A lawsuit has been filed by Sprint Corporation against two former senior employees who worked with three other telecom firms to steal trade secrets worth billions of dollars from the wireless service company.
The charges, filed at the Johnson County District Court, has identified Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks, Charter Communications, including two former Sprint personnel, as defendants.
The lawsuit accuses Craig Cowden and Paul Woelk, who were long-time executives with Sprint, of illegally accessing the company's Voice Over Internet Protocol systems, and share sensitive data to Bright House while still working with Sprint.
The Overland Park-based wireless carrier spent hundreds of millions of dollars creating its VoIP Network and was starting to recover its investment when Bright House set up a meeting with Time Warner Cable, one of the biggest clients of Sprint.
The lawsuit alleges that Time Warner started planning to abandon Sprint and with the assistance of Bright House, establish its own VoIP technology. VoIP enables phone conversations over the internet instead of a traditional phone connection.
The charges also accuse Cowden and Woelk of leaving Sprint shortly after to work with Bright House, bringing the sensitive information with them.
Over 3,500 Sprint documents, including technological designs, network architecture and financial data, were found in the possession of Charter, court records reveal. Charter Communications bought Bright House in March 2015.
Charter's legal advisers were forced to warn Sprint of the discovery in the fall. The firm's notification was triggered by the findings of "what appeared to be Sprint records with no valid reason to be at Charter," the charges stated.
As this developed, the consolidation of T-Mobile US and Sprint is just around the corner, the chief of T-Mobile's main owner Deutsche Telekom disclosed on Wednesday, vowing to ramp up efforts to seal a valuation gap with US industry leaders Verizon and AT&T.
Underscoring the positive market response after a New York judge junked last week a lawsuit brought by over a dozen US states attempting to derail the deal, Tim Hoettges bared the "new" T-Mobile would be valued at almost $120 billion.
The figure compares with $275 billion for AT&T and $243 billion for Verizon, Hoettges stressed, in a statement prepared for a media briefing.
The 57-year old executive has wrestled with regulators for seven years to get the deal over the line. As soon as it is done, Deutsche Telekom would have around 42 percent stake in the T-Mobile merger but have a voting share of 67 percent and control of the board.
