marioc21

I guess the market is getting wind of Sprint's expansion plans.  Not sure what else would account for today's jump in the stock price. Granted the stock has taken a beating this week after those comments from BTIG. 

Was it law or just threat of law to come with a industry protocol?

There was a law passed in 2014 that reversed the Library of Congress's copyright ruling that had made unlocking your phone illegal under the DMCA. But nothing was passed forcing carriers to unlock phones. This seems like the fulfilling of an industry promise from last year.  Probably in an effort to cut off any regulations or legislation mandating it. 

http://www.cnet.com/news/president-signs-cell-phone-unlocking-bill-into-law/

Didn't they give us some of the details from the quarter a few weeks ago? Maybe I'm just confused because I haven't had any caffeine today.

They put out unofficial subscriber numbers just after new years because Marcelo did a Q&A at a financial conference.  Tomorrow we'll get the official ones along with financial results. 

Amazon and Brookstone apparently are also interested in buying some of the stores

 

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-03/amazon-said-to-mull-buying-radioshack-stores-in-retail-expansion

Pretty much only thing left is how the stores get carved up.  Looks like Sprint might take half and the other half may get split by the other two. 

So update on this today.  

(Bloomberg) -- RadioShack Corp. is preparing to shut down the almost-century-old electronics chain in a bankruptcy deal that would sell about half its stores to Sprint Corp. and close the rest, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

 

 

The locations sold to Sprint would operate under the wireless carrier’s name, meaning RadioShack would cease to exist as a stand-alone retailer, said the people, who declined to be identified because the talks aren’t public.

 

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/radioshack-talks-sell-half-stores-182519858.html

Interesting on that NTelos story I just posted.  Woodstock and Winchester are also Shentel territory. Didn't realize NTelos had markets that overlapped with Shentel.

An update on NTelos' LTE plans.

Sprint (NYSE: S) wholesale partner nTelos Wireless said it will expand LTE service to 81,000 of its wireless customers in Roanoke, Va., and Charleston W.Va. The attention on those markets and the network expansion comes two months after nTelos said it would sell off its spectrum and its retail business in markets in eastern Virginia, known as its "Eastern Markets," to focus on its "Western Markets" in western Virginia and West Virginia where it has a stronger retail presence and benefits from a network deal with Sprint.

 

In a statement, nTelos said the LTE network enhancement for Roanoke and Charleston is part of its "4G for All" expansion, and includes LTE deployment across 26 cell sites. This deployment will be the first in a series of nearly 300 LTE site launches the company has planned across its Western Markets in 2015. NTelos already has nine of its markets covered with LTE: Beckley, Bluefield, Parkersburg, Harrisonburg, Staunton, Waynesboro, Winchester, Woodstock and Hagerstown.

 

http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/ntelos-expand-lte-network-virginia-and-west-virginia/2015-02-02?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Editor&utm_campaign=SocialMedia

Now it means that most DSL is no longer broadband.  Hopefully it will spur more broadband development.  And more FTTH.  I am for the change in definition, if it is used to add teeth and legs to Government Broadband initiatives.  I see this as a bargaining point that cities and states have with local ILEC's who are providing very slow broadband options.  Because they can point out that ILEC "X" doesn't even offer broadband to its citizens.

 

In my city, since our cable operator Midcontinent is adding fiber to the home with 1 Gig speeds, CenturyLink is finally jumping on board too.  They are adding FTTH in all new housing neighborhoods.  This is great news.  If not for the competition with Midcontinent here, they would have run their antiquated DSL network forever, trying to monetize that thing as long as possible.

 

Viva la broadband revolucion!

It's good when you have a smaller competitor that's really willing to push the incumbent. Where I live we have Verizon fiber and Comcast cable.  When Verizon started FIOS around here I expected them to really push Comcast with super fast speeds.  However, over time they both seemed to get into their grooves and just split the market in two.  Neither one is interested in pushing the other.  I don't expect either one will make any major upgrades until a third player like Google decides to show up.

My most recent bill was for $103.57. That's for 3 lines on a 9 line Framily plan.  With a data upgrade to 3gb on 1 line.  Less a 15% corp discount for the data. Plus taxes.

