It's amazing how short sighted some people are. THe reason for merging with Nextel was to get the bandwidth, the 4g, Q-chat and the customer base. The iden side will continue to have capacity issues just like GSM will in the future which is why UMTS/HSDPA is being rolled out. Nextel was planning to migrate their customer base to CDMA anyway, this just speeds up the process.
Those who like to think of Sprint as the red headed stepchild need to remember who was the first US carrier to have 3g. (August, 2002)Sprint will be the first US carrier to offer 4g. Some carriers don't even have 3g, especially those with their headquarters in Bellevue, WA.