Editor’s Note: RCR Wireless News goes all in for “Throwback Thursdays,” tapping into our archives to resuscitate the top headlines from the past. Fire up the time machine, put on the sepia-tinted shades, set the date for #TBT and enjoy the memories!
A Sprint/T-Mobile deal of a different sort
Rumors of Sprint’s interest in acquiring smaller rival T-Mobile US seem to be hitting a regulatory wall as reports indicate little support for such action from government officials. Reuters reported that current Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler has “expressed expressed his skepticism about a potential merger” between the nation’s No. 3 and No. 4 carriers in meetings with Sprint Chairman Masayoshi Son, citing an FCC official. Son, who is also chairman and CEO of Japan’s Softbank, picked up a controlling stake in Sprint last year. The Reuters story notes that Son and Sprint CEO Dan Hesse recently met with Wheeler on the matter. Rumors have been circulating for months – if not years – regarding a potential deal by newly embolden Sprint buying out Deutsche Telekom’s controlling interest in T-Mobile US. The deal would place a combined Sprint/T-Mobile US on near-equal footing size wise with the nation’s No. 1 and No. 2 operators Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility. … Read more
H-block auction is underway
The Federal Communications Commission’s auction of the H-Block spectrum kicked off the week at a more heated clip that resulted in an additional $100 million in potential winning bids. The auction of 10 megahertz of spectrum in the upper 1.9 GHz band surpassed $1.1 billion in total bids through 37 rounds on Monday. Bidding remained active all day, with between 40 and 45 new bids through the day’s first four rounds before hitting 51 new bids in the final session. The government last week increased the number of rounds per day from the opening three rounds to five rounds. One-half of the top 20 markets in terms of bidding prices received new bids through the latest five rounds, including new bids for:
–Dallas ($55.5 million)
–Boston ($51.9 million)
–Philadelphia ($45.5 million)
–Miami ($29.3 million)
–Houston ($22.1 million)
–Detroit ($20.4 million)
–Phoenix ($19.8 million)
–Orlando, Fla. ($18.6 million)
–Denver ($13 million)
–Portland, Ore. ($10.5 million)
Verizon showcases LTE Broadcast at Super Bowl
Verizon Wireless used this weekend’s Super Bowl as the test bed for its LTE Multicast service that is based on the LTE Broadcast standard for one-way streaming of video content. The test was part of the carrier’s Power House demonstration area set up at New York City’s Bryant Park. A spokeswoman for the carrier noted that the demonstrations “went great,” and that Verizon Wireless was working towards having the network enabled during the third quarter of this year. The demonstration used network technology provided by Alcatel-Lucent, one of Verizon Wireless’ long-time LTE network providers, and a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 device. In addition, Qualcomm provided “middleware” that enabled the multicast content to be received by these devices; chip provider Sequans worked with Expway middleware to enable the content to play on the devices; encoders from Media Excel and Thomson; and MobiTV providing an application and the platform to demonstrate the offering. … Read more
Price wars of 2014
The domestic pricing wars continue to heat up as AT&T Mobility is the latest to stoke the fires of a battle rippling across nearly all of the country’s mobile operators. The carrier over the weekend unveiled a new family plan that provides for unlimited talk, messaging and a shared bucket of 10 gigabytes of data services for two lines at $130 per month with no contract. The kicker is that additional lines can be added for just $15 per line, which puts overall pricing well below that of Verizon Wireless, on par with Sprint and just a touch above what is offered by T-Mobile US. The plans allow for up to 10 lines to be on a single account, which would drop the per-line price to just $25. Those lines would each have a split of the 10 GB of data, which is similar to the Sprint Framily plan unveiled last month. T-Mobile US by comparison allows for up to five lines of service per account, which with 2.5 GB of data per line comes out to $160 per month, or $15 less per month than the new AT&T Mobility offer and 500 megabytes per data per line per month. The biggest savings comes against Verizon Wireless, which has so far stayed out of the recent pricing fray. A Verizon Wireless Share Everything plan with 10 GB of shared data and five smartphones is currently priced at $300 per month. … Read more
Cisco VNI of 2014: The impact of tablets
Cisco has released its closely-watched Visual Networking Index report, and while the networking giant continues to predict double-digit growth rates for mobile data traffic, it is scaling back its forecast somewhat. Cisco forecasts global traffic of 2.6 exabytes per month for 2014, down from last year’s forecast of 2.8 Eb per month for 2014. In 2013, Cisco says mobile operators handled 1.5 Eb per month, off just slightly from its forecast of 1.6 Eb per month. Mobile data traffic grew 81% in 2013, and Cisco says it would have grown 98% if operators had not been able to offload traffic to Wi-Fi connections and femtocells. Globally, 45% of total mobile data traffic was offloaded onto the fixed network through Wi-Fi or femtocells in 2013. Carriers offloaded 1.2 exabytes of mobile data traffic onto the fixed network each month. Tablets made a big impact in 2013. Mobile data traffic per tablet was 1,374 megabytes per month, compared to 529 MB per month per smartphone. The number of mobile-connected tablets increased 2.2-fold to 92 million. … Read more
Smartphone market saturation, and its potential fallout
Already we’ve heard from Apple and Samsung that their future is not as rosy for smartphones as investors had hoped. In reality it is like expecting early automobile dealers to continue to grow sales after they have replaced all the buggy carts in the neighborhood. The saturation in smartphones will make it difficult to continue their past growth and open up threats to their dominance as the smartphone consumer fragments into niche segments clustered around unique specializations such as gaming or photography. Apple definitely has to focus on Asia as the source for their future growth. We saw a significant slowdown in consumer demand for iPhones right before the holidays when in the past demand for the latest model would carry Apple through the holidays. Within western retailers we observed aggressive promotion of even the newest iPhones with the iPhone 5C being offered for free by Best Buy and others. Even the flagship iPhone 5S could be found for $99 at many carriers and retailers, a sure sign they were desperately trying to move inventory before year end. This cut in prices helped drive demand, but demonstrates how saturated the market is when only a “free” iPhone 5C will get consumers to commit to changing handsets. … Read more
Check out the RCR Wireless News Archives for more stories from the past.
