Congratulations on your new role leading Sprint Nextel. The skills you brought to a smooth debut of Embarq onto the public scene will be a great asset in smoothing the investor waters for Sprint Nextel. I’m sure you and the Board of Directors will place a high priority on that, given the beating the stock has taken in the last 18 months.

But what excites me about Sprint’s potential isn’t fixing up the customer services issues from the merger, as much as it needs to be done. It’s your plan for the first fourth-generation wireless broadband network in the U.S. (Point of order: Canada gets the nod for the first North American 4G network.) It’s not so much that it’s being done with WiMAX – I’d be just as enthused if it were going to be made from peanut butter and rubber bands, although I doubt you’d be getting so much support from Intel, Motorola, and the WiMAX Forum. The real vision in the Sprint 4G plan comes from the intended business model.

Yankee Group’s research shows that Anywhere Consumers want to take their experiences with them wherever they go. But that doesn’t mean we want to jam all of them into our mobile phones. We have lots of other portable items that can share the mobile experience load: laptops, cameras, game devices, even (my personal favorite) umbrellas. As the size and cost of connectivity at the edge of the network both continue to shrink, items using it will only increase.

To make all those work, we need a network operator that won’t ask us to sign up for per-device service contracts. Instead, we need one relationship with the wireless network that embraces, simply, all the devices we might want to benefit from the network’s services and capacity. That’s the way to stimulate consumer adoption of the mobile internet. And that’s what I like so much about Sprint’s plans so far.

While Verizon’s getting that vaunted testing lab up and running, I say keep the pressure on your 4G team to get its first installations up in 2008. Given your prior success simplifying rate offers at AT&T Wireless, you have a great opportunity to perfect the 4G business model and show those red guys how it’s done.

Good luck!