irev210

Robert,

 

In your most recent article it sounded like you were pretty confident that sprint would be rolling out 5x5 800MHz LTE in urban or capacity constrained areas + 1xAdvanced everywhere. You also mentioned that there will be a 20% improvement in coverage. Is that just a result of new equipment and RRUs @ 1900Mhz?

 

Is that confirmed?

 

Also, can you shed some more light on 1xAdvanced? With current 1x, data speeds are limited to about 144k/sec or so... what are the capabilities of 1xAdvanced from a coverage and data speed standpoint? I know that the qualcomm marketing material always says "4x the capacity or 4x the coverage" but what is sprint expected to do and how will that effect coverage?

 

Glad you are getting in-depth on this stuff, it's super interesting. I (and I am sure many others) appreciate all the hard work and time you've put into this.

Still wondering

Is it official that there are NV sites actually providing service to regular customers yet, or are they still testing?

I'm not justifying them stealing technology from other companies, and I don't think it is right. What I was saying is that it is a part of business. As per the research that I have done, there is not a single shred of evidence that supports your claim that Huawei has stolen. Furthermore, you have not presented anything supporting the claim that Huawei has engaged in stealing technology. Just because they are a Chinese company, and the chinese have engaged in corperate espionage, doesn't mean that they are involved. At this point, without any facts, your assertions are nothing more than slander.

I only posted the most recent article because it showed up in the paper today. What it DOES support, once again, is that the Chinese government has a long history of supporting/engaging in corporate espionage for the benefit of state-owned or state-supported enterprises in China. It just proves my point that the government in China actively engages in corporate espionage. As Huawei is a state-supported enterprise, I think it is perfectly valid to compare them.

Here are some more direct examples:

Cisco Systems filed an IP infringement claim in 2003 against Huawei Technologies (a powerful Chinese MNC that produces telecommunications and networking equipment) for copying patented Cisco technologies, user manuals, and the source code used for Huawei’s counterfeit routers. In a 2005 interview with PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Warren Heit, a partner at White & Case, states that display cases at some of Huawei’s offices contained ‘perfect’ knock-offs of Cisco telecom and Polycom equipment.

Huawei’s business model, for example, is partly based on selling counterfeit products in developing countries with poor IP protection. As Heit suggests: “Huawei is saying to itself… ‘I am going to knock (Cisco) products off and to the extent the IP law allows me to practice in these areas, I’m going to go there…Cisco, maybe you can have the U.S., but I’ll take you everywhere you haven’t gone.’”

A Huawei employee illegally took photos of Fujitsu circuit boards at Supercomm in 2003; Business Week speculated that the employee may have also collected proprietary information from AT&T, Cisco, Lucent, Nortel, and Tellabs.

http://www.hsaj.org/?fullarticle=5.1.7

On July 21, the general counsel of Fujitsu Network Communications sent a letter to Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei, informing him that a Huawei employee had been caught allegedly trying to filch information on rivals' products at a recent trade show.

On June 23, Yi Bin Zhu was discovered after hours at the SuperComm show in Fujitsu's booth removing the casing from a $1 million piece of networking gear and taking photos of the circuit boards inside. According to a July 21 letter sent by Melanie Scofield, the Fujitsu unit's chief counsel, a security guard was summoned and confiscated the photo card in Zhu's digital camera along with a notebook containing notes and diagrams of other suppliers' gear.

On Saturday, The Australian newspaper reported that the country's national security ser-vice is investigating claims that the Australian branch of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei employs technicians in Australia with direct links to the People's Liberation Army and the Chinese government.

Their claims include that the Chinese government controls Huawei's operations and that the privately owned company is involved in cyber espionage against Australian interests, ac-cording to the paper.

http://english.peopl...83/6751276.html

But one telecom industry veteran said that around 2004, it was clear to many that Huawei was copying Nortel’s telecom hardware, and even its instruction manuals.

http://m.theglobeand...?service=mobile

As reported by The Wall Street Journal this month, hackers had free rein inside Nortel's network for more than a decade before the company went bankrupt in 2009.

Still, neither the expert nor Mr. Shields was able to establish a direct link between the hackers and their mysterious benefactors. Mr. Shields' conviction that the Chinese government was involved on behalf of Huawei remains circumstantial at best: The Shenzhen based company had surpassed US$100-million in annual sales to international markets in 2000, the year many Nortel historians mark as the start of the former Canadian corporate champion's fall from grace. Huawei enjoyed rapid global growth from that point onward.

