Sprint is set to slash 500 jobs from its headquarters in Overland Park, Kansas, as part of a broader corporate restructuring. According to the Kansas City Business Journal, the move will reduce internal costs and allow the carrier to divert more investments toward its network and sales efforts.
The job cuts will impact about 8 percent of Sprint’s workforce in Overland Park, with the layoffs to be completed over the next four weeks. Sprint counted around 28,000 total employees at the end of last year.
Sprint has weeded through its employee ranks over the past several years in an effort to right its flagging financial position. Sprint had around 38,000 total employees at the end of 2013, before it began slashing headcount as part of a broader financial restructuring instituted by the hiring of Marcelo Claure as CEO.
However, in late 2016, Sprint Chairman Masayoshi Son stood next to then president-elect Donald Trump and touted plans to “bring back to America 5,000 jobs.” At the time, the carrier said the new positions would be in its customer care and sales departments.
Software to Save Money
As part of its most recent quarterly results, Sprint’s management indicated plans to increase capex spending on its network.
Some of Sprint’s network investments are in software, though it’s being particular in how much it invests. At the recent Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Spain, a carrier executive said its network software efforts include tapping into the open source community as a way to manage resources.
“We don’t have all the resources as some of our competitors so we have to approach it in a targeted manner,” said Ron Marquardt, vice president of technology at Sprint, in an interview with SDxCentral at the conference. “We don’t just want to contribute for the sake of it. We want to contribute to things that will be a differentiator for us or something that we want to influence.”
The company’s first foray into open source was a project called C3PO that it worked on in conjunction with Intel. C3PO employs control and user plane separation (CUPS) for packet optimization. The project was released into the Central Office Re-architected as a Data Center (CORD) group as two projects: one was for a control/user plane separated gateway, and the second was for all the components such as the home subscriber server (HSS) and the mobility management entity (MME).
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