American wireless carrier Sprint has appointed SoftBank executive Junichi Miyakawa as technical chief operating officer.
His appointment follows the investment in Sprint by SoftBank of Japan. Miyakawa is joining Sprint from SoftBank Group, where he led the company’s network operations.
As part of the reshuffle, Sprint chief technology officer Stephen Bye and chief network officer John Saw will report to Miyakawa.
This is a newly created position. Sprint says both Stephen Bye and John Saw will continue lead their organizations.
Miyakawa will oversee Sprint network and technology organization, including related strategy, network operations and performance. He will also lead its relationships with key network equipment vendors and will report to Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure.
Miyakawa joined SoftBank BB as a board of director in 2003 and currently serves as executive vice president, board director & CTO for SoftBank Mobile, SoftBank BB and SoftBank Telecom. Under his direction, SoftBank emerged as a wireless market leader in Japan with a network running on the 2.5 gigahertz spectrum.
Miyakawa will remain an executive vice president and board director at SoftBank Mobile, SoftBank BB and SoftBank Telecom, but his main focus will be on Sprint.
Sprint faces music on customer acquisition
Sprint, which competes with Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile US, lost 864,000 total retail subscribers in Q2 2014 and reported a year-to-year decline in corporate and wireless service revenue. Its wireless business grew just 0.2 percent due to its growing wireless equipment revenue.
The company will be announcing latest quarter result on November 3.
At present, Sprint is focusing its Capex (capital spending) toward completing its Network Vision deployments and expanding its Sprint Spark service footprint, said analyst firm TBR. Sprint trailed AT&T and Verizon in LTE coverage ending Q2 2014. Sprint surpassed its mid-year goal of 250 million LTE POPs with a total of 254 million LTE POPs in 488 cities.
T-Mobile scores
T-Mobile US, which was an acquisition target for SoftBank, said it added 2.3 million net customers with 1.8 million branded net customer additions in Q3 2014, including branded postpaid net additions of 1.4 million and branded prepaid net additions of 411,000.
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The Deutsch Telecom subsidiary has ended the third quarter with 52.9 million wireless customers, an increase of 2.3 million customers from the end of the second quarter of 2014 and 10 million customers over the last 6 quarters.
T-Mobile said its service revenues rose 10.6 percent. It does not share specific numbers.
T-Mobile also increased its subscriber target and said branded postpaid net customer additions for 2014 will be between 4.3 and 4.7 million against the prior guidance of 3.0 to 3.5 million.
Baburajan K
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