Sprint And Affiliate Sue Each Other Over Legality Of New WiMax Effort

from the bad-blood dept

In certain markets, Sprint has always used affiliates to sell its service, rather than building out its own efforts. Some of those affiliate relationships caused problems back in 2004/2005 when Sprint merged with Nextel -- as Nextel's service existed in some of those markets, potentially "competing" with the Sprint affiliates who had agreements that Sprint would not compete directly. So, with the new WiMax joint venture with Clearwire, Sprint knew that the big affiliate iPCS would be upset. In fact, last week, Sprint sued iPCS in Delaware seeking a declaratory judgment that the new joint venture did not break their agreement with iPCS. That lawsuit appears to have been filed slightly before iPCS filed its own lawsuit in Illinois against Sprint. Chances are the two suits will be combined in some manner, but it's yet another hurdle that Sprint needs to clear before it can get this new WiMax offering off the ground. Sprint may have a decent claim here -- as the agreement with iPCS is focused only on 1.9GHz spectrum, whereas the WiMax network is on 2.5GHz spectrum. Either way, it seems like these affiliate relationships may be a lot more pain than they're worth.
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Filed Under: affiliates, contracts, countersuits, exclusivity, wimax
Companies: clearwire, ipcs, sprint


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  1. identicon
    alaric, 13 May 2008 @ 6:15am

    iPCS might have a good case too

    Depends on how they defined exclusivity and if it was beyond the band (1.9 ghz) to include services.

    Clearwire effectively means that sprint will not seek to evolve its cdma network for at least a while (i think they have to do LTE personally) and that sprint and the affiliates could lose customers to Clearwire.

    I'm sure that'll make for good legal points.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Ari Zoldan, 24 Jul 2008 @ 10:03am

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    link to this | view in thread ]


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