Conan Kudo

It's full on lte release 9 implementation for the original equipment. Software updates can enable certain lte advance functionalities as for equipment.

 

Sprints 8t8r equipment are straight out LTE advance.

 

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

8T8R, however, is not a software upgrade. It requires replacing the entire radio head (including RRHs) to implement. Same goes for the weird 4T2R radios it is now installing to replace the previous 2T2R radios it had in place for FDD bands.

Don't make the mistake that LTE-Advanced features are all accessible through software upgrades. Less than half are. The focus of Releases 10-13 are on features that require brand new hardware to function, because they modify critical behaviors or change the air interface in some critical manner. Most of the "software fixes" from Release 10 are focused on the core network (specifically IMS and IPX interfaces and functionality), so they won't affect the RAN much.

That's the reason why T-Mobile received custom gear from Ericsson to be Release 10 compliant, and why NSN gear is Release 10 compliant as well. It's the same reason for AT&T and Verizon having to replace their gear again in order to move up from Release 8, and why Ericsson and ALU market upgrades to Release 10 will be far more painful than in Samsung markets. Release 9 was mostly software oriented fixes, so Sprint received Release 8 gear with patches to implement some relevant Release 9 improvements. Release 10 will require new hardware.

Sprint covers 282 Million with EVDO coverage as of December 31st of last year according to broadbandmap.gov

 

T-Mobile covers 245 Million with HSPA coverage as of December 31st. I know that T-Mobile's network is larger by pure square milage but in terms of 3G coverage or what's classified as broadband by the FCC, Sprint covers more people (in broadband).

I specifically did not mention technologies. He asked about coverage, with no technological qualifiers. In terms of raw coverage, T-Mobile's native network is larger. There are some areas Sprint covers that T-Mobile does not, but T-Mobile has much more geography and population covered than Sprint, overall.

I still have a question that maybe Neil can answer. How many of T-Mobile's sites would actually improve Sprint's coverage.

*sighs* Mou...

As far as T-Mobile sites that improve Sprint coverage, there's a significant amount of them that would. The majority of Sprint sites are co-located with T-Mobile or too close to T-Mobile sites to be of any use, but there are a significant number of T-Mobile sites (~20K or so) that exist in areas that Sprint has much thinner to no coverage. These extra sites are the reason why T-Mobile's network is technically "bigger" than Sprint's, in terms of overall coverage (285-290 million people covered under T-Mobile's network vs 260 million people covered under Sprint's network).

I'm not sure why Neal needs to set us straight how many Sprint sites there are.  Which there are roughly 55,000 now with Clearwire counted.

 

Robert

When we last had this discussion, Sprint did not yet control Clearwire sites. As of now, there are around 52-55K sites under the control of Sprint. However, I expect this number to eventually shrink to about 48-50K after everything is said and done (including decommissioning non-strategic and redundant sites from Clearwire).

T-Mobile's site count has moved up to nearly 60K (it's around 55-57K, I think).

Where is the source of cutting capex?  Additionally, even if they are cutting capex from $8 Billion to $7 Billion in 2014, that doesn't mean much.  It may even be because equipment suppliers cannot even produce the equipment fast enough to burn $8 Billion, so they have revised projections.  This is absolutely nothing to be concerned about at all.

 

And is the $1 Billion cut over the next two years?  If so, that would mean $15B instead of $16B.  This is just not a sign of the sky is falling.  Masa could easily get another billion if he needed to.  This is a sign of something else that is not understood at face value.

 

Robert

The $1 billion in capex cut for the next 12 months (mentioned in Sprint's 10-Q) alone isn't too worrisome, but the fact that Sprint management is telling analysts that 2.5GHz is going to be deployed in a CapEx efficient manner (which it should be doing anyway) implies that they are revising deployment charts and cutting back deployment of 2.5GHz materially.

Of course, cutting 2.5GHz is likely to hurt Sprint the least, especially if the cuts are largely oriented around culling more sites instead of transitioning them to LTE TDD.

Shares tanked yesterday because people realized that Sprint had no cash and the profit was "illusory" (word used by my analyst friend). Sprint has negative cash flow (meaning it was burning cash) with losing $496 million this last quarter after everything is said and done, including the $23 million in operating profit. 