Armed with nearly two decades doing security for the now-defunct Canadian company whose technology still powers telecommunications networks around the world, he had spent a day just before Christmas 2008 digging through the Web browsing history of then CEO Mike Zafirovski, known to colleagues as 'Mike Z'. Mr. Shields was convinced there were criminals working on behalf of China's Huawei Technologies Co. accessing the CEO's files, but his hunch hadn't been enough for his immediate bosses to grant him direct access to the top man's PC.

http://www.canada.co...77-85427e0b97c2

Using seven passwords stolen from top Nortel executives, including the chief executive, the hackers—who appeared to be working in China—penetrated Nortel's computers at least as far back as 2000 and over the years downloaded technical papers, research-and-development reports, business plans, employee emails and other documents, according to Brian Shields, a former 19-year Nortel veteran who led an internal investigation.

The hackers also hid spying software so deeply within some employees' computers that it took investigators years to realize the pervasiveness of the problem, according to Mr. Shields and Nortel documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. They "had access to everything," Mr. Shields said of the hackers. "They had plenty of time. All they had to do was figure out what they wanted."

http://online.wsj.co...KEYWORDS=nortel

I can go on and on... but I think this makes my point. While there is no "smoking gun" I think there is a long trial here.

1) Huawei copied Cisco and Nortel equipment

2) Chinese hackers had access to Cisco and Nortel computer systems

3) ZTE and Huawei are the two major state-sponsored telecoms in China that would benefit from hackers stealing IP from various telecoms across the world.

4) It is very well documented that no major (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint) telecom in the USA can use Huawei

5) There are multiple reports that confirm that while Huawei is "100% employee owned" in reality, it is a state-sponsored enterprise

Smoking gun? Not exactly. Enough stuff out there to say that Huawei actively goes out and steals IP, yes.

Do all companies do that? No. Do some? Yes. Are they told to by their respective governments? Typically no.

Well, now that I read that article, I feel like Chinese hackers are downloading everything off my hard drive.

 

Companies have been reverse engineering their competitors products for years, this hacking of source documents just speeds up the process. In no way am I saying it is right, but it is the shady part of business. Even US companies do it. Whether or not Huawei engaged in the hacking or use of the intellectual property, they are innovating beyond what others have done.

Sure, companies have. This is totally different. This is the Chinese government that is the driving force ehind this.

Huawei is not innovating. They stole a crap-ton of IP and are now putting out a new product based off stolen IP. When you introduce a new product, it needs to be viable (at a price that makes sense for both the buyer and the seller). When development costs are not "real" you can essentially do things that other companies cant (you can't compete with a company that illegally steals billions in tech). Just because Huawei is releasing it, doesn't mean no other company didn't actually create it. Maybe they did and said "hey this would be too costly for anyone to buy". Huawei comes along and steals it and says "hey we can build this for a lot less because we have no development costs and people will buy it".

FBI Traces Trail of Spy Ring to China

 

ORINDA, Calif.—Federal agents were searching Walter and Christina Liew's home here last July for evidence of corporate espionage when a safe deposit box key caught their attention. They asked Ms. Liew if she knew where the bank was located. Her husband told her in Chinese to say she didn't, according to an account later given by federal prosecutors.

An agent who understood Chinese picked up on the exchange and followed Ms. Liew as she left the house, drove to an Oakland bank and tried to empty a safe deposit box the key fit. The box, according to prosecutors, contained documents outlining a more than decadelong plot to steal DuPont Co. corporate secrets and sell them to a Chinese government-owned company.

 

http://online.wsj.co...d=ITP_pageone_0

Again, I am not one to argue about strange theories but there really is a pretty long list of lawsuits, news articles, etc that clearly define the Chinese Gov'ts roll of stealing IP from anyone and everyone.

The fact that you say that's ok so they can "innovate" because "everyone else" does it is pretty sad. I am all for companies being competitive and what not... but not this.

Robert,

In your most recent article it sounded like you were pretty confident that sprint would be rolling out 5x5 800MHz LTE in urban or capacity constrained areas + 1xAdvanced everywhere. You also mentioned that there will be a 20% improvement in coverage. Is that just a result of new equipment and RRUs @ 1900Mhz?

