Sprint affiliate gets litigious to block Clearwire WiMAX deal
by Donald Melanson 
posted May 12th 2008 at 4:27PM
Sprint affiliate iPCS has butted heads with its parent company in the past, and it looks like it's causing a bit of a ruckus once again, this time over Sprint's deal with Clearwire to form a new WiMAX-focused company. As the AP reports, iPCS (which has 640,600 subscribers in seven states) thinks that new service would compete with it in the markets it operates in, and therefore violate the exclusivity agreement Sprint signed in 1999. To put a halt to that possibility, iPCS has filed suit in the Cook County Circuit Court in Illinois to block the deal, adding that it "intends to fully and aggressively protect and defend its exclusivity rights." Not surprisingly, Sprint saw this one coming, and it asked a Delaware Chancery Court to rule last week that the Clearwire deal didn't violate its arrangement with iPCS, although there doesn't appear to be any further word on that front just yet.
[Via Phone Scoop]
[Via Phone Scoop]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jason Peterson @ May 12th 2008 5:27PM
I used to work for an Authorized Agent in Northern Michigan, which is an iPCS market. When Sprint and Nextel Merged, we could not sell any Nextel phones that had the new Sprint Logo on them because iPCS thought this would hurt their sales. We finally just quit selling nextel as it was getting harder to find the phones without the new logo. If I remember correctly, iPCS sued Wal-Mart for allowing its Connection Centers to carry Nextel with the new logo, and Wal-Mart pulled Nextel in its iPCS markets.
Jason Peterson @ May 12th 2008 5:30PM
Point is, iPCS is a tough affiliate for Sprint to have to put up with. When Sprint tried to buy iPCS they wanted almost double what their stock was worth.
Greg @ May 12th 2008 6:19PM
iPCS is basically horrible - every interaction they've had with Sprint has been adversarial. Sprint needs to drop them like a bad habit if they want to be successful.
youngcalihottie @ May 12th 2008 11:38PM
damn. they are always getting in the way. sprints bad for their way back done deal. :P
it seems like it is negatively impacting customers, too. thats the worst part. its never in the customers' favor. sprint seriously needs to drop them, buy them, or maybe just pay them royalties for wimax customers in ipcs markets? although the situation does suck, ipcs does have a legal point. since wimax does data, voice, and supposedly everything you'll ever need, i definitely see where it absolutely does compete.
from xohm.com:
"Up Next: Open Possibilities
Soon you will find XOHM in more and more places and available in WiMAX enabled products like laptops, digital cameras, video cameras, phones, PDA’s UMPC’s (Ultra Mobile PCs) and many other products. More"
then again, i wonder if sprint could fire back that ipcs has made no attempt to roll out a wimax network? surely they should have had some sort of network infrastructure clause in their agreement?