465
|
The Mobile Minute is sponsored by SpiderCloud Wireless. Crown Castle sees strong carrier spending, adds small cells Tower giant Crown Castle International (CCI) reported second quarter revenues of $916.3 million, up 25% from the year-ago quarter. The company noted continuing network investment by all four major U.S. carriers, and said that it made significant progress integrating the towers it purchased from AT&T. During its earnings call, Crown Castle said it now has 13,000 small cell nodes and 3,500 contracts for small cell deployments. The company uses the term “small cells” to refer to distributed antenna system nodes. Management said that the 3,500 nodes under contract are in the design and permitting phases, are probably 18 to 30 months from deployment, and will cost $100,000 to $120,000 each to bring online. Alcatel-Lucent and Fujitsu join AT&T’s inner circle for user-defined network cloud Alcatel-Lucent and Fujitsu are the newest additions to AT&T’s roster of suppliers for its user-defined network cloud initiative. “The architecture and deployment teams are finalizing their planned introduction of this new architecture, which we expect to roll out later this year and early 2015,” said Tim Harden, president of AT&T’s supply chain. Other vendors working with AT&T on this program include Ericsson, Juniper Networks, Amdocs, Metaswitch Networks, Affirmed Networks, and Tail-F Systems, which Cisco is buying. In other AT&T news, the carrier’s Mobile Share plans are a hit with customers, but they’re also a hit to average revenue per user. For more on that see today’s video below. |