Is that confirmed?

Also, can you shed some more light on 1xAdvanced? With current 1x, data speeds are limited to about 144k/sec or so... what are the capabilities of 1xAdvanced from a coverage and data speed standpoint? I know that the qualcomm marketing material always says "4x the capacity or 4x the coverage" but what is sprint expected to do and how will that effect coverage?

Glad you are getting in-depth on this stuff, it's super interesting. I (and I am sure many others) appreciate all the hard work and time you've put into this.

I agree with above. Sprint's goal with postpaid is to offer the best services with the best phones.

Prepaid is great at offering the most value.

At some point, I am sure that you will see Sprint offer a prepaid LTE plan but probably not for a while. They will want to take advantage of the increased efficency of LTE but will probably give well definied speed caps and data caps to keep Sprint postpaid a premium product.

Sadly, the Chinese gov't has a long history of telling state owned companies to steal US and other intellectual property.

I'll dig up a few articles later...

This one should get you started:

http://www.bloomberg...-cyber-war.html

“What has been happening over the course of the last five years is that China -- let’s call it for what it is -- has been hacking its way into every corporation it can find listed in Dun & Bradstreet,” said Richard Clarke, former special adviser on cybersecurity to U.S. President George W. Bush, at an October conference on network security. “Every corporation in the U.S., every corporation in Asia, every corporation in Germany. And using a vacuum cleaner to suck data out in terabytes and petabytes. I don’t think you can overstate the damage to this country that has already been done.”

“We’re talking about stealing entire industries,” he said. “This may be the biggest transfer of wealth in a short period of time that the world has ever seen.”

I am not one that is about crazy theories or grasping at straws... but there is a long list of articles that allow one to connect the dots.

I will spend some time and draw up a long timeline of news articles. Did you read about the nortel theft? That's insane that Chinese hackers had full access to nortel networks for 10 years. If you feel like Huawei had nothing to do with that... I'll see if I can dig up some articles to convince you otherwise.

The second generation of microwave devices will provide smaller, lighter, faster and more energy efficient devices to provide site to site backhaul. Hopefully they can get these to market before NV is done. Huawei is really building themselves a name in the tech section. I am actually excited to see their flagship line of phones when they come to market. Initially I thought they might just be another wanna-be producing shoddy knock-offs. Their design for at least one of their phones is eerily similar to the SGSII, but at least it's not just like the iPhone, or they would already be in court.

 

http://www.lightread...p?doc_id=218300

are you kidding Huawei pretty much stole everything from various telecoms across the globe.

moto, nortel, who knows who else.

why do you think sprint was not allowed to use huawei equipment for network vision?

They need somebody... not a huge list of people that they can hire.

It would be amazing if Lightsquared was able to get the FCC to offer them a spectrum swap.

Looks awesome, maybe Sprint will deploy some of these

I think I may just hang out here rather than SU. Very friendly and actually informative. I will start posting announcements here if you would like.

Same here. Other places have a few very "anti-sprint I hate sprint my data speed sucks but I am on AT&T now but I still like to complain about sprint" people that sort of kill any informative posts.

S4GRU doesn't suffer from that.

While Sprint was selling off its landline business, Verizon was deploying its FIOS network. So it is no big deal for Verizon to have fiber to its towers. That's why its network backhaul has no problems with the loads on it.

Yeah, I would be curious to know what percentage of base stations are actually connected to the carrier's own fiber. Probably not that many (I am guessing).

Verizon FIOS doesn't have the largest footprint... and don't forget that Verizon and Verizon Wireless are two different companies.

but from what ive read they have minimized the reliability issues to very little with tech advances of microwave now.

microwave from what i read is better in terms of being able to get it rolled out to a tower much faster than fiber(no digging req for microwave), and can provide enough bandwidth carriers would be using in the very distant future...

Yeah, I bet the capital costs of deploying microwave are very very low. But still, who wouldn't rather fiber, heh.

I know it's not practical (or feasible) to have 100% fiber... but one can dream.

Microwave is better than a T-1, sure... but let's not get carried away here. There is nothing better than fiber to the tower.

I am curious what percentage of Verizon 4G LTE base stations are fed via microwave... not many, I am guessing.

