I think WiMax was what killed Sprint altogether, but I don't think Sprint was the sole entity in control of Sprint adopting it. ATT and Vz had unexplained shad

I think WiMax was what killed Sprint altogether, but I don't think Sprint was the sole entity in control of Sprint adopting it. ATT and Vz had unexplained shady dealings to make sure Sprint was unable to buy LTE gear at an acceptable volume and/or price to adopt LTE; in addition, they were unable to acquire conventional 4G-friendly frequencies from the Bush-era FCC auction (the same auction that locked T-Mobile out of a growth path until the Obama-era Digital Dividend auction). Sprint was then forced to adopt WiMax, which at the time, didn't look so bad, as it looked like Asia was mass adopting WiMax, and thus, LTE would be the one of two major worldwide standards, not the sole survivor. WiMax opened up the CBRS band, something LTE did not yet have access to, giving Sprint cheap usable frequency space nationwide (useful, since they could not transition to 4G without it after being cockblocked by ATT, Vz, and the FCC). However, that ended up not being that useful, Huawei and several other companies had promised handsets and backend equipment for WiMax, but decided to pull back from the US market instead and also pull out of WiMax entirely and back the Chinese-lead LTE-TDD adoption instead (which is also the part of the LTE spec that adopted the CBRS band for fixed position LTE usage, which also happens to be where WiMax excelled); the parts of Asia that still use WiMax are switching (or have already switched) to combined WiMax 2+ + LTE-TDD equipment to eventually transition to 5G LTE over the next decade. I think Sprint played a bad hand badly that the house had conspired to give them. I think they could have easily pushed their existing WiMax holdings into a very powerful fixed Internet offering for home users, and went after the ATT/Vz cartel in other ways. T-Mobile seems to be hot on acquiring that CRBS band for that exact purpose, thus the Sprint merger. I'm not arguing that Sprint's leadership wasn't staffed with complete morons, that much is self-evident, but that they did not start out this journey with the intention of destroying a company with bad decisions. They clearly had help with that.