Sprint continues to be one of the largest mobile phone carriers in the United States, holding a little more than 48 million customers. Verizon Wireless and AT&T boast 91.2 million and 85.1 million customers respectively. Sprint is firmly entrenched in third place, even though the company has given a first or second place effort. Sprint spent most of the last two years collaborating with and acquiring other related companies in order to find a way to shore up its market share.

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Many believed that the 2004 merger of Sprint and Nextel was a major coup for Sprint, and signaled a major expansion of the Sprint network and customer base. However, Sprint had a difficult time integrating the Nextel iDEN network with its own CDMA network. Furthermore, Nextel's signature feature, "direct connect" slowly became more and more irrelevant with the increase of talk anywhere/anytime minutes and text messaging.

Nextel was hardly the only company with which Sprint merged or collaborated during the last couple of years as it sought to compete with Verizon and AT&T. In July of 2009, Sprint and Ericsson (ERIC) formed a $5 billion partnership called "Network Advantage". As part of the deal, Ericsson took on the task of day-to-day services, provisioning and maintenance of the Sprint networks while Sprint began to focus on customer service and new products. In November of 2009, Sprint purchased Virgin Mobile USA for $438 million and a month later announced a $426 million acquisition of IPCS. All of Sprint's business moves made noise, but little else. Customers continued to leak away from Sprint and to competitors. Sprint was left in third place with an extremely high debt load.

Recent news about Sprint might indicate a change in fortunes for the company that reported a 9% decrease in revenue from FY2008 to FY2009. This year, Sprint rolled out one of the lowest cost data plans in the market with the "Our 69.99 is worth more than their $69.99" campaign. The advertisement points out that Verizon and AT&T "$69.99 plans" are good for unlimited talk only, while Sprint's similarly priced plan includes unlimited text, picture messaging, unlimited Web, GPS navigation and unlimited calling to any mobile in America. The deal is really a stunning value. Whether or not the "Everything Data 450 plan with Any Mobile, Anytime" will convince customers to change carriers in favor of Sprint remains to be seen, and one also needs to ask, if AT&T and Verizon cannot offer this product for the same price, can Sprint afford to do it?

Price is a major shot across the bow of competitors, but Sprint is seeking to improve quality at the same time. The Sprint 3G network was recently rated as the top network for smartphones in the Bay Area according by PC World - a surprising development to most customers who might have experienced trouble with the Sprint network over past years. But Sprint is not waiting to simply improve 3G service, the company is plunging on toward the so-called 4G network through cooperation with Clearwire (CLWR) and additional investment from a stable of companies including Comcast (CMCSA), Tim Warner Cable (TWC), Intel (INTC), Google (GOOG) and others. Sprint hopes to build a WiMAX network covering 120 million people by the end of 2010. The 4G technology is already available in 27 different markets with expansion to places like Boston, Denver, New York, Washington D.C. and more. 4G holds significant promise in terms of wireless internet speeds for both smartphones and mobile computer platforms.

This week, Sprint CFO pleased investors by announcing plans for "rigorous" cost management and aggressive debt reduction in 2010. AT&T and Verizon stole the show at the end of 2009 with their dueling "map" ad campaigns, but will the telecom darkhorse, SprintNextel have the last laugh?