RedSpark

Page 8 of the Investor Presentation shows the percentage of Tri-band and CA-capable devices on Sprint.

 

http://s21.q4cdn.com/487940486/files/doc_presentations/2016/3_Fiscal-2Q16-Sprint-Quarterly-Investor-Update-FINAL.pdf

 

"Postpaid tri-band LTE phones represented 78 percent of the 25.7 million ending postpaid phone connection base compared to 54 percent at the end of the year-ago period and 73 percent at the end of the prior quarter. During the quarter, 94 percent of postpaid phones sold were tri-band."

 

"Postpaid carrier aggregation capable phones, which allow for higher data speeds, were 75 percent of postpaid phones sold during the quarter, increasing the number of these phones within the phone base to 42 percent."

 

The iPhone 7 release on Sprint really drove the CA percentage number up this quarter.

I see they lifted up the hood on 3CA in 8 cities. Stuff we already knew but glad to see they announced it. I'm in the Columbus market and haven't experienced it yet on my 7plus but that could explain as to why I lost b41 while at home but who knows.

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Sprint has definitely turned the corner. What's incredible to me is how bloated Sprint was as a company. According to the release, Sprint has realized more than $1.1 Billion of year-to-date reductions in cost of services and selling, general and administrative expenses, with nearly $600 Million of the reduction coming in the fiscal second-quarter.

 

Apparently, the company remains on track to achieve its goal of a sustainable reduction of $2 Billion or more of run-rate operating expenses exiting fiscal year 2016 and has plans for further reductions in fiscal year 2017 and beyond.

 

Sprint's bloated cost structure was a huge liability, and kept the company from being truly competitive.

Earnings Report for 2nd Quarter of Fiscal Year 2016 is in:

 

http://newsroom.sprint.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=12357

 

Anyone joining the Conference Call today?

Perhaps Sprint has something in the works here as well:

 

http://nypost.com/2016/10/21/sprint-eyes-entertainment-arena/

Did I not read somewhere that sometime soon Sprint is going to force people into a handful of plans? If so, when is that happening?

 

Marcelo talked about streamlining Sprint's plans at the Goldman Sachs 25th Annual Communacopia Conference on September 20, 2016.

 

Seeking Alpha has the transcript:

 

 

So we decided to come up with a program called Unlimited Freedom and Unlimited Freedom is an attractive rate plan that basically you're only going to get one bill and we mobile optimize your streaming. And then some customers told us that’s great but I also like -- I don’t like it to mobile optimizing. So we said great, so we're going to have unlimited premium that we don’t mobile optimize and streaming. So we are going to potentially move to only three rate plans.

 

We will get out of the 50% off most likely, I say most likely because we are trying new things as a fast company. So if we try new things and don’t work, but 50% is to work make no mistake we're really good at getting in and out of things, we've had a problem, but our plan of record is we want to get off of 50% up.

 

We want to increase a little the ARPU and the ARPU that we're bringing in new customers and we want to massively simplify our business by moving to three rate plans, an entry plan, an Unlimited Freedom and an unlimited premium.

 

Why can we do that? Now is where our vast spectrum holdings come into play. We have more capacity per subscriber than any other carrier in the world. So therefore now that we're indentifying our network, now we start putting our network to work and that’s been always part of the strategy.

 

So we believe the more amount of consumers that actually know about unlimited, we believe that we can continue to grow and the ARPU that you're loading in unlimited is significantly higher.

 

While at the same, the cost reductions that you have by offering a very simplified value proposition in your retail stores, on the web, on carrier, today is hard to carriage and with the amount of rate plans that we have is confusing.

 

So we want to move to one way in which a buyer release a phone with three simple rate plans and we’re going to get there and we're going to be very disciplined, do a lot of testing to make sure that we do it at the right time to make sure we're not leaving anybody on the table.

 

 

No official announcements on it re timing/implementation, etc. since Marcelo's remarks.

So, 1900/800 is not enough? 600mhz 5x5 will not change that.

 

I believe the end game is to have 800/1900 to supplement those areas where B41 will not reach.

 

Eventually the CDMA spectrum will also be refarmed for LTE. 600mhz will not be usable anytime soon. If they said 600mhz could be acquired deployed and used with in a year or two I'd agree. But 4 years from now, no one will care.

 

The end game is for Band 26 to be used for VoLTE mostly and WiFi/Band 41/Band 25 for data.

