Sprint wireline strong amid other woes

Sprint Nextel posted a $344 million net loss and ongoing wireless customer churn as part of its second quarter earnings, but wireline IP continued to be a bright spot for the otherwise troubled company. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said during the company's earnings call that growth in IP services and reduced operating expenses bolstered the wireline unit, with demand for global MPLS ports in particular 60 percent higher than the same period last year.

Sprint has busied itself with migrating more legacy traffic to IP infrastructure, also leading to higher growth margins. The company recently committed to deploy 40 Gbps IP over dense wavelength division multiplexing technology from Cisco Systems. Such advances also improve Sprint capabilities for handling increasing wireless data and video traffic on its wireline network.

Hesse said wireline capital investment was up about 5 percent during the first half of this year, but the spending for the entire year would likely end up below last year.

For more:
- check out the earnings transcript [1] at Seeking Alpha

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