Latency and reliability can't be beat with fiber

I am guessing that Sprint defintiely learned a bit about microwave from Clearwire's recent deployment.

It's all about trying to get overages back on peoples bills.

Carriers miss the days of going over minutes or texts... so now they are turning to data.

They count on people being stupid opting for a cheaper upfront data package and then going over those limits. It's annoying.

This is the way I looked at it:

Advantages:

• 
  Sprint is actually really good running prepaid carriers (primarily boost and virgin). If I am not mistaken, all of Metro's customers can roam on sprint, so all of the handsets would merge wonderfully onto sprint. Adding ~10 million prepaid customers would be very easy and fit nicely into sprint's prepaid model.
  
• 
  Sprint doesn't need Metro's spectrum and could profit handsomely off of selling the AWS and 700MHz spectrum to AT&T (or leap).
  
• 
  With network vision and LTE going live, there will be extra capacity on CDMA voice/data channels - 10 million customers would help use that.
  

Disadvantages:

• Sprint is finally gaining traction on actually fixing itself. They have a lot on their plate right now (network vision, iPhone, improving customer experience, etc).
  
• Price. I think when the board looked at the proposed value of 10 million prepaid subs vs. the value of Sprint, it was a hard pill to swallow. If Sprint's stock price was in a different position, I think this would have gone differently.
  

I think that at the end of the day, the timing was just wrong.

they could just use LTE-Advanced and combined whatever carriers they can.

10x10 + 10x10 or 10x10 + 5x5, etc

The big question here: is dish going to piggyback off lightsquared's failure and just slip into network vision? That's the play here.

The Palm Pre.

Close, palm pre was not announced by Sprint, it was announced by Palm. It was entire CES event put on by Palm, not sprint.

More technically, it was announced on Jan 8th and was released on June 6th - not six months.

Either way, no go

I think that if they took a small step to educate consumers about the benefits of wifi, more people would use it.

Frankly, the average consumer doesn't want to deal with it. They want something simple.

1) At the point of sale, it should be explained in person or over the phone the benefits of wifi.

2) With every phone there should be a seperate printed sheet of paper that explains the benefits of setting up wifi on your phone.

3) Send text reminders to customers who do not setup their home wifi.

4) Other incentives should also be provided (monitary, prizes, discounts, blah blah blah)

I agree this is different than an international model/US model delay. It's not even a GSM/CDMA delay. The only thing they HAD to change from Verizon's Nexus was the frequencies of the radios. Shouldn't take this long. There has to be something else holding it up.

I am assuming that it has to do with no LTE commercially available anywhere.

I think once they even get a few sites up and running, fully tested, and commerically turned on they will launch the Galaxy Nexus.

April is still seeming like the most likely time for that to happen.

This is just referencing landine broadband, right?

Same model applies to wireless though.

That's what happens whenever an Galaxy S series is announced in the spring. The U.S gets it that fall.

Released, sure - but announced by a carrier?

I can't think of a device that was announced by a carrier and took six months to get to market. Any history buffs here?

Almost makes me wonder if they didn't tease the Galaxy Nexus so that it would stop some customers from jumping ship just for the Nexus. Then make everyone wait until the Nexus is pretty much irrelevant to release it.

There were reports of Verizon getting some kind of exclusive rights contract to the Nexus. Maybe it was a 6 month exclusive agreement? That would put the release date mid May, right after CTIA.

Would it make sense to announce a handset six months before a customer can buy it?

The sprint CTIA show is in May. So that's when I would guess you'd hear about a big phone release. Last year at this show Sprint announced the EVO 3D and the year before that it was the original EVO 4G. I would hope Sprint would use the show to announce LTE being lit up in its first few markets and the galaxy nexus going on sale along with any other lte phone they may release.

 

+JustinRP37 to be fair, Sprint sued the cable cos first over some voip patents. So, a retaliation lawsuit from Comcast was inevitable. We'll see how it sorts out.

Annouce a phone in January then re-anounce it in May? That doesn't make sense.

I bet they will announce a whole slew of other LTE devices... but the first three should be out before CTIA.

The march release is what I originally read by a blogger (can't find link atm).

The current sprint promotion that ends in the middle of april sort of hints at a mid/late april launch...

The trail is still cold

Originally I saw a blog that said "March"... seems like April is the most plausable... haven't seen anything else lately though.

April would be nice...