Conan Kudo

However, there's some uncertainty on whether the CA will be with Band 17+2 or Band 12+2. Both are supported in the spec, but depending on how fast the agreement gets implemented, AT&T may do the latter rather than the former...

Nortel locked them out of the Americas, and Lucent kept them out of Europe. After both suffered their fates, Samsung was able to come into the global infrastructure business. It also helped that Samsung devices were becoming very popular, too.

Samsung Networks has been in the business since the late 1980s. However, it entered Europe and the Americas fairly recently. It had restricted itself to Asia prior to that...

SoftBank's network uses the following technology and bands: UMTS 900/1500/1700/2100 (3GPP bands 8, 11, 9, 1) LTE 700/1800/2100 (3GPP bands 28, 3, 1) Most of their handsets support UMTS 900/1500/1900/2100, as UMTS 1700 is being dropped for LTE 1800. The reason UMTS 1900 (3GPP band 2) is supported on a vast majority of their handsets is because there's a lot of roaming with Latin America and Europe/Japan. Both Europe and Japan have been active in the Latin American economy for quite some time now. PCS was the first band that UMTS was deployed on in the Americas, though now it's on 850 and 1900. It's also for this reason that the vast majority of European handsets are tri-band UMTS 900/1900/2100. It's also fairly easy to support it, too.

Sprint has plenty of non-contiguous allocations that prevent any large efficiency with PCS LTE. The only shot Sprint has with PCS LTE to go up to a larger channel is if it gets PCS H block. But that doesn't matter either. SoftBank does not care about the PCS network (because it is CDMA on PCS A-F, there's no confidence in a band 25 LTE ecosystem right now, and there are no synergies to realize here because of CDMA instead of UMTS on PCS A-F). It doesn't care about the ESMR network. It cares about the IMT-E TDD network. SoftBank has already enforced a strategic change to Sprint that has refocused capacity efforts around Band 41 instead of the other bands. Sprint has been offering UMTS band 2 service support on a large number of its devices for a few years now, so it could do that. ESMR would likely retain a single CDMA 1X-Advanced carrier alongside the 3MHz FDD LTE carrier. As you said, there's no real reason to not retain the legacy CDMA 1X-A service on ESMR until the bitter end. And it wouldn't cost that much more to support it, since nearly the entire system is already in place. Nearly all of the equipment deployed in Network Vision can be reused for a UMTS/LTE infrastructure on ESMR/PCS/TD-IMT-E spectrum.

SoftBank will never change its requirements to include CDMA. Adding support for Sprint's and T-Mobile's LTE networks will come very soon, but there's absolutely no reason to include CDMA on its phones (excluding iPhones). It is a UMTS/LTE operator, not a CDMA one.

That is definitely true. I'm glad you brought up the Bell System. For all of its faults, it was a good thing from a technological perspective. The Bell System eventually grew, incorporated features from rival systems, and became the gold standard for a telephone system. The Bell System did it by incorporating the feedback from those in various markets it expanded into (Mexico, Japan, Europe, etc.). That made it a better system, overall. The 3GPP does the same thing today with UMTS and LTE. As for spectrum release issues in Europe, the EC is working on streamlining the process this time around with the APT700 subset that will be implemented for its second digital dividend spectrum release in about a year. The EC messed up this time with the CEPT800 plan because they allowed the individual countries to have their own timetables on digital TV conversion. To be fair, part of the problem was the differing TV standards used throughout the region covered by CEPT. Not all of them used PAL (which tended to move toward lower frequency systems anyway). Several used SECAM instead. The countries also argued for years about which system to move to until they EU put its foot down and told them which system to use. These problems won't come up again this time around, so I think it'll move along much more smoothly.

