Sprint Says It Needs to Raise Up to $7 Billion in Capital as Loss Narrows - Bloomberg

Sprint Nextel Corp., the third- largest U.S. wireless carrier, said it needs as much as $7 billion in capital to pay for new handsets and a network upgrade.

Sprint plans to refinance $4 billion of its debt and seek $1 billion to $3 billion in financing from suppliers, elaborating on capital plans Sprint first talked about earlier in October 2011.

Separately, Sprint also says it is working with Clearwire on ways to ensure that Clearwire Long Term Evolution facilities can be made seamless for users of Sprint's new Long Term Evolution network. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse says "you're right to think of 2013 as the period of time that Clearwire LTE capacity would begin to come along, that we would use Clearwire's LTE capacity to augment our own network capacity going forward."

Clearwire clearly could use help from Sprint to build out a new LTE network in markets where it also provides WiMAX services, while Sprint could benefit from the additional LTE bandwidth, whether or not LightSquared actually gets clearance to launch and raises additional funding.

Sprint Says It Needs to Raise Up to $7 Billion