Expansion. Is there any?

[4GHoward]

For example, if Sprint gets more government agreements, they can spend more to add towers for improved coverage for the customers and government officials that needs the best service possible.

[4GHoward]

For example, if Sprint gets more government agreements, they can spend more to add towers for improved coverage for the customers and government officials that needs the best service possible.

 

Check out the government agreement with the City of Houston for example.

 

http://newsroom.sprint.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=2048

[digiblur]

There are missed opportunities out there all the time. Sprint had a couple of markets in my area but they let all the customers leave with no network upgrades. Sprint just didn't see the numbers to fix the issues same goes with your area. Sprint just didn't see the ROI for your area. Happens with every company in different places.

 

Sent from my C64 w/Epyx FastLoad Cartridge

[Fraydog]

There's probably 5000 customers here on VZW and 100 on the other providers combined.

[WiWavelength]

I am curious as to how many lines of service are required to make a new tower profitable. I have to think that after all the building costs, then the leases, backhaul, and power expenses, it would be around 100 lines.

 

The initial build out cost can be amortized over time, but the lease, backhaul, and power expenses are ongoing. By my back of the napkin calculations, those recurring costs can run in excess of $50,000 per year -- even for a rural site. So, I think that the 100 lines estimate may be well on the low side.

 

AJ

[Kevster1321]

sprint will never cover all of my town i get no service where i live now (airave) only ppl here are VZ and AT&T. AT&T's tower is 1000ft from my house.

Sprint 1 tower in town

VZ 4 towers in town

AT&T 4 towers in town

[pyroscott]

 

The initial build out cost can be amortized over time, but the lease, backhaul, and power expenses are ongoing. By my back of the napkin calculations, those recurring costs can run in excess of $50,000 per year -- even for a rural site. So, I think that the 100 lines estimate may be well on the low side.

 

AJ

 

Probably why Sprint isn't chomping at the bit to expand into areas that they aren't spending a ton on roaming. There are not many areas that they could go that Verizon isn't already that have enough potential customers to make it worth it. Once they start loading up with new customers who want unlimited data, then the roaming savings could offset the recurring costs enough to start expanding. 800 mhz CDMA and LTE will help with spacing, but I don't think any other carriers are set up to roam on 800 cdma and there are no LTE roaming agreements or equipment now for anyone to roam on 800 Mhz LTE.

 

Sent from my CM9 Toro

 

[WiWavelength]

There's probably 5000 customers here on VZW and 100 on the other providers combined.

sprint will never cover all of my town i get no service where i live now (airave) only ppl here are VZ and AT&T. AT&T's tower is 1000ft from my house.

Sprint 1 tower in town

VZ 4 towers in town

AT&T 4 towers in town

 

Ryan and Kevin, I will play devil's advocate for a moment. If nearly every POP in town is a sub of only one (or two) other provider(s), why should Sprint bother to launch/improve service to your town? It could be akin to a mom & pop grocery store opening up in town and trying to make it against an existing Walmart Supercenter.

 

Basically, is there truly room in the market for another carrier?

 

AJ

[Kevster1321]

i get it AJ all i want is one more tower then the coverage would be on par (outdoors) with the big two.

if you look at the map 06255 if they put a tower where all those roads meet ma/ct border i would be has happy has a pig in sh!t.

[Fraydog]

 

 

Ryan and Kevin, I will play devil's advocate for a moment. If nearly every POP in town is a sub of only one (or two) other provider(s), why should Sprint bother to launch/improve service to your town? It could be akin to a mom & pop grocery store opening up in town and trying to make it against an existing Walmart Supercenter.

 

Basically, is there truly room in the market for another carrier?

 

AJ

 

That's probably a big reason why Alltel left Randolph County and closed their corporate store down in Sparta, which ironically enough was in Wal-Mart, when they bought First Cellular. That said, it was a hideously bad decision on their part to not have a stand alone store somewhere in Randolph County.

 

In Chester, where the mom and pop store is still in existence, lots of people drive to the Supercenter 17 miles away in Sparta. Unfortunately I can't do that with mobile service short of moving.

 

It would be a harder case to make if AT&T were all the way through Chester with 850 spectrum. As it is Chester sits on that border where only Verizon has contiguous low-frequency spectrum until Sprint 800 SMR comes into play.

 

Under current considerations? It's probably not a good idea to compete here. With that spectrum coming online? I think that's the game changer. The SMR spectrum is the beachfront property currently being cleared of the ungrateful. When it's being put to better use we'll see major improvements in rural coverage.

