Conan Kudo

Did they just say they expect Sprint to post similar additions to T-Mobile?

Yes. Trefis also justifies it by saying because T-Mobile got those kinds of gains, Sprint will too. They're horrible and unreliable. I've seen similarly stupid analyses from them on other companies...

They are also the only firm to make such a statement. Out of more than a dozen analyst firms!

 

Where? What locations not indicated on the coverage map?

 

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5 MHz Band 2 LTE along I-59 near Picayune, Poplarville, Purvis, just north of Hattiesburg (adjacent to a band 4 site), Laurel, Sandersville, Heidleburg, and Vossburg.

On US-45 north of Meridian, Lauderdale, Shuqualak, Macon, and Brooksville are all 5 MHz Band 2 LTE as well.

 

According to Sensorly and RootMetrics it looks like some places like Collins, Mendenhall, Moss Point and Gautier as well.

 

Also worth noting that they deployed some Band 4/UMTS markets in MS within the last 9 months in West Point, Columbus, Oxford, and Vicksburg as well.

Also, 5MHz FDD Band 2 LTE is active along Clinton-Raymond Road.  Spots of 10MHz FDD Band 4 LTE and WCDMA carriers (two AWS, one PCS) are live within Clinton proper, and it smooths out to ubiquity in Jackson.

Progress still looks shitty here in the Midwest...maybe they're doing a lot more in the rest of the U.S. I haven't seen it here.

From my view here in the Southeast, T-Mobile seems to be quite aggressive. Not sure why they are less so in the Midwest, but there's a huge amount of network upgrades going on in Mississippi, Alabama, and the Floridian panhandle. Of course, none of it shows up on the map yet...

I used those hypothetical stats for illustrative purposes.  The actual percentages are not important.

 

But there is good reason why T-Mobile advertises its coverage POPs, not its coverage area.  T-Mobile is still -- by good measure -- the weakling among the big four.

 

AJ

Everyone advertises in POPs. AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint. No one, aside from Verizon, advertises on geographical coverage.

Is it really that "amazing"?  In the US, something like 90 percent of the population is confined to 10 percent of the land area.

 

Prima facie, stats can be impressive, can appear similar to other stats.  But in depth analysis shows that they are not so similar.

 

AJ

Actually no. It's a little over 50%.

There's substantial geographic expansion required to move from 285 million people covered by the 2G network to 300 million people covered by the 4G network.

From the Q3 statement:

 

250 mil LTE pops covered

260 million by 2014 year end estimated

300 million goal by 2015 year end

 

Wideband LTE is in 19 markets, aiming for at least 26 by end of 2014.

40 markets have LTE on PCS 1900, and growing

 

 http://newsroom.t-mobile.com/issues-insights-blog/company-news/t-mobile-lte-now-reaches-250-million-americans-months-ahead-of-schedule.htm

That puts T-Mobile at 5-8 million POPs less than Verizon and 5 million POPs less than AT&T for native coverage. That's pretty amazing, actually.

So what will happen to the expansion band now? just sit there empty forever?

Probably, but who knows? Something could change in the next few years that resolves all this nicely. I wouldn't count on it, though.

I was also under the impression that the Expansion Band (816-817/861-862 MHz after it replaces the current Guard Band) would be available for Sprint (possibly even default to them) if vacated by all other eligible licensees by a certain date. It doesn't make sense for it to just sit there unused.

 

That said, these spectrum squatters are idiots, and it's great to see them get a bit of comeuppance.

The squatters ruined it. Now there's no way for Sprint to gain those frequencies. If there were no squatters and the frequencies remained bare, Sprint could have reasonably asked for the condition that was imposed on it to be waived so that the spectrum could be put to use for its ESMR cellular system.

The squatters can choke on their licenses for not reading the fine print and screwing it up for the rest of us. Now we have to wait for the FCC to throw down the banhammer on these idiots first and revoke their licenses before any such reasonable accommodation could be made for Sprint to gain those frequencies.

I don't know. It'll be one new one for Sprint. Ting is just another MVNO.

 

 

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Churn would tick up a bit for two losses (adds don't factor into churn), but the net loss would be -1 in subscriber numbers (as two Ting cancellations plus one Sprint addition is net loss of one connection).

I still don't like the idea of the 600MHz auction to begin with... We should be taking a hard look at how our existing <1GHz spectrum is allocated first...

Does T-Mobile have any towers controlled by WesTower or MasTec?

It has a few in North Mississippi, mostly ones co-located with Sprint. However, several sites formerly under WesTower's control moved to others over the last year or so.