 

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Yeah, this is where I see this going.

Imagine what would be said if he/sprint would have said this loud and clear "it's not that we don't want 600, we just can't afford it"

I don't think that would go over well in the press. ESPECIALLY if sprint says it.

 

 

I guess we either take Tarek at his word on this, or we don't... in which case, as you alluded to, it's pretty good spin.

It was/is still a capacity layer. As more sites get b41 and/or wider band 25 carriers, its capacity role should be diminished.

 

 

Tarek Robbiatti (Sprint's CFO) talked about the role of low band Spectrum for Sprint's Network on September 28th:

 

Sprint's (S) Management Presents at Deutsche Bank's 24th Annual Leveraged Finance Conference (Transcript)

 

 

Unidentified Company Representative

And was that part of the rationale behind why -- among other reasons why you were not participating in the current auction which was obviously low band focused? It sounds like the future is going to be the core of the network will be 2.5 and things like millimeter and maybe even centimeter wave technologies will wind up being the offload the backhaul, a lot of the sort of congestion avoidance features?

 

Tarek Robbiati

Yeah, and thank you for asking this. I mean, you know, a year ago when I joined there was a speculation that we did not go for putting our names for the 600 megahertz auction because we didn't have the liquidity to do it. And that is not at all why we made the decision. It wasn't about liquidity, it's about network strategy. And in the world of 5G, you need to have high frequency spectrum. Why bid for low frequency spectrum? We have plenty of it at 800 and 1900 and that's enough. And the new world will be also involving lower frequency spectrum for propagation basically for voice, really important to still have access to 800 spectrum and 1900 spectrum. But we don't want to be buying just for the spectrum. We are building a network for the future. And we have plenty of that spectrum that we can harness and we intend to do so.

 

Sounds like Sprint has really thought this through. I do find it interesting though that Sprint originally signed on to the T-Mobile petition for a 40 MHz Spectrum Reserve for the 600 MHz auction. I wonder what changed in the interim with that, because according to Tarek, they decided not to go ahead with bidding on it after all.

I think the progress is ok although I would have expected a bit higher in terms of initial coverage.  Obviously 2.5 GHz small cells will help fill in the gaps and provide more capacity which will improve the B41 usability numbers.  

 

I guess considering that Sprint was not able to fully shut down Wimax until the end of Q1 2016 in order to start deploying 2xCA B41 LTE its pretty good progress.  Hopefully Sprint doesn't let the gas off the pedal and hopefully their cost cutting measures are starting to pay off.

 

Yeah. The delayed WiMax shutdown definitely pushed things back a bit. Given the huge jump in iPhone 7 Preorders this year (Almost 500% as of September 20th, according to Marcelo), it'll be interesting to see how Sprint's device capability mix is affected. We should hear about this during the upcoming Earnings Conference Call on October 25, 2016.

 

The most recent data we have for on-network devices is from the Fiscal 1Q2016 Earnings Conference Call:

 

Tri-band LTE phones represented 73 percent of the 25.3 million ending postpaid phone connection base compared to 46 percent at the end of the year-ago quarter and 69 percent at the end of the prior quarter. During the quarter, 91 percent of postpaid phones sold were tri-band.

 

 

Carrier aggregation capable phones, which allow for higher data speeds, were 74 percent of postpaid phones sold during the quarter, increasing the number of these phones within the phone base to 35 percent

 

 

So if you factor in the 2.5 GHz Spectrum on 70% of POP's here, you get a better sense of how far along Sprint is and what the customer experience is. Still lots of upgrade room for Triband and Carrier Aggregation Capable devices.

 

Given the huge number of iPhone 7 pre-orders, we'll see how much the needle is moved on Carrier Aggregation Capable devices.

 

We'll also see more data at some point if/when Sprint breaks out Three Channel Carrier Aggregation Capable devices separately.

Sprint's Robiatti: 70% of our POPs now covered by 2.5 GHz

 

Thoughts on this progress? Tarek Robiatti shared this information at a Conference.

Also saw this in The Washington Post:

 

Sprint emergency generators ran out of fuel, cutting off 911 cell service

 

Looks like a stuck/broken valve prevented additional fuel from getting to the backup generators.