 

That said, there are some towers Sprint has in much more rural areas not far from me that make NO sense. All the towers Sprint long ago put up on rural Route 3 between Gorham and Cape Girardeau, MO with virtually no population in those areas is a prime example. All areas very well covered by Big Red and with HSPA+ from AT&T bleeding across from Missouri.

 

That tower placement is classic Old Sprint. The good news is that Sprint is moving on from that with Network Vision.

[Fraydog]

 

No one lives in this area, and it's FOUR towers.

 

Ugh.

[WiWavelength]

No one lives in this area, and it's FOUR towers.

 

Ugh.

 

Ryan, do you know when the coverage in question was constructed? Unless it was built within just the past few years, you cannot attribute it directly to Sprint, as both Cape Girardeau and Carbondale were affiliate markets. Roberts Wireless was the affiliate that did the initial build out 1998-2000. Then, Alamosa PCS bought out Roberts in 2000 and operated the markets through 2005.

 

Furthermore, it is highway coverage, and you cannot underestimate the value of highway coverage extending like spokes from a market's titular city. This was especially true for affiliates that made their by way selling PCS 1900 MHz service (with no included roaming) in secondary markets like Cape Girardeau. You may not like the sound of this, but providing native highway coverage away from a secondary market is/was far more important to a carrier than was providing coverage to a small town like Chester.

 

AJ

[Bob Newhart]

 

 

No one lives in this area, and it's FOUR towers.

 

Ugh.

 

 

As AJ mentioned, those are freeways and highways there in that map.

 

Similar to how no one lives at a ski resort or baseball stadium, but thousands go there.

[Fraydog]

 

 

As AJ mentioned, those are freeways and highways there in that map.

 

Similar to how no one lives at a ski resort or baseball stadium, but thousands go there.

 

Anyway it was a terrible decision of tower placement by Roberts Tower Company and Alamosa PCS, Sprint affiliates that aren't around anymore. I wonder why.

 

AJ, I think you underplay traffic coming through Chester. The Chester bridge is the single bridge between the JB Bridge and the Emerson Bridge at Cape.

 

I have family that lives in that area and they all have either VZW or Alltel which covers that area well.

 

Roberts erected all the towers in question. Their businesses are almost all in deep financial trouble.

 

In contrast, I'm pretty clear Sprint built the coverage from Saint Mary north on 55 as well as the cells at Red Bud, which might have originally been Nextel but later with Sprint CDMA added on.

[Boosted20V]

Anyway it was a terrible decision of tower placement by Roberts Tower Company and Alamosa PCS, Sprint affiliates that aren't around anymore. I wonder why.

 

AJ, I think you underplay traffic coming through Chester. The Chester bridge is the single bridge between the JB Bridge and the Emerson Bridge at Cape.

 

I have family that lives in that area and they all have either VZW or Alltel which covers that area well.

 

Roberts erected all the towers in question. Their businesses are almost all in deep financial trouble.

 

In contrast, I'm pretty clear Sprint built the coverage from Saint Mary north on 55 as well as the cells at Red Bud, which might have originally been Nextel but later with Sprint CDMA added on.

 

I see that you keep referencing Alltell and VZW seperately, aren't they the same entity? Alltell got bought out by them years ago?

[jefbal99]

I see that you keep referencing Alltell and VZW seperately, aren't they the same entity? Alltell got bought out by them years ago?

 

In areas where Verizon already had coverage, I thought the FCC made them sell off towers. Maybe they got bought up by a mom & pop rural carrier

[Fraydog]

 

In areas where Verizon already had coverage, I thought the FCC made them sell off towers. Maybe they got bought up by a mom & pop rural carrier

 

In six rural markets where VZW was forced to divest Alltel, it was bought by ATNI Commnet and is operated under the Alltel brand through a license from Verizon which still owns the Alltel brand. Of course, ATN churned customers like crazy in my market overall, most of them porting to Verizon.

[WiWavelength]

Anyway it was a terrible decision of tower placement by Roberts Tower Company and Alamosa PCS, Sprint affiliates that aren't around anymore. I wonder why.

 

Ryan, come on now, the above has nothing to do with the current issue. I think that you are letting emotion get the best of you. Alamosa PCS merged with Roberts Wireless (and several other Sprint PCS affiliates) because that was a good business decision. Sprint bought out Alamosa because Alamosa was suing Sprint for violation of its non compete affiliate agreement, as the Sprint Nextel merger brought iDEN into competition with the affiliates' CDMA operations.

 

AJ, I think you underplay traffic coming through Chester. The Chester bridge is the single bridge between the JB Bridge and the Emerson Bridge at Cape.

