Report: Sprint Mulling Nextel Sale

Reuters is reporting that Sprint Nextel Corp is now considering a sale of the Nextel portion of its wireless network, which it had bought (to considerable consternation) in 2005. The report said that the company may have trouble finding a buyer, however, since the value of the Nextel network has fallen about 80 percent; it’s only worth about $5 billion now, after Sprint had paid $35 billion for it three years ago.

Sprint has struggled to integrate Nextel’s push-to-talk iDen network, which construction workers, government employees, and IT workers prefer; plus, the company has lost millions of customers in recent months due to the carrier’s famously poor customer service.

On top of that, the report said that anyone who actually ponies up for Nextel is going to have problems reversing the painful merger. “They spent the last few years trying to integrate it,” said Stifel Nicolaus analyst Chris King in the article. “There are a lot of questions that a buyer and the government would have to have.”

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