to terminate the agreement announced last summer. We remain open to considering future spectrum hosting agreements with LightSquared, should they resolve these interference issues, as well as other interested spectrum holders.

Late last year, both companies agreed to halt deployment design and implementation of LightSquared's network to ensure that Sprint's Network Vision project remained on schedule. While unfortunate, termination of the agreement will have no impact on Sprint's current customers and is not material to Sprint's ongoing business operations. Network Vision remains on schedule and on budget, and we look forward to begin launching our 4G LTE network mid-year.

While not saying it outright, they certainly hinted loudly that Clearwire is in as the new partner. Hopefully, when all of the dust settles on this disaster, Sprint and Clearwire will be able to launch a network that both companies can be proud of and ultimately will not sink one of the oldest publicly traded companies.

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