What people don't understand is that telecommunications is all about scale and interoperability. That's how the original phone system managed to grow throughout the world. Cry about it all you want, but there's a reason that universal service typically demands universal technology and compatibility. Despite the fact that our networks are well-built out, it hasn't been long enough that the dust has settled yet. We still have an opportunity to push interoperability, better spectrum management, and better technology management. A lot of us tend to forget that these companies don't own the spectrum (even though they make it sound like they do). We do. I consider many telecom companies out there to be very hypocritical. Even at the CCA, where the smaller carriers bemoan the lack of interoperability and stuff like that, they talk out of both sides of their mouths. They want the big carriers to not have that ability, but they want it to screw over their customers. They've even said that they don't want to offer that to their customers. A.J. often accuses me of having a Eurasian view to telecom. And perhaps he's right. But the Eurasian view is that common technology, common frequencies, and common networks are incalculably beneficial to the public. CEPT has done a great job of that in Europe, and even though the spread of that beyond Europe is tinged by some darker undertones in Africa and Asia, I think it still worked out fairly well. Contrary to popular belief, I liked using CDMA2000 when it first arrived. It was superior to FD-TDMA systems like D-AMPS and GSM. But, I switched to UMTS as soon as it arrived, because I felt that it sufficiently incorporated the advantages of CDMA technology with some advancement and interesting capabilities of its own. And of course, it was a global technology being adopted by all regions. I've never made it a secret that I prefer UMTS over CDMA2000. I personally like that operators in Canada, Latin America, and most of Asia have switched from CDMA2000 to UMTS as they've realized the socioeconomical weakness of the CDMA2000 platform. For a company like Sprint, who is deploying multi-mode gear, it's very easy to add UMTS to it and transition over time to UMTS/LTE. T-Mobile is doing the same thing in MetroPCS CDMA/LTE markets, and it's been going along very swimmingly. I think that operators in the US should move to a common UMTS/LTE platform, especially since our spectrum for LTE is so screwed up that we've practically broke the key benefit of everyone using LTE. I've also never made it a secret that I think the FCC needs a swift kick in the pants by the public to force them to fix our spectrum problem. We don't have a spectrum shortage problem. We have a spectrum mismanagement problem. This is because Congress keeps forcing the FCC to auction spectrum when it isn't ready, and the FCC keeps taking shortcuts to auction spectrum, leaving it fragmented and useless. Thankfully, the FCC doesn't make totally insane decisions (like making 600MHz spectrum TDD). However, the FCC's work with 700MHz, S band, PCS H, L band, etc. prove to me that we, as the public, need to force the FCC to fix this -- once the government is back online.

And where did you get the idea that Legere hates AT&T? For goodness' sake, he learned the ropes of telecom while working there, alongside Dan Hesse and other stalwarts in telecom today! I doubt he hates AT&T. However, it's a sound strategy to pick a fight like he's doing. The "us vs them" mentality is easy to fall into, and Legere is making it "us" to be T-Mobile, and "them" to be AT&T. Invoking that "underdog" and "challenger" imagery with T-Mobile as the "good guy" and the other three as the "bad guys" helps rally the troops and it is helping to turn around the company. Sprint is no stranger to this, but it hasn't been executing well to back up its marketing. So it has somewhat fallen flat.

Favorable is something as simple as being able to pick and choose what areas would have roaming enabled, and flexibly calculate the fees incurred based on that.

No. No one mentioned a flat roaming rate. However, T-Mobile has the option of enabling AT&T voice and data UMTS roaming anywhere it can afford to. AT&T gets to rate-limit T-Mobile to CSD speed, though.

If T-Mobile could afford to enable roaming across the entire country, it would. But AT&T does not offer roaming on a national basis for domestic roaming. Roaming rates differ based on location. In some areas, AT&T simply charges too much to enable any roaming. In others, AT&T charges a more reasonable rate. Sprint's situation with Verizon is unusual, and has not been repeated by anyone else since the original Alltel disappeared.

Unfortunately, domestic roaming agreements don't work the same way that international ones do. The closest analogue would be India, where T-Mobile has signed agreements with multiple operators to get pan-India coverage. And even then, the operators don't give T-Mobile any indication whether they truly offer that.