As long as they keep the drawers of electronic components (resistors, diodes, etc) it's fine by me. Radio shack is the last retail source for those items in most areas.

Doubt it. Sprint is looking at the locations of the stores not the inventory there. If they do buy out the leases those stores will probably be turned into Sprint stores just like most others.  

Sprint claims it's net port positive against T-Mobile, and T-Mobile claims it's 2.2 net port positive against Sprint (according to FierceWireless from the call).

 

However, in the actual released results, Sprint claims 0.03 million postpaid adds and T-Mobile claims 1.30 million postpaid adds. Sprint's gaining more prepaid adds than T-Mobile (410k vs 266k), but T-Mobile's postpaid additions are more than triple Sprint's prepaid adds.

 

I'm inclined to believe T-Mobile's port ratio is probably more accurate, based on the actual numbers from Sprint's Press Release vs T-Mobile's, unless some new information comes to light.

Marcelo seems to be talking about prepaid port ratio. Not postpaid.

Marcelo was referencing TOTAL net ports.  That includes postpaid and prepaid.  T-Mo's number was strictly postpaid.  Looks like sprint was able to pry away significant prepaid customers from them.  

That conpletely contradicts what Legere said that sprint port ratio is 2.2

Marcelo's comment was regarding total net ports.  That means prepaid and postpaid customers.  Seems like Sprint is doing a good job of taking prepaid customers from TMo. Maybe Legere was just referencing postpaid customers.  

Most interesting thing I picked up from his Q&A was that they are net port positive against T-Mo.  So for all of Legere's shots, Sprint is taking more customers from T-Mo than giving away.  So that's a plus. 

The audio of Marcelo's financial presentation is available here: http://www.veracast.com/webcasts/citigroup/imt2015/42213581229.cfm

Was hoping to see more post paid net adds but anything positive is excellent and I imagine next quarter will be huge! Nearly a million adds total is awesome! A little confused why they are referring to this as the 3rd fiscal quarter? I would have thought we'd be at Q4 by now no?

 

Sprint changed its financial reporting to match SoftBank's after the acquisition was completed. They used to follow the calendar year, but now they report on a fiscal year basis. 

It is a disaggregated portion of the former PrimeCo PCS license for the Richmond-Norfolk MTA.  Because of the spectrum cap at the time, VZW could not retain the entire license.

 

AJ

PrimeCo! My first cell phone company. 

The backtracking has already started:

http://www.imore.com/sprints-cut-your-bill-half-promo-results-only-20-percent-savings

Wasn't backtracking. That story is based off of Q&A with Sprint CFO at a financial conference and discussing why plan wasn't going to hurt Sprint's bottom line that badly. Was explaining that half price was just on service plan and didn't include costs of new phones purchased by customer. So taken all together a customer's net savings would only wind up being 20 to 30%. 

Transcript of conference is here: http://seekingalpha.com/article/2726075-sprints-s-management-presents-at-bank-of-america-merrill-lynch-leveraged-finance-conference-transcript?page=1

Now that the auction has surpassed $40B and has completed round 47, how many more rounds will there be? Increasing at .56% a round is getting interesting. 

My question is, how many of these bidders will be able to follow through on these bids? 

Re-reading some of the transcript from the financial conference I saw this:

So we entered into 2014 with the idea that we needed to come up with something new to continue to attract subscribers. We came up with the family plan idea, which when you look at the start on January and probably in the mid-February, was a great start. It went after the one, two to three, up to five lines. But then very rapidly it start to deteriorate as people started to post their accounts on eBay and Craigslist and all those things.

 

Marcelo said roughly same thing at another conference a while back.  Which really confirms that the downfall of Framily was not that it was "too complicated", but in fact too "successful". Too many people were able to hit the magic 7. They seemed to be banking on fact that most "Framilies" would be no more than 5.  

The promotion is very smart. Its most favorable to sprint to get 2 year contract customers to switch as their aggregate bills for voice/text/data are higher than customers who have edge or next and receive lower access fees. The $350 max buyout also limits the likelihood that installment plan customers switch, if the buyout is even applicable to the payoff on financed devices. Basically, its a lot easier to half a bill where each line is paying $35 or $40 for access than $15.

