Sprint Offers Excess 3G for Consumer Electronics

To offset poor subscriber revenue numbers and its ongoing horrific churn issues, Sprint-Nextel Corp. is expanding the model it has with the Amazon Kindle eReader: Amazon essentially rents the Sprint network, unbeknownst to end users.

Amazon is in a kind of MVNO arrangement, where it pays the carrier per data minute used by Kindle owners to download books. Amazon doesn’t pass along the cost, rather offsetting the embedded wireless charges with the sale of the books themselves.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Sprint is now talking with gadget companies such as GPS device maker Garmin Ltd., camera doyenne Eastman Kodak Co. and storage device maker SanDisk Corp., about embedding wireless and essentially acting as MVNOs on the Sprint network.

Of course, the product development and manufacturing cycle involved with the strategy of embedding 3G is likely to mean that the first fruit of the initiative is a bit down the road.

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