Bucking the Wind To Rebuild Sprint

Where have you found the most resistance to change?

I haven't found much resistance at all. If all things were equal, I'd much rather take over a company in great shape and going well. But if there is an advantage that it is not going well, it's the readiness to embrace change because everyone knows modus operandi isn't working.

What group in the company is most troubled?

The most opportunity for improving customer experience was at the point of sale, at retail. Making sure the customer really understands what they are buying and are being sold the right plan and that there are no account set-up errors.

How did the WiMax joint venture with Clearwire come about? What's in it for you and your partners?

Clearly there were financial incentives to bring in cash and capital to help us build out a network more quickly.

Google, in terms of building applications for the mobile Internet, has possibilities they understand as well. What if you combined their search with where you were? Then it becomes a much, much more valuable search.

For cable companies Comcast, Time Warner and Bright House, it's their distribution and ability to bundle it. When we build the network, we're looking for customers and usage because there are a lot of fixed costs.

And then you have Intel making the chips with an embedded chip model -- that is very different from the traditional model -- where a customer doesn't have to go to a Sprint store to buy a phone.

I just bought my wife for her birthday a high-definition video camera. In a couple years, a new one will have a WiMax chip and I could be taking HD video and sending it back home real-time. Those kinds of applications that are more powerful shouldn't be limited to the landline world.

I saw a study that showed the majority of iPhone users browse the Web on their phones, while a much smaller portion of other smartphone users use Web applications like search engines and online maps on their phones. Why do you think that is?

I'll give Apple credit, they built a device that is user-friendly for wireless data except for when an iPhone user is not in a WiFi area. It's really, really slow. So that's not a customer-friendly experience at all.

Any concern your relationship with cable companies could complicate the WiMax project? Would they be concerned that customers would leave their cable broadband services for mobile WiMax?

For them, the key is really providing video to the home in high definition. When you think of the bandwidth needed to provide 30 to 40 high-definition channels, you still need a pipe into the home for that. What they are looking for is a competitive advantage over their arch rivals AT&T and Verizon. This will give it to them. For one to two years, we will have something AT&T and Verizon won't have.

With all these changes, what will Sprint look like in three to five years? Will it look like the company that we know of today or something totally different?

Three years from now, we'll be the undisputed clear leader of wireless data in America. We'll be the only national mobile company out there offering that kind of broadband capability across the county.

How much interest are you getting for your monthly flat-rate plans for voice, messaging, e-mail and picture messaging? In an interview, AT&T Mobility chief Ralph de la Vega told me their own flat rate plan hasn't made a huge splash.

I'd say that on voice, he's absolutely correct. For voice, it's a big, 'So what?' So the AT&T and Verizon plans (which start with voice services and charge extra for data) aren't that big of a deal.