Sprint and Nextel

The deal became official today. This is big news for Kansas City. I spent five years working at the Sprint 'mothership' in Overland Park, KS. I am glad to no longer be working there, although I am thankful for some good years that I did have there. I still have several thousand shares of Sprint stock from my employee stock purchase plan, so I hope that the deal is financially beneficial. I think that it will be. Nextel seems like it needed technology to supplement its wildly popular push-to-talk service and Sprint badly coveted Nextel's business-heavy customer base. I was surprised to see that Sprint would be spinning off its local business. I wonder if I read that correctly. The reason this surprises me is that I thought the LTD business at Sprint was the most profitable division. The strategy seems to be to bet big on wireless. Not that they haven't been investing heavily in wireless over the past ten years, but now they are dumping one of their cash cows to make room for more wireless assets. Interesting. I haven't read much professional analysis of the deal, but most analysts I've heard so far seem to think it is a good deal. I'll try to read some more about it. I'm sure it will be well covered here in Kansas City.

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