Confirming months of rumors and speculation, Sprint has announced that it has entered into a maintenance agreement with Ericsson to manage and maintain Sprint’s CDMA and iDEN cellsite network, with 6,000 Sprint employees tranferring to Ericsson’s control.
The agreement is set for a seven year term with total cost between $4.5 and $5 billion for Ericsson’s services which includes back-end support and utilizing assets to improve netwotk management.
For its part, Sprint will retain full strategic control over its networks and also retains the ability to pick and choose vendors it thinks best for network management, as well as focusing on what the carrier calls its core competencies including Ready Now, service plan lineup, and product line.
WTF?!?!?!?!? Thanks for leaving the Network employees high and dry!
Network employees will not be left “high and dry”. No jobs will be lost in this process. Sprint will be transferring 6,000 employees to Ericsson. They will become Ericsson employees, handling the same jobs that they do today.
While there is some potential for job reductions on the Ericsson side of things, they’re probably not going to happen until long after the transition is made, and everyone adjusts to the switch.
Yeah. A lot of the employees that work for sprint are being sent to ericsson and are keeping their jobs. Sprint is surprising a lot of people with their improvement in service.
Ok, so we outsource, then lay off so severance is not paid out. It’s the whole donkey-carrot routine. Hopefully those of us that are moving, will gain the advantage of Ericsson and start actually receiving some merit increses and benefit from all of this. I think a lot of employees are tired of being No. 3 and being threatened for our jobs year after year. I hope this will pull it together and dig us out. Marketing needs to step up and start getting some real phones with lower pricing.
I’d like to know, why out of 8,000 people, they send off 6,000 and keep the 2,000?
From what i’m hearing, the day Ericsson takes over, they will be laying off 15% of it’s networking employee’s. It makes sense. sprint will get stuck footing the severance plan, and ericsson will be paying less people. I just don’t understand how they can do this to their employees….Sprint used to be very good with the people who worked for them, not it’s like they don’t even care….it’s actually sad to see.