The “Nextel” part of Sprint Nextel will officially be a thing of the past by around this time next year.
CNN is reporting that the company will axe the Nextel network – which it acquired several years ago in an effort to increase its presence in the mobile space – by the end of June in 2013.
At the time, it was one of the biggest technology mergers to date. There had never been an acquisition like that in the mobile space. Of course, today it seems almost commonplace.
There are less than 250,000 customers currently using the Nextel network, and for them, when the end of June comes around next year, they’ll be looking for new mobile service.
Of course, Sprint will no doubt offer them some sort of special rate to come over to its network, but the idea of switching service to a company that kicked them off of their current plan might not sit too well with them.
But in the big scheme of things, 250,000 customers isn’t that big of a deal. Sprint’s acquisition of Nextel never really led to the kind of growth that the company wanted.
The company even decided to get rid of the name. For a while, it went by the name Sprint Nextel, but after realizing that the Nextel brand didn’t really carry much weight, it went back to being Sprint.
In fact, the only real thing that it actually changed about the company was Sprint’s logo. Today, Sprint’s claim to fame is not the Nextel acquisition but the fact that it still offers unlimited mobile data.