Sonic Underground

PC Magazine

No, Neal, you are distorting the chronology to suit your argument.  USCC did not control Cellular 850 MHz spectrum in Nebraska until Alltel acquired WWC and divested the overlapping Cellular A block licenses in rural Kansas and Nebraska.  That was not until 2005, yet USCC had already launched PCS 1900 MHz service in Omaha in 2003.

 

Roughly the same is true of Viaero.  It does not serve Omaha, but it did not expand into eastern Nebraska until well after T-Mobile had started constructing a network in Omaha in 2001.  So, again, how did both USCC and Viaero receive local exchange numbers but T-Mobile could not?

 

And you can blame Cook Inlet all you want.  But T-Mobile is still ultimately responsible for Omaha.  Maybe you should say that T-Mobile nee VoiceStream got what it deserved -- for using sham Native American bidding groups to loophole the FCC.  AT&TWS and Cingular did likewise, but for the record, Sprint never did that. 

 

AJ

Okay, first of all. I will concede on the USCC. I misread the authorizations on that. But USCC entered at around the time the last of the number pools were available (2000-2003). Obviously now there's a new set of numbers, so T-Mobile should take the opportunity to correct this. Regardless of Cook Inlet's decisions in the past, T-Mobile has an opportunity to fix it now. It should.

Secondly, though, the Cook Inlet/VoiceStream JV was never qualified as a Native American bidding group. The only thing it was qualified as was a "small business". It got a 25% bidding credit. US Cellular does the same thing in every auction. It's a terrible, untruthful, horrible usage of a FCC auction rules, but US Cellular still does it using various sham companies (it's doing it now in the AWS-3 auction as "Advantage Spectrum, L.P." and "Wolverine Wireless, L.P."), and T-Mobile does not. Cook Inlet/VoiceStream has never accepted money from Native American funds either. I don't know about the others, though.

Thirdly, Viaero Wireless has been in Nebraska since the 1990s. They expanded into "402" area in 1997 after acquiring PCS licenses for the area. They called themselves "Nebraska Wireless" back then.

Bell System

Warning bell

(Also, 500th post!   )

Blast! A lot of Sprint cell sites around here are controlled by WesTower. MasTec is going to ruin them even more...

It is curious that T-Mobile is the only carrier that never was able to get Nebraska numbers then. AJ may correct me, but we may have had the record for most wireless providers at once in Omaha in the early 2000's: Cingular-->AT&T, Sprint, Nextel, Qwest, Cricket, Us West (Airtouch--> Verizon), Verizon, Alliant-->Alltel--> Verizon, Us Cellular, and T-Mobile sitting on their protection network. It seems like their were plenty of numbers to go around here for anyone that wanted them.

Originally, T-Mobile did not administer the network that existed in the Great Plains. The Iowan network, as everyone knows, is controlled by Iowa Wireless Services. But what isn't as well known is that the spectrum (and the associated network) for the rest of the area was controlled by Cook Inlet.

For those who don't know, Cook Inlet Region, Inc is an Alaskan company that develops businesses to support the local Alaskan communities. One of the more unusual ventures of Cook Inlet was partnering with Western Wireless/VoiceStream to create a joint venture to acquire PCS licenses to construct a GSM network across the western half of the United States (and some parts of the Northeast), excluding Iowa. Cook Inlet constructed the facilities, dealt with permitting, acquired phone numbers, and such. VoiceStream would act as the "face" and sell the service, while paying Cook Inlet to have exclusive access to resell service on the network.

Cook Inlet's economic share in the venture gradually declined since the VoiceStream/Omnipoint/Powertel merger and Deutsche Telekom acquisition. However, Cook Inlet continued to hold a stake (and control) until last year. Last year (after the T-Mobile/MetroPCS deal closed), all the Cook Inlet/VS subsidiaries that represented T-Mobile's PCS licenses and carrier authorizations were folded into T-Mobile License LLC after T-Mobile bought out Cook Inlet from the venture. This was also disclosed in 2013 Annual Report to Stockholders issued on February 2014. Prior to this event, T-Mobile could not legally acquire phone numbers (it technically didn't own the facilities it used and was constrained by the terms of Cook Inlet). Cook Inlet didn't want to go through the effort and pay for the numbers for Omaha (which it never really cared for, not like Las Vegas), so T-Mobile never had numbers. And T-Mobile was capital-constrained in 2010-2012, so it wasn't really going to dedicate limited cash to give to Cook Inlet to acquire blocks of numbers then.

More bullshit.  USCC launched newly constructed band class 1 CDMA2000 service in Omaha well after 2001.  Come on, Neal, stop with the excuses.

 

You have yet to show any official documentation.  And this so called absence of local exchange numbers has not affected any other major operator in the same way in any other major market.  The issue does not exist in the way that you think it does.

