Sprint's Nextel nightmare lingers

From CNET News.com: Sprint continues to be haunted by its $35 billion acquisition of Nextel Communications in 2005 as the company is forced to divest some of its Nextel network and is still struggling to get its finances back on track.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court of Illinois upheld a lower court's ruling that Sprint must stop owning, operating, and managing its Nextel iDEN network in Sprint affiliate iPCS's territory. But the court also extended the time line Sprint has for divesting itself from this market from 180 days to 360 days.

Basically, the two courts agreed with iPCS that Sprint was violating its agreement with iPCS by operating the Nextel network in the iPCS territory. Nextel had already been operating in iPCS's territory before Sprint bought the company in 2005. The agreement between Sprint and iPCS precludes Sprint from operating a competing wireless service in its territory. So once the merger was complete, Sprint was in violation of its agreement, iPCS argued.

Now Sprint must either work out a deal with iPCS or with some other wireless operator in order to continue serving its roughly 500,000 iDEN customers in the iPCS territory.

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