And this has me wondering what Marcelo and his team could have done with that 24 billion that hesse spent on network vision

 

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Per the released Transcript from the recent Conference, here's what Marcelo had to say about Network Vision:

Okay. So what have we done? First thing we've done is we’ve optimized what Sprint did between 2013 to 2015 and for those of you who remember that was called network vision. So basically network vision we spend a lot of money. We spend the highest percentage of CapEx to sales of any carrier in America.

 

And what that gave us is a very solid foundation that allowed us to optimize the utilization of 800, 1.9 and 2.5. While that was a tough move every time we play, so you have to optimize and get the network better. The software team in Japan, we have Tiger team, Swat team and we actually optimized our network.

 

Secondly is when you have a really good base that where things get interesting is when you kind of start doing things that have come from software. So we did our 2CA and people were surprised with speed. Now we're doing our 3CA. So we call it, is being massive, is mainly optimizing our network and making software enhancements to our network.

 

So it is -- we have always said that it's a massive densification of our network and we're talking about tens of thousands of gear. And again it is not only small cells, there is micro cells, there is small cells, there is Phantom cells. It's a combination of different structures.

 

Technology has changed. The old way of building a network is basically go put a bunch of micro sites, contract with the power companies, outsource the way you mange -- outsource the way we deploy the network, that's what we did in Network Vision.

 

Today we have a complete entrepreneurial drive to build our network. Every single structure comes into a control tower in which we basically figure out what is the most cost efficient and the fastest speed that you can deploy a structure.

 

So you're looking our tens of thousands, first phase was to basically design a network. My Chief Network Masa played a very, very key role in helping us define the network. We had a lot of Japanese and American engineers all being led by Masa and John Saw and Günther. And we really -- it's the first time that I think these teams work so well together and we designed an awesome network that's going to be great.

 

Next step we filing applications and permits. We're in the process of doing that. We filed a lot and we're getting a lot of approvals and we're starting to put some on air to some cities in the U.S. that already have them on air. When the time is right we're going to announce how many we have.

 

We don’t like and I spoke to you earlier about this is it's not that we don’t want to disclose what our network plan is. We believe that we have a competitive advantage in how we're deploying our network and what is our cost to basically put a new gear and what's our cost to operate a network that we feel is not being good but just basically exposing our plan. It's very different than the way our competitors have deployed networks.

 

So it sounds like Network Vision had to happen to lay the foundation for what we're seeing now. Sprint's network needed a major overhaul to replace legacy equipment and run sufficient backhaul to support LTE at the tower sites.

Saw this in an article this morning that I can't repost:

 

Claure also said Sprint plans to make larger investments in its network. “Yes, we’re going to increase” capital expenditures but “never to the tune of what’s been done in the past,” he said. “We’re in the business of getting better month after month and quarter after quarter.”

 

That sounds very discouraging, to me at least. Unless he's just ruling out a second rip and replace.

 

- Trip

I think the point Marcelo was making, based on the full transcript of his remarks from the event, was that Sprint overpaid for what it got in return in the past. He's being smart on how Sprint spends its capital for network improvements, and ensuring that Sprint gets the most return on the investment it makes now. Also, this densification and optimization program has an entirely different cost structure as Tarek Robbiati (CFO) has said in the past. Marcelo commented on the network options available to Sprint, and its ability to select different site structures (and either wired or wireless backhaul because of its unique spectrum holdings) as a way to be cost efficient for each site in this program.

The numbers are in line with what they had last year.  The number for Sprint could be misleading since they are targeting Sprint customers to go to prepaid.  Nevertheless, Tmo is still growing.  We will see what the rest of the carriers have to say.  

 

I expect Sprint to add around 250k in phone postpaid, but we will see.

 

 

We'll see what Sprint has to say on October 25th:

 

Sprint Corporation Schedules Fiscal 2016 Second Quarter Results Announcement 

A pretty complimentary article from rcrwireless:

 

http://www.rcrwireless.com/20160919/carriers/kagan-sprint-comeback

 

It's about time the tech press started taking Sprint seriously.

 

 

I agree with you. It's about time.

 

I think the AMA that Günther did also helped get Sprint noticed by the press and taken seriously. RCR Wireless had a nice article about it as well.

The article didn't mention that they were comparing sales to the iphone 6. It just said iphone 7 sales compared to last year.

 

 

It's a very reasonable inference to conclude Sprint was comparing its current iPhone pre-order sales to last year's iPhone pre-order sales.

