Outsourcing is now standard among cellphone carriers, whether it’s for call centers or retail sales. But as Sprint (NYSE: S) Nextel looks for ways to right its listing ship, it is mulling a fairly dramatic outsourcing effort that could involve thousands of its IT and network-operations employees, the Kansas City Star reports. A spokesman for the carrier declined to give specifics on the outsourcing idea other than to say it was an option. “What we spend on our network per customer is more than what our networks are spending,” said the spokesman, John Taylor.

Macquarie Research analyst Phil Cusick recently suggested the carrier might be exploring outsourcing IT-related jobs to IBM and network operations jobs to Alcatel Lucent or Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC). He thinks the carrier could outsource as many as 5,000 to 10,000 employees through the move. “Network outsourcings typically involve transferring the affected network-operations employees (though not the network itself) to the vendor, which will then ‘right-size’ the cost structure,” Cusick wrote recently in an investor report. “Given (Sprint’s) redundant iDEN and CDMA workforces, we would expect significant layoffs (including in Kansas City) that (Sprint) may not have the political stomach to do itself.”

It’s not an entirely new idea in the industry. Carriers have various functions that operate internally and externally, oftentimes moving in both directions depending on performance and other metrics. Sprint Nextel is working on improving the customer experience, re-building its brand and increasing profitability, Taylor said. “The other focus that we have is that we really want to simplify our business and that’s been true from the very beginning (when Sprint acquired Nextel in 2005)… We’ve begun the process of turning things around, but there’s a lag of perception in the marketplace and it’s understandable.”