RE: "Nextel was not a profitable company,..."

* You are so wrong it's astonishing.


RE: "It's simply too expensive to try to maintain both networks at maximum capacity, and Sprint has chosen to do away with the network that has the lowest customer satisfaction ratings and causes more tech support calls. While I won't say there are no good things about iDEN, a decision had to be made, and it was."

* The only successful mergers in the US have all been ones that, at least for a reasonable period, maintained the brands and their operations as separate divisions, comingling only the bottom-line financials. That fact was lost on Sprint, and they made the fateful watershed decision to immediately wipe out the Nextel brand and force assimilation of Nextel into Sprint. Anyone who maintains the belief that Sprint HAD to assimilate Nextel immediately is an absolute non-student of business in the US, and is a large a fool as is Sprint itself.

History, and the facts, clearly show that Sprint's decision was the wrong one, and there was and is no reason to merge the two networks (yet). It is a fact that Sprint's handling of it has severely, severely, severely compromised the Nextel brand, and so today it is a different set of circumstances to consider. But the bone-headed theory that the two companies had to be immediately merged into a single brand and a single network, is just plain wrong, and again, history shows that it was wrong.