Sprint put a date on the shutdown of its Nextel network, a merger that has been struggling financially for a very long time. The carrier said that it could go offline as early as June 2013.

“Sprint will send written notices to business and government customers beginning June 1, 2012, regarding the iDEN Nextel National Network shutdown,” reports AllThingsD. “Additional notices are planned for distribution to the iDEN base multiple times over the next year as the shutdown of the iDEN Nextel National Network becomes more imminent.”

The telcom industry is only of several different verticals that are amidst a drastic change driven by consumer trends, although very few others can match the sheer scale of this segment’s transformation.  Right now the biggest carriers are competing over subscribers’ smartphones, and in order to do that they have to offer more speed.

It’s not merely a coincidence that today, in addition to revealing its plans for Nextel, the company announced that it took a massive $1 billion loan from Deutsche Bank and other bankers to sponsor the acquisition of 4G LTE equipment from Ericsson. It will pay off a sizable portion of the one billion in Nextel Communications notes.

Spring is currently the only carrier that offers unlimited data plans, and this big push towards becoming more competitive with AT&T and Verizon is good news for consumers.

Modernization is a  priority for the telco, and not just when it comes to its hardware. ClickFox released a case study not too long ago that details how the mobile giant leverages its big data analytics technology to better gauge customer interactions and consequently improve customer service. A rather impressive decrease in complaints has been achieved after the  solution was implemented.