Why is it a turkey?
Pivot, the long-beleaguered joint venture between several cable companies and Sprint Nextel met its demise in late April [1], but the troubles started long before. In late 2005 Comcast, Cox, Time Warner and Advance/Newhouse formed a joint venture with Sprint Nextel to provide a quad-play cable TV, high-speed data, landline telephony and wireless services to their customers.
The quad-pay idea never panned out, and Pivot never grew beyond the initial 33 markets Sprint announced in November 2007. That month Sprint CFO Paul Saleh quietly noted that Pivot was being hurt by provisioning issues [2] and the company decided to not expand the service into other markets or offer it in more retail stores. A few days later, Time Warner said that demand for Pivot services was "tepid." [3]
After the deal fell apart in April, Pivot customers were given the option of switching over to Sprint's regular services with comparable minutes and pricing.
See FierceWireless' timeline of the ill-fated JV [4].
Links:
[1] http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/cable-companies-exit-pivot-jv-with-sprint/2008-04-24
[2] http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/sprints-about-face-pivot/2007-11-02?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss
[3] http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/time-warner-says-pivot-demand-tepid/2007-11-08
[4] http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/time-line-sprints-ill-fated-pivot/2008-04-24
[5] http://www.fiercewireless.com/special-reports/iphone-3g-glitches
[6] http://www.fiercewireless.com/special-reports/theyre-cooked-wireless-turkeys-2008
[7] http://www.fiercewireless.com/special-reports/helio