Sprint throws 4G Hail Mary. Stock plunges. Teams up with LightSquared.

I decided to go read some articles on CNN.com and this one definitely caught my eye because I have Sprint and I have their first 4G phone, HTC Evo. Sprint is losing its most valuable subscribers to its biggest rivals which is mostly AT&T. Shares are plummeting and its once-leading 4G coverage is getting passed by. On Thursday, there was a $9 billion partnership agreement with fledgling 4G wholesale provider LightSquared. Sprint is planning on licensing some of its unused wireless frequencies to LightSquared, which the wholesaler will use to deploy its 4G network and then Sprint will be able to buy back some of the 4G services that LightSquared provides to offer to Sprint customers. In June 2010, its first 4G phone, the HTC Evo 4G, went on sale. This was five months before T-Mobile rebranded its service as "4G" and 10 months before Verizon started selling its first 4G phone.

Sprint's customer losses have decreased but the company is still losing ground in the wirless market. AT&T added 331,000 contracted customers and Verizon netted 1.3 million. The top two wireless providers have both recorded billions of dollars in profit last quarter.

I am a Sprint customer even though my mother pays for my phone, but I have had my Evo since it first came out and to be honest I like it. However, I have had too many problems with it. I don't think Sprint realized how much problems they would have with this phone. Since Jully 2010, I have had two Evos. I am a clumsy person at times so I do tend to drop my phone, but that shouldn't really do much damage. I do have insurance on my phone, but that is a lot of work transferring pictures and etc to a new one. With my first Evo, I began to have problems with it. It stopped charging. I figured it was just my charger myself or maybe a certain outlet, but then I thought to myself that that can't just be it. I took it to the Sprint store at the Quarry and come to find out my charger port within my phone was damaged, reason why it had stopped charging. Now the Evo itself takes up some battery life, but my battery life was being taken up way too much. I got a replacement Evo and ever since then, I don't even like using my phone I guess because it isn't my original. Not only that, I am noticing the same problems as before.. the not charging. I always wanted an iPhone, but I didn't ever get one. AT&T is a good company. They have their bad times every once in a while, but overall they are good. I am trying to get the new iPhone 5 when it comes out. No hard feelings to Sprint because they are good as well, but I am having way too many problems with my Evo and I'd rather just have an iPhone if I wanted to deal with these problems. Also Sprint always does something where no Sprint users can text for like an hour or so. They are just having too many problems and plus it's time that I get a cellphone in my name anyways.

Overall, this article was interesting of course. As stated earlier, it had caught my eye since I am a Sprint customer and I have their 4G phone. I didn't talk much about the article because I wanted to talk about my little experience even thought it really didn't have to do with much, but the link is below if you want to read it.

http://money.cnn.com/2011/07/28/technology/sprint_lightsquared/index.htm?hpt=te_bn2