If this blog post is correct, then Sprint Nextel (NYSE: S) is possibly taking a large step backward in trying to woo new customers to the wireless carrier's service in the U.S. According to many customer reports and forum postings, wireless carrier Sprint Nextel is terminating service contracts with some customers due to excessive calls into the company regarding service or phone issues. On the surface, it appears that high-maintenance customers are being dropped by Sprint since the cost of providing after-sale service is too high. Solution: Sprint terminates service and zeroes out the customer bill.

This is the first time I have heard of a wireless carrier terminating service contracts from their end without penalty for customers who have accounts in good standing, but who require higher levels of service than other customers. That may be a little hard to grasp, as some customers are never pleased no matter what is done for them and complain about every single thing with repeated phone calls to a company's call center, tying up expensive resources in the process. Are some customers not worth having as customers? Sprint thinks so, and to a point, I agree with the company here.

However, sending a form letter announcing that "your service is being terminated" without any warning beforehand is not a good idea for increasing one's public image. In recent quarters, Sprint has lost hundreds of thousands of customers to the competition and has floundered with subscriber numbers as AT&T (NYSE:T) and Verizon Wireless have grown and grown.

Terminating paying subscribers is not the way to increase customer count. However, Sprint could have opened a dialog with these high-maintenance customers and came to some kind of understanding on why all these customer service calls were happening (billing mistakes? phone problems?) before summarily terminating service without any prior notice. That surely will not win Sprint additional customers, and as all things on the Internet, the word that this is happening will spread like wildfire.