Sprint Corporation

Sprint Corporation (formerly Sprint Nextel Corporation) was a US mobile phone operator that operated worldwide. The company was headquartered in Overland Park in the US state of Kansas.

The company was formed by a merger of Sprint and Nextel, the third and fifth largest companies in the industry in the US at the time. Sprint had acquired Nextel in 2005 for $36 billion. As a result, Sprint Nextel had gained about 1.3 million new cell phone owners, bringing its customer base to over 45.6 million.

In 2013, Sprint acquired Clearwire and parts of U.S. Cellular.

In the same year, 78% of Sprint was acquired by Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son's telecommunications company SoftBank for around $20 billion. On 23 January 2017, it was announced that Sprint was acquiring a 33% stake in US musician Jay-Z's streaming service Tidal.

Sprint PCS and Nextel used different technologies and frequencies: Sprint PCS was a CDMA2000 network, while Nextel used the iDEN standard developed by Motorola. Both systems were not compatible with the GSM used in Europe. However, Sprint customers had the option of getting a SIM card programmed with their phone number that they could use in GSM phones. There were also phones that were both CDMA or iDEN and GSM capable.

Sprint Nextel was the title sponsor of the NASCAR Sprint Cup, a motorsport league in the USA, from 2004 to 2016. The company was also the namesake of the Sprint Center in Kansas.

Sprint Nextel, through its subsidiary SprintLink, operated a global provider network and, in addition, an OC-192 standard backbone network. Customers included large international corporations, retailers, and some fast-food chains. SprintLink operated peerings with Tier-2 and Tier-3 ISPs, and owned networks in the United States, Western Europe, East Asia, Australia, and India. The network lines consisted entirely of underground fiber optic lines in the United States and Europe as well as submarine lines in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans. SprintLink was responsible for cable maintenance and management in the TAT-14 consortium.

At the beginning of April 2020, Sprint merged with T-Mobile US, the company was merged with it in the long term. As a result, T-Mobile US rose to become the third-largest provider in the US.