Additionally, if you break out the metrics and figure out the ARPU mix, things don't look that good, either.

• -650K postpaid phones
• -70K postpaid mobile broadband
• +570K postpaid tablets (avg ARPU being 1/3 handset ARPU)
• -546K prepaid phones
• additional -77K prepaid due to churn out from USCC Midwest buyout

Consequently, Sprint did the following:

• Cut capex by at least a billion dollars
• Lowered guidance on net adds, cash generation, and churn
• Pushed out potential positive net adds to 4Q (likely due to near-guarantee gains for Christmas)
• Deprioritized 2.5GHz deployment for 2014 in favor of 800MHz
• Stated intent to deploy 2.5GHz in "capex-efficient manner" (read: substantially less deployment than originally planned)

This doesn't look very good to Wall Street, so shares fell.

In the places I go, VZW EVDO is just getting downright awful. I don't think they're doing any CAPEX on it anymore. And I guess I don't blame them. But my average VZW 3G speeds are now 50-250kbps.

 

I thought by this point with so many LTE devices out there and 700MHz coverage nearly ubiquitous that EVDO burdens would be getting lighter, not heavier. They may be removing EVDO carriers for future refarming in Band 5 for VoLTE.

 

Robert via Samsung Note 8.0 using Tapatalk Pro

Lowell McAdam has mentioned several times since 2011 that no CapEx is going into the CDMA network. It's all going into LTE. As for OpEx, CDMA is getting the bare minimum of the budget (i.e. just enough to keep it going to get users camped on LTE or whatnot). I don't recall exactly where, but one of the execs mentioned that once VoLTE launches, the OpEx budget for CDMA will drop even more (more of it will be allocated for LTE).

Since Verizon deployed the LTE network as a separate overlay system, and decoupled the core networks in 2012, it's entirely possible to allow the CDMA network to fail without LTE failing, too.

Starting late last year, Verizon has been removing EvDO carriers on PCS and squeezing them on Cellular. So both 1X and EvDO capacity have fallen as a result. Verizon wants to start work on a second LTE network on PCS sometime in the middle of next year.

AT&T's UMTS voice network is inferior, coverage wise, to Verizon's CDMA. Now, their LTE networks might end up being equal as both of them have nationwide spectrum.  And I thought that the Alltel roaming deal expires in 2016.

How do you know that? From what I've seen, AT&T's UMTS network matches Verizon's CDMA network in terms of overall coverage. There are spots here and there where they trade on coverage (Montana is strong for AT&T but weak for Verizon, while Verizon has a presence in Nebraska and AT&T does not, etc.).

Certainly many challenges remain, foremost being coverage. I will be curious to see how well LTE on 600 MHz propagates compared to 1xA 800, particularly if the latter is changed to be tuned for coverage rather than capacity. The reliability of VoLTE will also depend on certain Release 10-12 LTE-A features, like Co-ordinated multipoint (CoMP) and Enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC). Sprint's network is I believe still on Release 9. Even with all those bells and whistles, I expect 1xA 800 coverage to extend much further than LTE 600. eSRVCC in Release 9 apparently allows for handoffs to CDMA circuit-switched voice for at least emergency callers, so coupling VoLTE with 1x800 to fall back on without the call dropping is theoretically possible.

It's more likely that PS handover will be used rather than SRVCC for CDMA networks, since that is much simpler to do. Sprint is already halfway there with eHRPD. EvDO was designed to support VoIP calls, if I remember correctly.

There's no reason that Sprint could not get roaming agreements from GSM carriers today. Most of Sprint's devices are quad-mode GSM/UMTS/LTE/CDMA, so the voice and data roaming orders already apply for Sprint to try to get roaming deals with GSM/UMTS operators. If it elected to, it could choose to get a roaming deal from AT&T instead of Verizon when the Alltel agreement expires next year. In fact, I'd probably recommend it because a roaming deal with AT&T is probably going to have more favorable terms than a roaming deal with Verizon. Verizon has not and will not allow Alltel roaming agreements to renew.

