History Of S. Sprint

Sprint has a remarkable family tree that can be traced back to the 19th century. On one side in Abilene, Kansas is the Brown Telephone Company, founded in 1899, on the other, a railroad company, the Southern Pacific, which can be traced back to the 1860s. In the early years of electronic correspondence, it was regular for railways to introduce telegraph wire on posts along its tracks, enabling dispatchers to monitor trains and relay track conditions to locomotive engineers. (Chakravarty, 1995) With the advent of telephony, these wires led to voice communication. By the 1940’s, these railroads had established distance networks that were independent of the Bell System and other telephone companies. (NPR, 2012) This became new grounds for the

This helped US Sprint to win a major contract, handling 40 percent of the federal government’s long-distance business through a system called FTS2000. FTS2000 made sure that the government could support long distance communication in the event either company suffered a network failure (Marcial, 2001). The government became US Sprint largest customer. Consisting of companies such as Grumman, Calving Klein, Elizabeth Arden, Cheseborough-Pond’s, and National Starch were just a few of the major US Sprint accounts. In April 1989, after the breakup of the Bell System, US Sprint, gained access to millions of Bell company telephones. With access to thousands of new accounts from their pay phones, US Sprint revealed its first profitable quarterly earnings, an estimated $27.5 million in April 1989 (McCraken, 2011). In August 1989, US Sprint acquired Honolulu-based company. The bilingual agents were able to handle calls between Hawaii and Japan. US Sprint now had 50 percent market share of calls coming out of Hawaii. This led to a merger of a satellite communication division, Telenet. US Sprint’s international voice services was renamed Sprint International on January 1990. With its international expansion, US Sprint purchased a 50 percent interest in PTAT-1, a translantic fiber optic cable system run in conjunction with Britain’s Cable & Wireless (McCraken,

It featured television series star of “Murphy Brown”, Candice Bergen. Bergen’s effectiveness grew as the spokesperson grew with the show’s popularity. The following year, US Sprint had accumulated nine percent of the nation’s long-distance business, which represented $70 million of a $70 billion market (Sloan, 1999). In addition, US Sprint was the first major carrier to offer public frame relay data service, a high speed digital transmission service unencumbered by standard error-correction, thus allowing more information to be transmitted in less time (Sprint Communications Company L.P,