Conan Kudo

I'm a software engineer (it's a computer science degree). Right now, I work for a company that develops embedded system solutions for monitoring assets and facilities using cloud managed platforms. It's good work. Challenging and fun.

The big news is that Sprint is shifting its financial and operating calendar to begin on April 1, in accordance to the directive that all SoftBank controlled companies follow (it is popular financial/operating calendar restart period in Japan because the first quarter starts out very well in the entertainment and electronics industries during this period).

The net losses on cash isn't good, as I acknowledged that T-Mobile did push itself into debt with the MetroPCS merger. I'm curious to see how 4Q results and the VZ 700MHz transaction will affect the FY 2013 financials for TMUS.

Hyde Park

Not necessarily. Tablets are an easy gateway to sell service because monthly rates are low, and if the carrier is subsidizing them, they can keep the subscriber until the contract expires (under normal circumstances). And people do want tablets. "Cheap" tablets are what consumers want, as the HP TouchPad firesale showed.

I ignore everyone's spin. If you look at T-Mobile's numbers on a quarterly basis, it looks pretty damn good from Q1 2013 onward. Prior to that, T-Mobile's subscribers were weak, its ARPU was weak, its churn was horrible, but it was still profitable. T-Mobile pushed itself into debt in 2Q'13 with the acquisition charge from merging with MetroPCS, but it returned to astounding subscriber growth over the course of FY 2013.

I generally ignore the spin and look at the numbers. Doing direct comparisons on a quarterly basis myself paints a more accurate picture than what Sprint's "spin" says. The spin sounds nice, but the numbers look pretty bad. Hesse has noted that disconnects/port outs are ongoing by business customers even after that. The after-effects of the Nextel shutdown have not settled yet. ARPU has been high because in spite of the losses, the majority of Sprint subs are still on the pricier Simply Everything plans. The My Way plans launched last year pushed many of the legacy non Simply Everything users to move up to My Way, which pushed ARPU up even more.

Did anyone read the FY 2013 numbers? Across the year, Sprint still lost 2.285 million subscribers. That's pretty astounding. And if it weren't for the tablets, they would have lost 408,000 subscribers for the quarter. The only problem with replacing phone subscribers with tablet ones is that the ARPU is cut in half for those subscribers.

The OP wants the backhaul gear, not the endpoint gear. That means he wants the microwave P2P transmission gear.

iPhones camp on LTE and continually rescan in order to periodically ping for any information that the CDMA network has waiting for it. This is because iPhones do not support the CDMA+LTE version of eCSFB. The side effect of this is that it is more likely to switch sectors (which can cause some network connectivity instability). As for switching "sites"/"cells" when the site you are connected to gets too loaded, that's a feature that 3GPP networks have had for a while now. It's a fundamental technique for load-balancing that was developed for GSM and extended for UMTS and LTE. The network is intelligent enough to be able to know what it is too loaded. But the important aspect of this is that it can shunt devices to another cell through forced handover. This technique is absolutely critical because unlike 3GPP2 networks, 3GPP networks do not permit maintaining a full client-side list of sites and sectors (basically, no PRLs). It is up to the network to push that information in real-time to the device.

Radio channel

It's not that it won't ever happen, it's just that it is unlikely to. It's not like DT hasn't licensed the brand out to those it doesn't control before...

Gnarly waves!

Ain't that the truth! He probably set Sprint back more than a decade. Cutting off investment, spinning off mobile broadband assets, "firing" subscribers, etc. That said, Hesse has largely righted the ship since 2011. And unlike his unlikable predecessor, Hesse recognizes mobile broadband and fixed wireless is going to be core to Sprint's future growth.

Originally, Sprint owned a stake in the venture. Sprint asked the cable companies to buy them out, so they did in August 2007.

I quoted the wrong post. However, don't count your chickens before they hatch. There's still AWS-3, which will be an auction of 2x25MHz of spectrum. While T-Mobile has been a huge driver in the AWS-3 efforts, I actually expect AT&T to be the big bidder for that auction. It's the only shot AT&T has toward offering competitive LTE network performance. My estimation is that T-Mobile will bid for up to 2x10MHz of AWS-3, maybe even 2x15MHz in some markets (*cough*Cincinnati*cough*), but AT&T will try to grab as much of it as it can. I'd rather see Sprint, T-Mobile, and regional operators go after this auction, but the likelihood of Sprint participating is pretty low in the face of SoftBank's desired direction for Sprint.