 

If T-Mobile really wanted to serve Omaha, it could get it done.  But T-Mobile does not really want to serve Omaha -- because it and 3GPP are late and so far behind the curve in Nebraska.  That is the T-Mobile modus operandi across the geographic majority of the country.  Deal with it.

 

AJ

 

And USCC also controlled 850MHz spectrum throughout Nebraska for years before entering Omaha after the turn of the century. Area codes 402 and now 531 cover more than Omaha, you know. Even though the Omahan network was new, USCC had a presence in Nebraska for years. So of course it had numbers.

Blaming 3GPP technology is stupid and irrelevant. AT&T and Viaero Wireless both have Nebraskan numbers due to their legacies in Nebraska. And the sheer number of phone numbers used in Nebraska triggered number pooling to be implemented earlier than most states, and number allocation rates still remained high.

For Omahans' sake, I do hope T-Mobile does want to really serve the market. While one of the issues has only been recently addressed (T-Mobile being formally authorized as a carrier in Nebraska), the other issues do need to be dealt with (network quality and phone number allocations) in order to do well there. Now that T-Mobile has cash and is growing, I hope it will do something soon.

I am sorry, Neal, but nobody else buys that explanation.  It is bullshit.  T-Mobile is not stopped in the Omaha metro because of lack of available local exchange numbers -- for better than a decade.

 

AJ

Considering that the pool of blocks of numbers for area code 402 ran out in 2001 (when T-Mobile was still VoiceStream and was closing the deal to be acquired by Deutsche Telekom), it's an extremely valid explanation. Heck, you've admitted as much, knowing full well that there were far more cellular networks in Omaha than the rest of the country. There were more pagers, more phones, more data cards, more everything. The 531 area code overlay was created in 2011, but numbers were not even being issued until last year! As far as I know, the blocks allocated for 531 have only been to wireline and VoIP providers so far.

And to address mobile number portability, you aren't allowed to port numbers that you don't have a local exchange for. That is, because T-Mobile lacks any local exchange reserves in Nebraska, it cannot accept Nebraskan numbers for number portability. Number portability is a "local" process, despite the fact that you're allowed to port mobile numbers from anywhere a carrier has an exchange these days. If there's no exchange, you don't get to port in. It's that simple.

What I don't get is how you don't know this, A.J.? This is Phone System 101!

Way to go John!

http://www.rootmetrics.com/us/rsr/omaha-ne

Blast it all. It's rather annoying that T-Mobile still doesn't have Nebraskan numbers, so they won't fix this market because they can't sell anything there...

Space Jam

Isn't that backwards? The 700a is 6x6, which is all the sub 1Ghz spectrum that TMUS has, and in about half of the US they don't even have that. Sprint is actually in a better position outside of the IBEZ and the southeast if we are going by Robert's map. http://s4gru.com/index.php?/topic/5413-sprint-800mhz-spectrum-map-work-in-progress/

Aside from one market where they have Cellular 850 A block spectrum (12.5MHz FDD), this is correct. Sprint technically has more low-band spectrum in aggregate than T-Mobile does. T-Mobile's footprint in low-band spectrum is increasing all the time, but it isn't quite to the level of Sprint's yet.

Yeah. AFAIK Network Vision equipment/infrastructure is way more modular/easy to upgrade and inter-compatible/manageable than anything anyone else has done so far. It's also way more consistent across various areas.

T-Mobile's network architecture is just as modular (if not more so). T-Mobile's architecture is also simpler than Sprint's, since it isn't trying to do crazy CDMA/LTE bridging that doesn't work out very well most of the time.

The consistency of both Sprint and T-Mobile's networks leave something to be desired. But they are both improving on that.

Price targets for TMUS are up to $40, with a $37 consensus and 11 analysts rating the stock a strong buy. EPS consensus is 0.05.

It's normal for the stock to go down, especially as shorts kicked in the last few days and weeks. The NASDQ itself is down almost 9% from a month ago , TMUS is down 15% up today 1.50%, as is the NASDAQ. 

 

That's in line with what I've heard from analysts who examined only the fundamentals of the business. The market is quite prone to volatility, so the value of the stock is not always reflected in the price of the stock. As the market calms down from M&A fever, we'll see more people focus on the business fundamentals and the share price of TMUS will rise. Almost certainly, the share price will spike up on the Q3 earnings report due at the end of the month.

Rough day on Twitter today eh?

Rough week is more like it. The Google Nexus launch was a mess and being badgered by certain unnamed people led to lack of sleep, too...

Praise.

¡Fantástico! I thought that might be the case, but I wanted to be sure.