 

Maybe so. But wireless carriers have reasonably smart, knowledgeable engineers working for them. And those engineers have access to traffic data that may carry more weight than do your anecdotal observations.

 

Regardless, I did some additional research and likely found the reason for Chester's omission. Randolph County, IL is actually still in the St. Louis BTA, so it probably has been Sprint corporate area all along. However, Perry County, MO directly across the river is in the Cape Girardeau BTA, and Jackson County, IL only a few miles to your south is in the Carbondale, IL BTA. So, those were affiliate markets. Unfortunately for Chester, it was at the convergence of corporate and affiliate markets, at the far flung edges of both, such that corporate and affiliate could not build out contiguous coverage without the cooperation of the other. For potentially that reason, Chester attracted the attention of neither.

 

AJ

[Fraydog]

 

Ryan, come on now, the above has nothing to do with the current issue. I think that you are letting emotion get the best of you. Alamosa PCS merged with Roberts Wireless (and several other Sprint PCS affiliates) because that was a good business decision. Sprint bought out Alamosa because Alamosa was suing Sprint for violation of its non compete affiliate agreement, as the Sprint Nextel merger brought iDEN into competition with the affiliates' CDMA operations.

 

 

 

Maybe so. But wireless carriers have reasonably smart, knowledgeable engineers working for them. And those engineers have access to traffic data that may carry more weight than do your anecdotal observations.

 

Regardless, I did some additional research and likely found the reason for Chester's omission. Randolph County, IL is actually still in the St. Louis BTA, so it probably has been Sprint corporate area all along. However, Perry County, MO directly across the river is in the Cape Girardeau BTA, and Jackson County, IL only a few miles to your south is in the Carbondale, IL BTA. So, those were affiliate markets. Unfortunately for Chester, it was at the convergence of corporate and affiliate markets, at the far flung edges of both, such that corporate and affiliate could not build out contiguous coverage without the cooperation of the other. For potentially that reason, Chester attracted the attention of neither.

 

AJ

 

Well, thanks for the research, it can still help in the future. I think local government has been a thorn here. That might play a big part. However it has changed. Chester let T-Mobile build a tower in 2010. The rest of what has been built was over 10 years ago. There are lots of NIMBY types in the background here.

 

I can understand now wary things played out this way. Hopefully they play out differently in the future. The biggest thorn here is Frontier. Hopefully the IBOP project makes backhaul more affordable here. It's pretty bad if Verizon has elected to run their own fiber lines in rather than use Frontier, it has pushed us near the back of Verizon's LTE deployment.

[WiWavelength]

Well, thanks for the research, it can still help in the future. I think local government has been a thorn here. That might play a big part. However it has changed. Chester let T-Mobile build a tower in 2010. The rest of what has been built was over 10 years ago. There are lots of NIMBY types in the background here.

 

Also, it may actually have been a blessing in disguise that Chester did not get Sprint PCS service during the affiliate era. Had that happened, Sprint corporate would have deployed a site in town and Roberts or Alamosa would have deployed a site on the Missouri side of the river, probably near the western edge of the flood plain. The problem would have arisen for the parts of town on or atop the bluff overlooking the river and the flood plain to the southwest.

 

That area of town would have been effectively on a NID boundary between the corporate site in town and the affiliate site across the river. The corporate site would have been backhauled to a Sprint MSC, while the affiliate site would have been to a Roberts or Alamosa MSC. So, phones in the affected area would have idled back and forth between the two sites every few minutes to every few seconds, as the Ec/Io of the corporate and affiliate sites' pilot signals fluctuated. Each bounce back and forth between the two sites would have been accompanied by a registration, and repeated registrations on two different NIDs tend to cause missed calls/notifications, not to mention reduced battery life.

 

Long story short, the corporate/affiliate coverage combo could have prematurely ruined Sprint's name in Chester.

 

AJ

[Fraydog]

Excellent point, one I did not consider until now. I have come to the line of thinking that any pre-NV site expansion here would have not worked well. If Sprint decides to come at some future point once 800 LTE is in play and use the tower T-Mobile built, they'd have enough coverage to blanket Chester. The T-Mobile tower, which is at the highest point of the county, is now owned by SBA. I'm sure SBA will want other companies to lease from them other than T-Mobile.

[Fraydog]

Also, apparently, Mobilenation was originally SI Wireless and is owned by local telephone co-op's here that are all based in Southern Illinois. Yet, they punted on serving their own territory.

 

I'm going to have to do a LOT more homework investigating all of this.