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Sprint Nextel feeling the pain

Sprint (S) recently reported a worse than expected loss of a half-billion dollars. To top it off, they've lost 1 million customers since the end of 2007.

Here at ChangeWave, our surveys have been tracking Sprint's long, steady decline for almost two years. Looking at our March 2008 ChangeWave survey of 3,597 consumers, only 11% said they currently use Sprint as their provider - a number which pales in comparison to Verizon (VZ; 31%) and AT&T (T; 28%).

There's other bad news for Sprint: our findings show Sprint customers to be the least satisfied of all of the major providers.

To make matters worse, when we asked Sprint customers how likely they were to change service providers in the next 6 months, a relatively high percentage (21%) said they're Likely to switch - compared to just 10% of Verizon customers and 11% for AT&T's.

Moreover when people do change cellular service providers, very few are switching to Sprint (3%).

Sprint's stock price has dropped precipitously over the past two years in tandem with their poor performance in our surveys, although they've recently gained back some ground.

Might their "Simply Everything" ads or their WiMax deal with Clearwire be making investors more optimistic?