Sprint's Hesse says there is no plan to attack wired broadband market in near-term

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said he does not see the carrier going head-to-head in the near-term with the likes of Comcast, Verizon Communications and AT&T in the market for wired home broadband Internet access.

Hesse's comments, made during a Sprint meeting with industry analysts and relayed by an analyst, stand in contrast to the long-term vision of Sprint Chairman and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, who has said Sprint could eventually compete in and shake up the wired broadband market in the US. According to Jackdaw Research analyst Jan Dawson, Hesse said that Sprint isn't planning to go after the home broadband market actively, and that it would be difficult to make money in that market, especially given how much video wired broadband customers tend to use.

AT&T, for instance has said its average, non-U-verse broadband customers use around 21 GB of data per month; overall average monthly usage on North American fixed access networks was 51.4 GB, according to a May study from network vendor Sandvine. Those numbers are much bigger than the average monthly data consumption by wireless phone users.

Dawson said that Sprint is simply focused on other business priorities right now and does not plan to aggressively compete in the home broadband market. He said that such a plan is "not on the roadmap" right now but could be somewhere down the line as the carrier expands its Spark service and increases speeds. For now though, Dawson said, Hesse was acknowledging that Sprint's spectrum position and the realities of deploying Spark make it infeasible to actually enact Son's vision.

"The difference is between the strategic vision Masa Son is laying and the operational reality of running the Sprint business today with the spectrum holdings they have," he said.