ALL GOOD THINGS THAT NEVER WERE

The past week, like many of late, was lousy with bad news. In an effort to combat the malaise, here's my admittedly feeble attempt at trying to find the good in some of our industry's most recent failures: A lot of them were doomed from the outset anyway.

Take the subject of this issue's lead news story — Sprint's decisions to shutter its Integrated On-Demand Network initiative and scale back its residential fixed wireless efforts. Both of those undertakings were riddled with problems from their inception.

Sprint's ION launched in June 1998 to widespread ennui. The plan was criticized for being little more than a marketing-driven repackaging of existing network elements under the then-popular “convergence” moniker.

ION was intended to be Sprint's response to the dubious assumption that all customers—residential consumers and especially the high-paying corporate ones —want all network services from a single provider and pipe. Even if that's right, which no carrier has proved to date, Sprint encountered overwhelming technical difficulties and found the effort to be entirely too expensive to be worthwhile. The whole thing began to implode and drag down Sprint's business. Last week the carrier shut down ION and started writing off the supporting assets.

Sprint's efforts to pave the last mile with a fixed wireless format called MMDS suffered a similar fate. The carrier bought into MMDS by buying up cheap spectrum licenses from their bankrupt previous owners — a red flag if there ever was one. Technical glitches and the prohibitive cost and time constraints of deployment prevented the effort from ever gaining any real momentum. Sprint now says it will freeze customer acquisition and network buildout to await the arrival of second-generation MMDS technology. (By my estimation, based on all the time and money invested in the MMDS format, that would be sometime north of never.)

Sprint's strategic streamlining propels the carrier high up on the M&A watch meter, as Vince Ryan explores in our lead news story (See Cover Story Special Report). The lesson for all telecom service providers is this: While these are unfortunate strategic setbacks for Sprint, the nagging economic conditions affecting everyone dictate that anything that isn't working should be left behind.

It's a brutal reality. It has widespread implications for companies forced to make difficult decisions—not to mention the employees who lose their jobs as a result. But when survival is threatened, it's far better to be free to maneuver than to be saddled with expensive, problematic baggage that simply doesn't work. And maybe the experience will make everyone just a little bit more careful the next time around.