From T-Mobile's side, it does have a roaming agreement with Sprint it can use that it inherited from MetroPCS, if it wants. But I doubt it wants to use it. If it did, it could renegotiate to add LTE, and use only the LTE portion of it.

Well in T-Mobile's case they've announced they'll use eSRVCC technology which will allow the calls to drop to either 3g/2g in case you move outside of LTE coverage. It's just the next advancement in Technology not sure how it's a e-peen rat race. Sprint will eventually deploy VoLTE as well. 

The interesting thing is that VoLTE will enable T-Mobile to seek roaming deals with Verizon and AT&T, as the voice and data roaming orders would now kick in for T-Mobile, allowing them to use VoLTE as a means to get reasonable rates for LTE roaming. The "visited" network doesn't need to have VoLTE for that to work, it could just redirect packet data to the T-Mobile core as normal.

It's $8 billion capex this year and next which is a solid increase from the $5 billion spent last year. NV 1.0 may be coming to a close but NV 2.0 and rolling out the new 8 pipe radios over the entire network and more is only just beginning. 

Are there any opex changes then? Because wasn't part of Network Vision supposed to reduce opex by simplifying network structures?

Dont understand how you look at previous trends for Sprint as though anything they have done in the past would necessarily be repeated. Nextel is gone, softbank is here, network vision, 800 voice, 2600 lte should all change the landscape. Just asking ...

 

Jim, Sent from my Photon 4G using Tapatalk 2

Once the main Network Vision program is done, Sprint will ease off capex and reduce it accordingly, which naturally changes the balance sheet. After this year, I'd expect significant cuts in capex to shift Sprint back to profitability.

Sprint and T-Mobile currently do not produce a profit; Sprint losing billions of dollars for the past decade. In this case, stability might mean that the two survive and effectively compete against AT&T+Verizon.

We don't know about the long-term health of either of these two companies because all financials right now are influenced by the heavy spending on network upgrades right now. You can't just subtract it, either, because there's always a degree of capex spending involved.

You can look at previous trends and develop a model of what it might be like if Network Vision and the modernization program were completed. Here's what I see it being like:

Sprint would still be losing money, but the loss would be narrower. However, the lack of the headline loss would cause more to peek into the deeper problems, such as poor execution ability. There are some serious fundamental issues with Sprint that need to be addressed, but hopefully Masa is working on that as we speak.

T-Mobile would be turning a profit of about $1 billion, because it would ordinarily ease off into $2.9-3.2 billion of capex if modernization wasn't accelerated. Because T-Mobile has been firing on all cylinders and is quite ahead of schedule, it went ahead and accelerated its program, which pushed it down to lose money for the quarter.

Interesting perspective by Verizon's McAdam:

 

Speaking of wireless consolidation, McAdam was sanguine and said Verizon could continue to compete no matter the industry structure. "We can certainly compete in a four-player market," but he said Verizon could compete in a three-player market as well. He added that typically, three-player are markets are more stable but that "whatever the regulators decide, they decide."

 

Read more: Verizon's McAdam: We're not talking to Dish about any deals - FierceWireless http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/verizons-mcadam-were-not-talking-dish-about-any-deals/2014-05-20#ixzz32GnzeUg6

I think that AT&T and Verizon are OK with the Sprint/T-Mobile merger. T-Mobile/DT definitely are. I think that if Sprint does a spectrum swap with Dish and then hosts Dish's spectrum in a joint venture that will concentrate on fixed broadband, then the merger will be acceptable to the feds.

 

Stable is bad, in this case. Right now, we don't have a price war. We have healthy competition on value propositions. T-Mobile competes based on features for price, Sprint competes with its unique plan structure, AT&T competes on bundled value and multi-layer mobile broadband, and Verizon competes on coverage of LTE.

In the event Sprint and T-Mobile were to merge, the effect would result in three "stable players." This is similar to Japan and Korea, where after consolidating to three players and they reached relative equilibrium in terms of what they wanted, they stopped truly competing. We won't get a price war.

Right now, Japan's telecom market is stable as a rock, enabling SoftBank to invest in other businesses and NTT to do research into new telecom technology. Three stable players means that competition would level off, rather than increase. Also, there would be no incentive to compete as long as you can hold nearly a third of all U.S. customers. As long as that balance is held, then there's no point in trying.

