Sprint Reports Loss on Nextel Write-Down

But Sprint was successful in persuading smartphone subscribers to pay more for the “unlimited data” service, and its service revenue climbed, beating Wall Street’s estimates.

The results cheered investors, who sent Sprint’s volatile stock up 20 percent, or 68 cents, to $4.05, its highest level in nearly a year.

In the April to June period, Sprint’s net loss was $1.37 billion, or 46 cents a share, compared with a loss of $847 million, or 28 cents a share in the same quarter last year.

Analysts polled by FactSet on average had been expecting a loss of 41 cents a share.

It was the 19th consecutive quarter of losses for Sprint, which is struggling to compete with its two bigger rivals, AT&T and Verizon Wireless. Still, Sprint raised its forecast for adjusted operating earnings for the year by 18 percent. The measure excludes interest expenses and writing down asset values.

Sprint’s revenue totaled $8.84 billion, up 6 percent from a year earlier. Analysts were expecting $8.72 billion.

Sprint’s goal is to complete the shutdown of Nextel in the middle of next year. It bought the network in 2005, a deal that proved disastrous. Nextel’s strength is its push-to-talk capability, functioning like a walkie-talkie, but it is not built for smartphones or data service. As subscribers abandoned it, Sprint was saddled with the cost of maintaining the network.

The company’s chief executive, Dan Hesse, said Thursday that Sprint was ahead of schedule in deactivating Nextel antennas. The company is using the space freed up on the airwaves to make data service faster.

Customers on contract-based Sprint plans paid an average of $63.38 a month in the quarter, a record high and nearly as much as AT&T customers are paying, even though AT&T has had the iPhone, which attracts high-paying customers, for a longer time.

IPhones proved surprisingly popular at Sprint. It activated 1.5 million of the phones in the quarter, the same number as in the first quarter. AT&T and Verizon had a drop in iPhone activations from the first quarter to the second, as the excitement around the latest model, the iPhone 4S, cooled.

Sprint, unlike Verizon or AT&T, still offers unlimited data service, and Mr. Hesse said that was a major reason Sprint keeps attracting iPhone subscribers. However, Sprint offers relatively slow data speeds.