Maybe that will stop so many people from abandoning Sprint. The company’s churn rate of ­consumer defections is roughly twice the industry average. Our bonuses—my bonus and every employee’s in the company—are based on exactly the same metric, and that’s reducing churn. We recognized that it was the biggest issue facing the company and that we had to fix it.

How did it get this bad? For years, the wireless industry was growing so fast you didn’t need to care about it. You could grow your way out of anything. As results started to decline, Sprint looked to reduce costs, and one of the ways was through big cuts in care and service. It cut the number of reps answering the phone calls, and average wait times went way up.

Can all that be fixed? A big reason people call customer care and tie up the service reps is because they have questions about their bill. The new flat-rate plan, Simply Every­thing, is all about reducing those. It’s the same amount every month, and customers know exactly what it’s going to be.

In your career, you’ve made a habit of creating single-price, all-you-can-eat plans. You did something similar at AT&T Wireless when you worked there in the 1990s. It’s very much like Digital One Rate, AT&T’s plan from 10 years ago. That was all about saying to customers, “Anything the wireless phone can do, just don’t worry about it. Just knock yourself out.” We found that customers will actually pay a premium for simplicity, and we’re finding it also on Simply Everything. It’s not about a discount. Customers who were spending less than $99 a month upgraded to the flat-rate plan because they think it’s a better deal. It’s like walking into Costco. I wasn’t going to buy 144 rolls of toilet paper, but God, it’s a good deal.

Did you have a clear picture before you took this job of how grim things were at Sprint? The problems were more significant and deeper than I had expected. I came right at the end of the fourth quarter. As soon as we announced our financial results, the stock went down to five dollars and change. It lost more than half of its value within a very short period of time.

How could you not know that was coming? To a certain extent, the board didn’t realize how significant the issues were. They didn’t dupe me. I don’t think they knew either.

Let’s talk about WiMax. So far, it’s getting mixed reviews about whether it’s going to work well or be a good business. One tech executive called it “WiMin” on his blog. It’s going to change the industry completely in terms of the capabilities and the applications possible in the mobile world. And it’s not just about phones anymore. It’s about embedded chips that can receive WiMax in your car, in your camera, in your video camera, and everything else. You’ll be able to download movies into the backseat while you’re driving. You can see real-time traffic. We think we have roughly a two-year head start over our competition.

This is through the ­Clearwire venture? Yes. Sprint owns 51 percent of that company. The other investors are Intel and Google and the big cable companies. I think we’ll have a terrific board of directors.

With all those owners, who’s actually going to end up running it? Craig McCaw, the telecom pioneer, will be a non­executive chairman. Ben Wolff, who has worked with McCaw, will be the C.E.O., and Barry West from Sprint will be the president. It won’t be a joint venture. It’ll be a separate public company once that’s approved, probably near the end of the year.