It's the end of an era. Yesterday, chief executive Dan Hesse announced that Sprint Nextel would move its corporate headquarters from Reston to Overland Park in his latest bold shake-up, the Washington Post reports.

This comes just after AOL announced that it's relocating to New York, and just after Sprint laid off 4,000 employees. Some say the move marks an end of an era in the region's telecommunications industry, following the sale of homegrown telecom giant MCI, the article said.

"It's a blow for the area to be a telecom hub and center of gravity," said Daniel Akerson, former chief executive of Nextel and a managing director at private-equity group Carlyle, in the article. So much for the "union of equals" that the Sprint Nextel merger was billed as in 2005.