 

With that said, I suspect this will give ATT and Verizon huge incentive now to push device financing on any contract customer who asks, more so than before because it makes leaving far more cost prohibitive on average.

 

And despite the bold promotion, I don't think it will be any hotter than the last promo after the initial influx it causes. Why? The steps are complicated and the mistrust of all wireless companies is so high. It literally seems "too good to be true"

I believe the $350 applies to either ETFs or unpaid installment balances.

Sent from my LG-LS980 using Tapatalk

If the CFO really said that 800 voice would be finished by year's end, then he's lying. Even putting aside the geographical restrictions from the IBEZ & PS that most investors should know about, you are absolutely right to point out the large number of GMOs that still need to be converted to full builds. That's just not going to happen in the four weeks left in 2014.

Well here's the CFO from the transcript of yesterday's conference:

 

Joe Euteneuer - Chief Financial Officer

Sure. So where we are on the network is, one, we have 260 million pops now covered on 1.9 LTE. We will have 800 voice done by year-end. We are at 92 million covered pops on 2.5 and will be 100 million pops by year-end and we have started 800 LTE deployment and should be done at the end of next year. So I think from a network standpoint we have been waiting to get to this point of having a network that is substantially complete. I mean I think 260 on 1.9 will continue to go up as far as number of covered pops. But I think now with the 2.5 of almost 100 million pops that’s sort of a third of the time you have a chance to hit a 2.5 tower and most of those towers are in concentrated areas so you can experience it.

 

http://seekingalpha.com/article/2726075-sprints-s-management-presents-at-bank-of-america-merrill-lynch-leveraged-finance-conference-transcript?page=1

But aren't these pure "Bottom Line Price" subs the same Sub-prime level customers that Sprint wants to avoid taking on?   

Not really. You can be an A+ credit customer and just not be interested in 20 gazillion gbs of data.  You'd be happier to get the 10 gb bucket you have for less. 

I think the new plans are simply a treat for customers to take notice. Nothing else changes.

 

The current branding, messaging is still in place. Hell, I saw a few of the Sprint ads over the weekend on TV, no the screaming goat, but the guy destroying the computer.

 

Great little bit.

It sounds like it's aimed at a different group of customers. Sprint's CFO talked about it at a financial conference today.  The new offer seems aimed at people who's motivation is bottom line price.  They're not interested in getting more data for what they're paying now.  They just want to pay less for what they currently have.  

Not exactly Marcelo related, but Sprint's CFO and an exec from SoftBank are giving a presentation at a financial conference today.  The audio stream is available here: http://www.veracast.com/webcasts/baml/levfin2014/id59111313956.cfm

Highlights so far:

• 260 Mil pops covered by 1.9 LTe
• 92 Mil pops covered by 2.5, 100 mil pops by year end
• 800 voice finished by year end
• 800 LTE finished by end of next year
• TMo came after them hard, ETF paid by TMo doubled Sprint's sub losses
• Marcelo was aggressive, changed things around. Became net port positive for first time in a year.
• Hiring 500 more sales reps to cover heavier volume at stores
• Going over new cut in half promo, going after families that weren't turned on by double data rate offer
• Sprint spent less on CapEx thanks to Softbank's help in deploying network more efficiently. 
• Future: continue deployment of 2.5. Expand capacity and speed of 2.5. Integrating wifi capability in handsets.
• Brightstar provided ability for lease program. Brightstar has ability to determine re-sale value of phones which allows lease program to work. 

That was it.  Nothing really interesting. For anybody interested the audio recording should be available later. 

I think they do not want to open it up to existing devices because they want to make sure everyone jumping in is getting a brand new Triband device.  To ensure the best possible network experience.

 

I suppose they could try to make it open to existing Triband phones, but then that gets wonky.  Since the purpose of this it to get brand new customers from the Duopoly and not likely to have new Triband devices, this is probably the best route to take.  Trying to tell customers can bring devices, but only if they're Triband, will get confusing and messy.

Plus forcing you to buy a new phone helps offset the ARPU loss due to the reduction in service plan price.