That seems pretty good and similar to T-Mobile (T-Mobile says up nearly 4x from last year).

 

https://newsroom.t-mobile.com/news-and-blogs/iphone-7-and-7-plus-shatter-records-at-t-mobile.htm

Glad they're keeping pace with the competition on this.

http://www.businessinsider.com/jay-z-music-streaming-service-tidal-accused-of-not-paying-its-bills-2016-9?r=UK&IR=T

 

For the tens of people paying for Tidal high fidelity on Sprint that are concerned about Sprint's new unlimited plan capping music streaming at 500Kbps.  Tidal has its own issues.

Tidal is currently headed out to sea. I give it 6 months tops, before it closes shop or is acquired.

 

I just don't see this company making any inroads against the likes of Apple Music, Pandora or Spotify.

This is very encouraging news:

 

http://newsroom.sprint.com/news-releases/sprint-pre-orders-of-iphone-7-and-iphone-7-plus-increase-nearly-four-times.htm

 

Sounds like Sprint is firing on all cylinders. That Unlimited Freedom plan is a real draw, along with the promotions associated for new and existing customers.

Too many local market questions crowded the AMA. "When is Sprint going to convert remaining 3G sites or expand native coverage around West Timbuktu, Pennsylzona?" It does not matter even if it is a major market. Gunther is not in position to answer those minor local concerns, especially with specific dates.

 

The real missed opportunity, in my opinion, was not pressing him about CDMA2000 utilization, particularly eHRPD/EV-DO. Sprint seems to be holding on to too much legacy bandwidth rather than ripping off the bandage.

 

AJ

Is this tied to standing up VoLTE? (For which he said: "VoLTE is on our roadmap and we'll make the move as soon as we can ensure that our customers have an even superior voice experience than today. It is tied to our densification and optimization strategy.")

 

I was glad he readily acknowledged the GMO issue when asked about it: "We have a specific program to deal with ground mounts in our Densification and Optimization program."

Sprint stock just cracked the $7 mark.

 

$8 here we come!

 

Remember this?: Sprint extends Claure's contract until 2019, will give him 10M shares if he gets stock to $8

 

The 10 million shares will only be earned "upon the achievement of specified volume-weighted average prices" of Sprint's common stock during regular trading on the New York Stock Exchange over any 150-calendar day period during a four-year period from June 1, 2015, through May 31, 2019. In order to earn 100 percent of the 10 million shares, the volume-weighted average price must be at least $8 during that period. If the volume-weighted average stock price during the period goes above $8, Claure could earn more stock, but no more than 120 percent of the original award.

Looks like Sprint matched T-Mobile's Promo for a Free iPhone 7 with device trade-in:

 

Pre-order 9/9: FREE iPhone 7 Get iPhone 7 for FREE when you trade in iPhone 6 or iPhone 6s and choose any Sprint rate plan.

 

$27.09/mo for 24 months for well-qualified customer with new-line activation or eligible upgrade. Free after monthly credits. Credits applied after device is received. Tax due at sale. If you cancel full balance due.

 

Sprint has become a lot more responsive in doing competitive offers.

Full CTIA Q&A: Sprint COO Ottendorfer Boasts Momentum

 

Really interesting conversation about Sprint's Network strategy for 3xCA and 5G, as well as its CapEx/spending plans going forward.

 

As part of the densification and optimization strategy, we are using that infrastructure and we are using our spectrum assets. That gives us the ability to use less CapEx than the other because it’s a lot cheaper to activate another spectrum carrier on a tower than to build a new tower. So in many cases we don’t even need a new card, it’s just a software change.

I took the advice here and got in touch with sprint. (Thanks!) I spoke with someone in Oklahoma from some team? Anyways they got all the info from me as well as heard first hand my problems less than a block away. They just called to tell me there is nothing they can do the sector isn't pointing At the intersection I gave them as being closet to the tower..... The map shows the coverage as fair. Basically a wasted my time. She asked to run a speed test which was .82mbps down and .21 up... The tower is operating as it should?? Our connection was so bad I had to call her on my work phone (vzw). No plans to optimize it anytime soon??? Smh I am glad sprint is doing well for those of you who claim it is. Over here things started looking good then just fell off.

 

oh well there nothing they can do

 

It wasn't a waste of your time. If there's nothing Sprint can do for you to address it in the foreseeable future, perhaps another carrier may better meet your needs. It's how it goes sometimes.