How did Verizon & ATT deal with backhaul issue?

[bigsnake49]

Why wouldn't ALL vendors do their best?

ALU almost died and Ericsson had to have gotten the message when they were thrown out of 2.5ghz.

Hungry smaller vendors are well motivated. Old bureaucratic ones not so much.

[lou99/maximus1987]

Hungry smaller vendors are well motivated. Old bureaucratic ones not so much.

Too bad we can't have Huawei and ZTE here.

[Volaris]

Tmobile lte: brought to you by att. Lol

Yup. Although so is Sprint LTE, except Sprint pays AT&T for that priviledge.

http://www.lightreading.com/mobile/backhaul/sprint-to-place-big-backhaul-bet/d/d-id/690289

In an ironic twist, it appears that AT&T, one of Sprint's key wireless competitors, will get a big piece of a first round of buildouts, said to involve about a dozen of Sprint's largest, most concentrated markets, including Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, D.C., and New York City. "AT&T cleaned house," says a source, noting that AT&T already had an advantage because it had fiber near a lot of the tower locations initially targeted by Sprint. Plus, "AT&T dropped its pants on pricing."

 

I think that what made it very difficult for Sprint to project manage the whole thing is that NV was vendor financed. Their money, their schedule. Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile would only release money when a milestone was met. That's a powerful incentive. When it's vendor financed, other consideration come into play besides meeting milestones like maximizing crew utilization, just in time delivery of backhaul and equipment, etc.

Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding.

 

Good post. Completely agree. If they needed money for that financial quarter, they were going to prioritize AT&T/Verizon/T-Mobile to get that cash out of their hands.

 

After all, as long as everything in the Sprint contract was met, they were getting paid. No need to give Sprint priority.

Hungry smaller vendors are well motivated. Old bureaucratic ones not so much.

Yup. Also, Ericsson and Alcatel Lucent were probably very motivated to keep their two biggest US customers (AT&T and Verizon) very pleased to assure they won secondary LTE contracts (ie. 1700MHz/AWS for Verizon and 850/1900MHz for AT&T) in the future. The power of big money.

[S4GRU]

And they just announced more vendor financing. Is that bad?

 

No.  This time Marcelo/Masayoshi are running the terms of the vendor financing.  I'm certain they are wise enough to put in schedule benchmarks in the terms.