Most of Sprint’s conference call was given over to managing churn, and most of the questions were about the minutiae of the subscriber numbers across Sprint’s properties.

SEE ALSO: Earnings: Sprint Revenues Down 5 Percent, Income Down 73 Percent

Welcome back Nextel: “Starting this quarter we will begin to reinvigorate the nextel direct connect franchise… our objective here is to reverse the subscriber trend on iDEN and reinvigorate this value franchise” said Paul Saleh, acting CEO and chief financial officer of Sprint (NYSE: S) Nextel. I remember Sprint getting some flack for doing away with the popular Nextel in favor of the less-popular Sprint brand.

Love the customer: Saleh also spent a lot of time talking about maintaining Sprint’s customer base—understandable given the relatively high churn—putting a lot of emphasis on the fact that “the customers that we have spend more with us and are more valuable to us than new customers we are attracting to the company. They’re also more loyal to us”. So he talked up the message that every market improved from an operational standpoint (eg, dropped calls), and said that every employee in the business is focused on just two objectives: “we will improve the customer experience and simply the business”. Sprint will change is advertising messaging and offers to “better balance retention and acquisition” and offer loyalty rewards to long-term customers.

Cap ex: Cap ex was lower than predicted in the quarter, and will be lower than predicted in the year. Part of this was delayed purchasing of equipment for Xohm, Sprint’s incipient WiMax network. The soft launch of the service in a few cities this year is still on track, but Sprint will decide later how best to commercially deploy the service in 2008.