Sprint has announced that it will be purchasing the largest remaining affiliate in iPCS for $426 million in cash, effectively ending years worth of litigation and a planned divestiture of iDEN assests as the result of a legal decision earlier this year.
iPCS provided cellular service under the Sprint brand name as a result of a longstanding affiliate agreement which began at the inception of Sprint PCS as a company and service provider in 1996, with the affiliate providing service under the Sprint brand in the 81 markets throughout Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio and Tennessee.
In recent years, iPCS was better known for continually filing suit against Sprint over recent deals involving Clearwire, Virgin Mobile USA and offering Nextel-branded services in iPCS territory, claiming its affiliate agreement was continually infringed on the basis of direct competition.
Because of the above, many savvy customers that lived in iPCS territory continually expressed frustration at the company for fighting Sprint at every turn for everything from plan consistency to service quality, which was considered subpar compared to markets directly controlled by Sprint.
With the purchase, Sprint has now added 700,000 direct customers, 270,000 additional customers using MVNO services that use the Sprint network and an expansion of service territory that now spans an additional 12.6 million people.
The purchase is expected to be completed by the end of the year pending necessary regulatory approvals.
Correction: We apologize for an error in the initial version of the article. We incorrectly stated that iPCS was the “lone remaining” and not the “largest remaining” affiliate. While it was a typographical error, the remainder of the report is correct.
Thats good news. Now sprint will not have to shutdown the nextel network.
I knew January was going to be a bad time if they didn’t get this resolved, now this is one less headache
This is bad reporting, Sprint still has 2 affiliates, shentel and swiftel.
We’ll get that corrected. It should say the largest remaining affiliate. Sorry about that, we’re going to avoid this in the future by adding additional editors in the review process.
I thought that was the last of the affiliates too, this seems to be the last of the troubling ones
This is horrible reporting as an employee of IPCS to say that are service is subpar to Sprints is downright disgusting. I work in a large market for IPCS and have customers praise how much better our Affiliate owned corporate store operates the actual Sprint corporate stores. We give way better deals on phones with new service and upgrades without M.I.Rs. No ******** customer service and we do what ever it takes to make a customer satisfied with our service. In fact the only thing that we cannot do in our stores is exchange phones bought directly from Sprint Corporate. Have you the reporter ever been to an IPCS Owned Corporate Store? We invite you to come see our level of service and our passion for our customers anyday at 4030 East 53rd St. Davenport, IA. So please revise your article about IPCS I do not talk about how your reporting is Subpar to ***********. And your shouldnt do the same about IPCS.
More trouble from iPCS with the shareholders suing because they feel the buyout is cheating them