McAdam isn't stupid. He's keenly aware that the scenario that took place in Japan is the ultimate destination in the U.S. if more consolidation among major players is permitted.

Charlie doesn't negotiate. That's why AT&T/DirecTV instead of AT&T/Dish. SoftBank won't buy Dish either, for the same reason.

AT&T has confirmed the directv deal for $48.5 billion. If the FCC lets this go through, they better let sprint and t-mo merge.

 

 

Sent from Josh's iPhone 5S using Tapatalk 2

Why?

DirecTV owns no satellite assets directly. EchoStar, controlled by Ergen, acquired all of Hughes satellite systems. DirecTV and AT&T don't compete at all. In fact, the two have been strong partners since the SBC/BellSouth days. The only wireless spectrum assets that DirecTV owns are for Brazil and Colombia. Obviously, since BellSouth divested its Latin American units to Telefónica nearly a decade ago, AT&T doesn't have anything there. And AT&T is divesting SBC's 10% stake in América Móvil to prevent arguments with Latin American regulators.

The situations are completely different. Sprint and T-Mobile compete in every market and they compete for the same customers. So unless you are completely blind to how M&A works, you'd realize that DirecTV/AT&T and Comcast/TWC have no effects on changing the regulators' mind on T-Mobile/Sprint.

What if a carrier is listed as being a member of LTEiRA but doesn't actually have any sort of LTE (Just 1x and EVDO) on their network? And uses their own (AWS) spectrum + Sprint's PCS stuff? And if they already have a full native bilateral roaming agreement with Sprint? (Talking specifically about Carolina West.)

Still no. While LTEiRA doesn't prevent roaming deals, it definitely prevents SRA-style deals. That's why Pioneer Telephone left the SRA for LTEiRA not too long ago.

Do you happen to know the throttling policy of a wholesale (MVNO) agreement?

It's generally the same as prepaid, though the limits that trigger the throttling differ wildly based on the agreement. And of course, there are some agreements that don't have them at all, like Ting's (because access is fully metered).

Sprint confirms it’s selling all 19 WCS spectrum licenses to AT&T for an undisclosed price. $S

— Walter Piecyk (@WaltBTIG) May 13, 2014

Now all your WCS are belong to AT&T...

Will they spin off U-Verse? DirectTV and UVerse compete directly.

No. U-verse will likely be expanded by DirecTV programming agreements, and DirecTV will continue to be available for DSL subscriber bundles.

Hey.... I have a serious question....

 

Is this your true identity?

 

 

I think, that you think, that I think, that you think, that I already know that answer.

Heh, no. I know lots of stuff, but I'm no super-machine.

We will see how sticky they are once Sprint has their network in order and actually want to do a serious promotion. If they don't want to do that, maybe they don't want those bandwidth hogs back?

 

You can't assume that everyone who leaves are bandwidth hogs. You make a great deal of assumptions without data to back it up. I get that this is a Sprint-focused site, but we have to be realistic here. The current trajectory is not good, and even putting its network back together may not be enough.

The subscriber gains are/will be temporary. Once Sprint has its network in order then it will have a response which help it gain back subscribers. It is pretty much a zero sum game, except for tablets and M2M. I don't count M2M because of the negligible revenue.

M2M revenue is also pretty high margin (~90% or greater). And subscribership isn't a zero-sum game, which is why you can have >100% penetration in the market.

You sound so confident that the gains are temporary. But the data collected by most analyst groups seems to contradict that. In fact, they believe the subscribers are stickier with T-Mobile than they were with their previous mobile network operators. So I will have to disagree.

They have nationwide AWS. I am sure they can move UMTS to PCS.

Yes, but T-Mobile still needs to support several generations of AWS UMTS devices that lack support for PCS. While the number of users who have AWS-only UMTS devices continues to dwindle, it's still significant enough to warrant maintaining it, especially in markets like Cincinnati, where many users come to T-Mobile from Cincinnati Bell Wireless.

gsm and cdma are old school. Just go shared spectrum for LTE advanced.

