Sprint Communications Company L.P. is a Delaware limited partnership and a U.S. telecommunications operating company. Its principal place of business is listed as 8140 Ward Parkway, Kansas City, Missouri; the broader Sprint group was headquartered in Overland Park, Kansas. The Sprint lineage traces to the Brown Telephone Company (1899); the entity itself was organized in 1986 as US Sprint Communications Company, L.P. and became a wholly owned subsidiary of Sprint Corporation. Sprint Corporation traded on the NYSE (ticker "S") and was roughly 85% owned by SoftBank Group (Reuters; SoftBank press release, Apr. 2, 2020). On April 1, 2020, Sprint merged into T-Mobile US, Inc.; Sprint and its subsidiaries became wholly owned T-Mobile subsidiaries (NASDAQ: TMUS) and Sprint shares stopped trading (T-Mobile Form 10-Q; SoftBank). Sprint no longer reports separately, so current standalone headcount/revenue for the L.P. cannot be verified from public sources.
Products / services. Sprint was one of the largest U.S. wireless carriers and a wireline provider: nationwide CDMA/LTE wireless service under Sprint, Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile and Assurance Wireless; long-distance and local wireline service; enterprise and government communications; and a Tier 1 internet backbone. Sprint Communications Company L.P. acted as a group operating entity; affiliates named alongside it include Sprint Spectrum L.P. and Sprint Solutions, Inc.
Litigation posture. An operating company defending against NPE suits. It appears twice in the tracked data — both as a defendant and zero times as plaintiff — and both cases were filed 2018-12-03 in the Eastern District of Texas (Marshall), a historically plaintiff-friendly venue.
Notable cases. Sol IP, LLC v. Sprint Communications Company L.P. et al. (2:18-cv-00527) and Sol IP, LLC v. AT&T Mobility LLC et al. (2:18-cv-00526) were consolidated for pretrial purposes with the AT&T case as lead. Sol IP is a Virginia-based NPE asserting an exclusive license to 4G LTE/WLAN standard-essential patents originating from South Korea's ETRI (Unified Patents; complaint ¶¶2–6), and it filed a parallel suit against Verizon; Ericsson and Nokia intervened. The Sprint case was terminated May 20, 2020.