Sprint: A Railroad Microwave Network, the Nextel Deal and the WiMAX Bet

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Sprint grew from two roots: the Brown Telephone Company, founded by Cleyson Brown in 1899 around Abilene, Kansas, which became United Telecommunications, and the Southern Pacific Railroad, whose trackside telegraph lines grew into a private microwave relay network. In the 1970s Southern Pacific's communications division fought AT&T in antitrust suits and at the FCC for the right to sell spare long-distance capacity, and an internal naming contest produced Sprint, an acronym built from the railroad's name. In the 1980s United Telecommunications acquired the long-distance business, and under Paul Henson it built the first major nationwide fiber optic network, which was highly profitable by 1989.

In 1995 Sprint launched the first commercial all-digital PCS network in the U.S., starting around Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and partnered with Comcast, Cox and TCI on bundled TV, phone and wireless service. The Justice Department and the European Union blocked a $129 billion merger with MCI WorldCom in 1999. In 2005 Sprint paid $35 billion for Nextel, whose iDEN push-to-talk network could not interoperate with Sprint's CDMA network, and in 2008 wrote down $29.7 billion of the deal. For 4G it bet on WiMAX through Clearwire, then abandoned it by 2011 to build an LTE network from scratch.

• Hybrid PowerSource phones packed both CDMA and iDEN radios and had poor battery life.
• Nextel executives left soon after the merger, and Sprint spent billions more buying out regional affiliates that threatened lawsuits.
• SoftBank bought 70 percent and then 80 percent of Sprint for over $20 billion in 2012 and 2013, largely for Clearwire's 2.5 GHz mid-band spectrum.
• Under CEO Marcelo Claure, Sprint opened stores in RadioShack locations, bought 33 percent of Jay-Z's Tidal, sold a windowsill Magic Box booster and hired Verizon's Can You Hear Me Now actor Paul Marcarelli.
• The $26.5 billion T-Mobile merger closed in April 2020, and the Sprint brand was discontinued by August 2020.