DALLAS – Leap Wireless’ senior vice president of strategy, Bill Ingram, threw down the gauntlet on his rivals during a keynote address at this year’s LTE North America event in Dallas, challenging his competitors to band together in their attempts to remain competitive in the domestic wireless space.
Ingram noted that wireless operators outside of Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility should work aggressively to bundle as much of their operations together as possible in an attempt to provide a more viable competitor in the market. This argument was clarified to indicate that Ingram was not suggesting that traditional mergers and acquisitions take place to combine these assets, but instead that carriers need to come up with certain arrangements that would allow for the sharing of resources that are not essential to the identity of a carrier.
Leap remains opposed to AT&T’s proposed acquisition of T-Mobile USA.
These arrangements are already in place to a certain extent, as shown by LightSquared’s spectrum hosting deal with Sprint Nextel, which Sprint Nextel continues to trumpet despite the pending interference issues holding up LightSquared’s approval process, as well as more traditional roaming agreements that allow operators to offer services in areas where they do not control a network or spectrum.
Leap executives made a similar proposal earlier this year at a conference in China.
Ingram’s model showed that with 40 megahertz of spectrum across what he termed “mid-band” assets in the 1.6 to 2.0 GHz band used in support of a nationwide LTE network and using 60,000 cell sites a network would be able to support 70 million customers consuming 20 gigabytes of data traffic per month. Such a network would also need to be in place by 2015 in order to provide a compelling alternative to the ever-growing presence of Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility.
To bolster his argument, Ingram said there is little need for carriers to own much of their network infrastructure. Leap has already taken this initiative, having sold off its tower assets earlier this year. Ingram also noted that a greenfield LTE deployment would incur costs of $35 per covered potential customers, compared with a LTE overlay priced at about $10 per covered pop.
Ingram repeatedly complimented Sprint Nextel’s current Network Vision initiative, which includes spectrum hosting capabilities, as a precursor to this sharing vision. Carriers that could take advantage of this proposition include Sprint Nextel, Leap, MetroPCS, U.S. Cellular, rural players and those looking for a foothold in the mobile space, including LightSquared, cable companies and Dish Networks.
The 20 GB of data cited by Ingram was part of Leap’s expectations that within the next few years consumers would devour a total of 50 GB of data per month, spread out with 25 GB used in the home through a Wi-Fi connection, 5 GB in a public Wi-Fi setting and 20 GB using a mobile 4G connection.
Pricing for such a model was not discussed, but with Leap’s history of flat-rate pricing, it could be assumed that such a model would be implemented.
During a panel discussion after Ingram’s presentation, representatives from Sprint Nextel and MetroPCS both indicated that such a proposal could make sense but that they had no announcements to make at that time.
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