You're the nation's third-largest telecommunications company, headquartered in Kansas, but are losing customers and being dismissed as an also-ran in the increasingly hot mobile phone market. So where do you unveil your latest whiz-bang products and services designed to get you back in the game? In the Bay Area, of course.
So it was at Sprint's Research & Advanced Technology Lab in Burlingame this week that CEO Dan Hesse introduced Sprint Spark, an enhanced service capable of surpassing wireless speeds "offered by any other network carrier," including, of course, Verizon and AT&T. With executives from Samsung and chipmaker Qualcomm looking on approvingly, a lab demonstration had Sprint Spark phones clocking in at 1 GB per second, which I'm told is "screaming fast."
The new phones contain other tasty features, such as high-definition voice, which makes talking on your smartphone in a noisy bar much more pleasant. Unfortunately Bay Area customers (full disclosure: I'm one of them) won't be seeing Spark phones for a while. They are being rolled out next week in just five cities - New York; Los Angeles; Chicago; Tampa, Fla.; and Miami. Not San Francisco and Silicon Valley, the world headquarters of tech and one of the densest smartphone markets in the country.
"Probably next year," said Hesse.
And therein lies part of Sprint's problem. It has more holes in its coverage than other carriers, especially Verizon and AT&T. In the Bay Area it ranks fifth, behind T-Mobile and Metro PCS, according to OpenSignal, which maps wireless networks and signal strengths around the country.
Sprint doesn't do too well in speed and quality either, according to surveys. Although it ranks high in customer service, it lost 360,000 contract subscribers in the last quarter, according to its financial report released Wednesday. Verizon added 927,000 subscribers and AT&T added 363,000.
"Yes, we've been experiencing 'pardon our dust,' " admitted Hesse.
But that is about to change, which was the main message delivered at the Sprint lab event. The restructuring of Sprint's entire network, including Nextel, which shut down this summer, is near completion. That and last year's acquisition of telecom operator Clearwire gives Sprint considerably more high-speed spectrum, and thus the ability to make its existing 4G LTE network available to 250 million Americans by mid-2014.
"We should basically have the country covered by the end of next year," said Hesse.
Sprint is also in a better position financially thanks to Japanese telecom and Internet giant Softbank, which bought an 80 percent stake in the company for $21.6 billion in July. That helped the company complete its takeover of Clearwire, which in turn enabled Sprint to record a rare third quarter profit of $383 million, despite fewer customers and lower revenue.
"In one year we will improve the network. I think it will take one year, but after one year, I think it will be a complete transformation," said Softbank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son, commenting after Softback reported a six-month operating profit of $7.3 billion on Thursday.
Memo to Hesse: You might want to step up the pace in the Bay Area. We're here to help, especially since you "guaranteed" this week that Sprint's unlimited talk, text and data will be available "for life."
Andrew S. Ross is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. E-mail: bottomline@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @andrewsross
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