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Karen Freitag
with Karen Freitag, vice president of global sales and business development for Sprint wholesale and emerging solutions
Sprint has a long history with mobile virtual network operators, becoming the first nationwide operator to openly embrace this business model and welcome new MVNOs to its network. Over the past several years that strategy has helped the company gain new subscribers even as its core wireless business struggled due to network issues and intense competition.
Just over a year ago Karen Freitag joined the company as its vice president of global sales and business development for Sprint's emerging and wholesale business group, which contributed more than $1.5 billion to Sprint's bottom line in 2013. Although Freitag was new to Sprint, she wasn't new to wireless. Prior to joining Sprint she worked as vice president of sales for Ericsson and Sprint was her client. Before that she spent several years at Nortel.
Freitag recently talked with FierceWireless Editor in Chief Sue Marek about Sprint's thriving MVNO business as well as the growing opportunity it sees in M2M. This is an edited transcript of that interview:
FierceWireless: You've been with Sprint just a little over a year. Before that, your career history was primarily with the vendor community, working with Ericsson and before that Nortel Networks. Why did you switch to the operator side of the business? And what's different about working for an operator vs. a vendor?
Freitag: I find a lot of things in careers are serendipitous. I wasn't necessarily looking to switch from a vendor to a carrier. A lot of this was about the opportunity. I had a great career with Ericsson and Nortel. But this came up and it was interesting because it was about leading a large organization and doing something a little bit different.
On the vendor side you have your piece of the solution, but you don't always see the whole end-to-end infrastructure. That was what was intriguing about the carrier side. You see the end-to-end solution and you provide the solution, not pieces of it.
Both have their challenges. But this has been a lot of fun. I was attracted to the job. I was hired by Matt Carter to run the wholesale...