Sprint enters into $5 Billion deal with Ericsson

By siliconindia   |   Friday, 10 July 2009, 19:04 IST   |    1 Comments
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Sprint enters into $5 Billion deal with Ericsson
Bangalore: Sprint Nextel has entered into a $5 billion deal with Ericsson for seven years. As part of the deal, 6000 Sprint networking employees will work for Ericsson beginning from the third quarter of the year, reports Computer World. The seven year deal can be extended, and as of now the workforce will not be reduced. However Sprint will retain the ownership of its network and customers will be served by Sprint employees. Ericsson on the other hand will be responsible for the day to day services, provisioning and maintaining Sprint's CDMA, iDen and wired networks. According to Bob Azzi, Senior Vice President of network at Sprint, Ericsson is expected to make a $130 million investment to do the network services work on the Sprint network. With help from 30,000 Ericsson employees, Sprint will no longer have to install a $20 million workforce management system. Ericsson which provides network services to about 100 networks globally, serving 270 million subscribers, won out over various other network services providers for the deal. Tim Donahue, Sprint's Vice President of Marketing said, "With Ericsson, performance levels are going to be as good if not better."