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It may be me as a restructuring and turnaround professional, as a telecom engineer, or someone who still has faith in Sprint but I think Sprint’s deal with LightSquared is a smart move.

In order to perform a turnaround for a company in the condition Sprint Nextel had been in in 2008, Dan Hesse had to think out of the box. Dan Hesse has been thinking out of the box and doing all of those things necessary to stabilize a company in distress and set it on a path for change and growth.

The LightSquared deal brings cash into Sprint while simultaneously enabling Sprint to establish a long term business relationship with a strategic ally.

It is going to be critical for LightSquared to perform well.

Sprint has lost a significant number of Nextel customers but I am confident the company will be able to win them back with is new CDMA push-to-talk feature.

It is easy to give up on Sprint but the reality is that no one except those who understood what Hesse was doing were confident he could steer a new course for Sprint. I have absolutely no inside knowledge of the inner workings of Sprint. However, Hesse has a track record of managing an turning around tough companies and his public actions spoke volumes to the experienced.

What Sprint and LightSquared need to do is to do whatever they can to support each other.

There are a lot of moving parts in a turnaround and it will be critical for Sprint to manage everything well.

In order to better understand what Sprint is doing to compete in the marketplace, you need to seeits action in total. This means a complete top-down and bottoms-up review of its marketplace activities and competitive actions.

I am not a big believer in tossing in the towel just because the other ”guy” is bigger than me. Sprint has certain advantages over the other carriers:

• It is smaller and hence a bit more nimble
• The company is not happy with being a distant Number 3 carriers and that is good to get creative and competitive thought processes moving in high gear.
• There are lots of great companies that cannot get AT&T’s or Verizon’s attention. Hence, there are a lot of excellent value-added partners that can come to the table to do business with Sprint.