richy

Great So they write up a press release and get how much free advertising! This is absolute gold for Sprint. It targets non subs, acquisition costs are low, the publicity and goodwill is free. I wonder how much of this is related to the tmo overtures. I mean this is a great idea by itself, but if they can take tmo subs and tmo mvno subs without having to buy tmo then you either make tmo cheaper to buy or remove the need to buy them anyway. An extra million subs won't really raise their costs but will add a huge amount to their income. I really dont see how they can lose from this.

Plus carriers buy handsets at wholesale cost. There is profit in selling them at MSRP. If this removes the discounts and subsidies etc, the end result is still them making a profit on devices. They may just end up having their cake, eating it and selling shares of it. Too long the carriers have all had the same business model, pricing pretty much in step with each other. This is great to see. Sprint are offering more choice, more flexible approaches, without compromising their bottom line. They have sat back and watched what tmo have done, they are offering non unlimited data options which is good for long term network health. They have been very sensible about watching what the real world repercussions would be and they have made their move. As NV moves toward a network that can stand toe to toe with vzw on coverage and beat it on capacity but with offerings that aren't draconian and offensive to customers, life is looking good for Sprint and their subs.

But it will drop ACPU which is something a consumer or mom and pop investor doesn't hear about but it integral to the financials. ARPU is something that people like to see increase, but if it drops but net income rises then people focus more on the income. It's a factor but people making large investments will understand that a drop may not be bad. The balance between ACPU and ARPU is where the coin is, if both drop by the same amount but your net adds goes through the roof then it is magnum of moet time and for a business like cellular coms a rise in net adds will result in a drop in acpu by default above and beyond the drop due to the exclusion of of the CPE cost.

Let them get into bed with dish. If Sprint and TMO were to merge they would have how much sub 1 gig spectrum? Half what at&t has? Yes they would have a lot of higher dial spectrum. What verizon wants is cheap spectrum and to hurt Sprint. Tmobiles spectrum is pretty much committed, Sprint does have a fair amount of spectrum but the majority of it is 2500mhz. Give them 20mhz of that, fragmented if possible and charge them $8bn.

Oh and it would hurt Dish, which would make me ooooohh soooo sad.

This is just a thought and I am not suggesting it as something for now but for a few years time when sprint has a significant amount of 2500 LTE lit. Netflix Open Connect is basically a cacheing server for netflix content that is 'on network'. The idea being that rather than an ISP's customer streaming Netflix from their home over the internet it only has to come from the ISP's internal network. Cableco's refuse to do it because they hate netflix because people are dumping their expensive TV packages for it. My thinking was that as Sprint develops its network it may be able to come to a deal with Netflix. Netflix normally gives these servers away for free, it saves them having to host them and pay for the bandwidth. Maybe they can figure out a deal where they give Sprint A LOT of the servers. They cost maybe $6k each. How about one in each lte core and in areas where activity is the highest they can put a server on each site. Sprint could also consider charging $5 a month for the access. The downside is it is actively encouraging mobile video use which eats bandwidth. The flip side is they can use it to push h265 (which reduces bandwidth usage for video), they can restrict access to 2500mhz connections, they can potentially make some money off what people are doing anyway and turn it into a plus and it will go a long way to improving netflix experience which will encourage netflix to drop the coin on the hardware. If the servers were placed on sites then it would also reduce backhaul usage at those sites.They could also limit streams to 720p which to be fair is enough for mobile. Perhaps its a little too mad, but if folks are going to use mobile VOD maybe it can be turned into a plus and controlled and monetised.

I found jetpack worked a lot better with any flash on a page and resulted in a lot less crashes. Just waiting for usps to hurry up and deliver a zerolemon 10k battery and case and a $10 smart dock alternative http://www.ebay.com/itm/111128080514?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1439.l2649 If anyone is interested I'll let you know what its like.

I see this as being aimed at tmo customers and some of the at&T mvno subs. It's smart, its aimed to offer a full carrier sub experience (roaming, perks, customer service) without the contract, with mvno pricing etc and without eating their own mvno subs (why spend money to acquire your own subs?). Personally I don't have enough lines to make a huge change but with more lines its a hell of an attractive deal. The peer pressure factor alone will result in higher retention. The easypay makes taking top of the range phones not just possible but easier (often a PITA with MVNO's). I really like that the market is evolving, more choice, better deals, this is competition in action.

