Nextel network problems dealt with, exec says

— -- The bad news? "It's probably going to be awhile before customers give us accolades," she says.

Sprint's black eye dates to capacity problems with Nextel's network in the summer of 2006, Walker says. "That's when it reached a crescendo."

That summer, she says, Nextel's IDEN network, famous for its "Push-to-Talk" service, started running out of capacity. The result was a nasty crush of "voice quality problems."

That's a nice way of saying that the service was abysmal: As Nextel hit the wall on capacity, call interference became commonplace. Voice distortion in the form of "slurring" — callers' voices sometimes sounded, well, drunk — was also a problem. Dropped calls were routine.

As Nextel's service problems mounted, customers started bailing out. That caught the attention of Wall Street and the media. Sensing blood in the water, rivals pounced.

Sprint tried moving Nextel's Push-to-Talk customers to the Sprint network, which was performing well, Walker says.

That presented another challenge: The networks of Sprint and Nextel aren't compatible — they use different spectrum frequencies — so customers had to buy dual-mode handsets that could handle both.

Hewing to its original improvement plan for Nextel's network, Sprint started installing a software fix that was supposed to double capacity. But the patch didn't work very well, and by fall 2006, Sprint was dispatching crews to manually install cell sites and other equipment in hardest-hit areas.

Walker says Nextel's network problems were largely fixed by early 2007, but by then, the damage had been done. Owing to months of customer complaints and a boatload of bad press, Sprint's reputation, honed over decades, was basically shot.

Walker says Sprint's plan, at this point, is to keep providing good service and hope, at some point, that wireless consumers start to notice. "We just have to be on our game."