Sprint Shedding Nextel Name After Softbank Deal

Sprint Nextel is already shuttering the old push-to-talk Nextel network, but it will officially shed the name when it closes its $20 billion deal with Softbank. The move sheds another piece of Sprint’s disastrous purchase of Nextel in 2005. How bad was the deal? By 2008, the company had written down nearly $30 billion related to the merger, which was pretty much the entire stock value of Nextel before the deal was announced.