He targets AT&T rather than Verizon because Vzw would decimate them on every front and Vzw isn't viewed as quite as evil and hopeless as AT&T. I think they don't target Sprint because of the overtures made between the two companies and it makes more sense to have a no hate agreement with Sprint so they can both focus on taking on the big two. One HUGE reason, if not the biggest, they target AT&T is that most AT&T phones are identical in hardware to tmo phones so a quick unlock and they should work just as well as any tmo phone. Not having to change your phone beyond an unlock removes one big barrier to switching. AT&T is easy to hate and its subs are low hanging fruit.

So if someone leaves a group the cost goes up? This could result in upsets, I think a s4gru policy would be sensible.

That makes a huge amount of sense! Very good idea.

So If I wanted 2 lines with unlimited data it would be $50+$50+$20+$20 + cost of phones either one off or monthly (or BYOD)? Seems to work a lot better for a greater number of lines but more lines = less likely to churn either voluntarily or involuntarily which makes sense. I think I need more family members, or at least more I can trust to pay their bills lol.

I found the following site pretty good! http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/ Theres also a couple of routers that are giving near NAS levels of speed for connected drives. Depending on what you want from a NAS you may be able to achieve the same from a decent router. When I looke at NAS's I found them pretty darn expensive for the hardware involved. All the arm based ones completely blow at any form of RAID 5/6 due to the parity calculations. The x86 based ones cost a lot of money. If you have a few spare parts it can be better to roll your own NAS and if your storage requirements can be handled by a single USB drive then one of the newer faster routers may do the job. The new Netgear n7000 gets close to 60MB/s read rates.

IIRC it is done manually and sometimes it can take a few hours, especially if Robert is asleep. Even though I did it in the middle of the night it was done in a few hours but with timezones etc it could take longer I guess.

God I hope so. They need to do something. At least they purchased an already recognized band, it's not like they bought the frequency Furby's speak to each other on so that is one small battle won. Legere has said that they have 15000 sites outside of chnl 51 markets and that the chnl 51 issue will go away soon, I don't know how accurate that is. http://www.lightreading.com/mobile/spectrum/t-mobile-channel-51-interference-a-non-issue/d/d-id/707173 Has some interesting comments, especially the bit about AT&T. My gut feeling is that AT&T would not be rushing to do anything that may benefit tmobile, even if it is to their own benefit. I really hope this spurs some action. It seems to me it would make a lot of sense for tmobile to move very quickly on setting up agreements with the other license holders, be it network sharing or renting or buying licenses. They already have a lot of sites that would speed it up for the license holders and they could start recouping their investments more quickly than if they tried to build out themselves from scratch. At least this is some movement on the issue, one Sprint may inherit! One benefit for tmo is that they already have wifi calling which could relatively easily be changed to use 700mhz LTE when only that was available so there wouldnt be need for a voice carrier at 700MHz to get the benefits of having a 700MHz band if that makes any sense.

Interesting, so if the bet plays off they could have a 5x5 of LTE at 700MHz which some kind of purchase \ roaming agreement or network hosting agreement with the other lower A block holders. It could all go horribly wrong and they could end up with only being able to use half of it for a downlink carrier ag link like I seem to remember at&t wanted to do . Methinks they might have luck with working with the other owners to build out and manage the network for them in return for usage rights at subsidized rates. Unless they can keep going back for more cash from share issues \ bonds etc. If they move quickly on this then the market might be more confident in them. At least finally I can see them committing to some kind of plan for the future. They are still very far behind Sprint but at least this is some kind of a start.

It's virgin spectrum, its totally unused so whilst it isn't a currently used band and would need new equipment etc it is valuable. It would mean more bands but phones already support 4-6 bands and PA's can now support over 40 bands. Each device wouldn't have to support all the bands, they could spread them out, design phones to support 4 or 6 of the 8 bands and just mix it up. If the 600mhz auction is delayed and they are looking at 5-10 years before it will actually be built out and working, it would seem to be more attractive. Verizon may end up with a lot of spectrum so I hope there are very strict controls over how quickly they buildout and people start to benefit.

Is this band 12? So it will not only require new phones to use it but will also mean potentially moving away from sharing at&t's phone designs unless at&t agree to add band 12 to their designs? So they just spent a lot of cash just for the spectrum, it isn't nation wide (I'm obviously not bitter at all about it not covering hawaii!!) and they still have to find the money to build it out when their LTE rollout seems to be slowing (at least from local experience, I guess it could be awesome elsewhere). It's better than nothing but $2bn in cash and about $1bn in spectrum is a lot for a less than convincing 'win'. Albeit for virgin spectrum, although it comes with potential issues. Can they go after other Lower A block spectrum from other license holders to start filling in those gaps? Edit: I just checked on reboot for Hawaii and that block is registered to cavalier wireless

It was started by Tesco, a UK company. It tanked at the cost of about $2bn and I think was bought out by its management. I visited a few of their Cali stores, not bad but I think they misread the market. The cheaper wholefoods is close to the mark. It's absolutely nothing like their UK stores though! Their UK stores are much closer to safeway \ Ralphs.