 

sent by tapatalk from my LS-980 (G2)

That is dumb on so many levels. For one, GSM/UMTS earn T-Mobile more than 70% of its revenue. Within that, UMTS earns T-Mobile greater than 65% of its revenue. GSM, while steadily earning less revenue, is still profitable to maintain due to domestic and multinational roaming and M2M services.

As UMTS is shifted from AWS to PCS, it can increasingly take over the role of GSM, allowing GSM to fade from the network. AT&T, ironically, is helping this by infusing a massive boost into the UMTS ecosystem by driving costs down to integrate UMTS into devices. It's now just as cheap as GSM to put into a device, in large part thanks to AT&T.

As for CDMA, the reason it's not worth maintaining is due to the increasing costs in the ecosystem. As operators steadily convert from CDMA to UMTS and cut off orders for CDMA-enabled devices, the cost of supplying those devices and network gear goes up. About a decade ago, a CDMA device would probably cost roughly the same as a UMTS one, because nearly all of the Americas maintained CDMA networks, as did several countries in Africa and Asia. This is definitely no longer the case. As a result, a CDMA device costs many times more than its UMTS counterpart. And more CDMA operators are disappearing every month. A few months ago, S-Fone in Vietnam declared bankruptcy and completely shut down. Bangladesh's CityCell is in the process of shutting down its CDMA network for GSM, pending approval to convert its mobile license to GSM/UMTS and turn on the replacement network. CityCell no longer offers CDMA roaming services, and has been preparing for two years for the switch. If its request isn't approved, CityCell will likely shut down. Bell and Telus in Canada are jointly shutting down CDMA across the country throughout the year. Movistar (owned by Telefónica) completed shutting down its last CDMA network in Venezuela about a month ago. Iusacell in Mexico has successfully migrated nearly all of its subscribers to UMTS and is repurposing CDMA spectrum for LTE service, in partnership with Nextel Mexico and Movistar. China Telecom, the biggest CDMA operator in the world, will likely fully switch back to GSM through a network sharing agreement being hashed out by all three Chinese mobile network operator companies to speed up LTE deployment. China Telecom already provides to its customers access to the China Unicom/China Mobile GSM network through its dual-mode CDMA/GSM devices that use GSM1X for the CDMA part.

Sprint's problems are compounded by the fact that no one outside the US use PCS for CDMA. And Sprint is the only one in the world using ESMR for CDMA. This makes CDMA device procurement exceptionally expensive, which is why Sprint has trouble with devices from time to time. KDDI elected to use it for LTE to avoid the cost issue, and Nextel Japan remains in limbo (though I expect it to have been fully shut down for the last few years, and they may not even have SMR licenses anymore).

We don't live in a vacuum, as much as many would like to think.

Has anyone ever considered the fact that this doesn't have to be a merger? It could be a sharing agreement. All this talk of a merger has been based on Son's T-Mobile comments when Dish was fighting for Sprint and Clear. Maybe what is going on is a massively Epic LTE network sharing agreement like EE in the UK. DT is half owner in that deal, so why can't they work on the same thing here in the US with SoftBank/Sprint?

 

 

Sent from Josh's iPhone 5S using Tapatalk 2

I've mentioned it multiple times. I immensely prefer a network sharing agreement where Sprint and T-Mobile share GSM/UMTS/LTE networks, maintaining a common platform while executing on developing broad coverage and high capacity networks using the broad portfolio of spectrum the two companies have.

In such a scenario, Sprint would still need to retire the CDMA network, as network sharing in CDMA is not feasible. It's somewhat possible, but it's so ugly, difficult, fragile, and not worth it. 3GPP networks have been designed from the beginning to support network sharing very easily, which is why ACS and GCI in Alaska transitioned to GSM/UMTS/LTE after merging their networks into a NetCo called AWN and now use the shared network.

Sprint/T-Mobile could probably skip the AWS-3 auction but they are not skipping the 600MHz auction no way, no how! 

 

Why should they skip AWS-3? AWS-3 offers T-Mobile the opportunity to get AWS LTE up and running in several markets where it can't now, such as Cincinnati. And the AWS ecosystem is much larger than the PCS one for LTE, making it much more cost effective for both companies.