Why would you not trust tmobile? Just curious. I'll preface this with the comment that I am the type of person who won't use a company if I view it as unethical. I don't use safeway because one of their local stores locked up an Air Force Staff Sergeant who was 30 weeks pregnant, and her husband and put their 2 year old in a care home overnight because they forgot to pay for a sandwich they had eaten on whilst shopping (they paid for the rest of their shop), so perhaps my decisions are not the norm which would be a fair call but I firmly believe in not being evil just because you can. When I look at tmo I see them trying to compete, they don't sit on spectrum (short of not having the cash to deploy), they don't spend a fortune donating to political parties \ candidates \ PAC's, they try and DO rather than talk. Look at the amount AT&T spends on buying politicians and marketing. I just see TMO as a company that is constrained by its finances but is trying to deliver for the customer which in turn should deliver for their shareholders. I look at AT&T and I see a company that will happily cheat it's way forward. AT&T haven't tried to change the market, their pricing is dangerously close to Verizons, they don't want innovation, they tried to buy TMO for no other reason than it would allow them to screw customers even more, tmo was a limiting factor on how much they could raise their ARPU, buying TMO would mean they could raise their prices, nothing more. You are totally free to disagree I realise I could be walking dangerously close to tinfoil hat territory. This is just personal opinion but I see a very different ethos at the two companies.

Would this be the one that bumps you down to a slower connection when you hit the bandwidth cap? (something I like). The list above did omit that AT&T is pure evil whereas tmo is just hapless. One way or another, I think AT&T will be better able to survive. They have the money to buy spectrum and deploy it. They have the money to upgrade where needed i.e. MIMO with more antenna etc. TMO are doing well right now (for them at least) because they are promising a lot and right now they can kind of deliver but as their offerings attract more people and all their customers usage profiles evolve to include more and more streaming at higher resolutions, I just don't see it ending well for them. AT&T with all its money had problems with the iphone data usage. I know tmo just raised 2bn, but my guess \ opinion is that they will need considerably more than that over the next few years to buy and buildout what they need and even if they do they face the problem of their customers phones not supporting new bands so even if you buildout you still have congestion issues because the bands may not be accessible to many of your customers. They are rolling the dice. I'm with them for now because it's attractive to me personally, but I don't see unicorns and rainbows in the medium to long term. Once NV is rolled out here the choice will be a lot simpler.

That Virgin brand is not only (very) expensive it comes with restrictions. Having worked for a virgin company, to use the brand you have to keep within certain service metrics i.e. you cannot have a bad reputation that might taint the virgin brand so your complaints department and fault levels all have to meet certain criteria. There are some benefits to the Virgin branding, in Europe at least, it comes with an aura, people think it cannot be bad because its Virgin. The reality is different of course but it does get you sales. Honestly, with a market this thin on margins I would probably dump it but I also hate marketing so I am probably biased.

Summed up nicely. TMO was making a fuss over mimo lte, this may make a little difference. The screenshot below is sensorly test results on tmo lte. The bottom one tells the story. Swamped LTE. Still not bad speeds but how much more swamped will it be in a years time as peoples usage evolves and they add more subs? The top two are tmo on form, the bottom one is just a reality of running an unlimited offer without the spectrum to back it up.

I would imagine one factor in this would be the significant number of mvno's. Sprint (and to be fair all but vzw) have a lot of mvno's subs and generally these incorporate a lot of cheap phones. All the net10 \ boost et al customers would need to buy new phones and until you can get volte phones for $20 I honestly don't see there being a compelling case for it. Once they can do it relatively cheaply it will be on the cards. I'm not all that familiar with cdma, but isn't a single carrier about 1.5 MHz? Keeping a single cdma carrier for servicing all those budget phones isn't a huge spectrum cost. At some point the scales will tip, but I think we are talking closer to a decade than 3 years but there are far more informed folks than me around to give you a better idea

If I were at&t I would do the following (and I realize it would probably cause some financial chaos for them) - Significantly increase the amount of data at each price point, double should do for a start, using 10GB should not cost a fortune. - Once you hit your data limit rather than just paying extra you should be allowed to continue at a reduced speed like 500Kbps for free. There is real consumer value in avoiding bill shock. - More deployed LTE spectrum. After the iphone data usage network swamping they should stay well ahead of the usage curve. - Reduce pricing once the contract is paid off \ the 2 years is up. That might start to make them more attractive, to me at least, but even with all that I have issues with their ethics or lack thereof.