bigsnake49

It will help defray some of the costs of deploying LTE and buying additional AWS spectrum from Verizon.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - T-Mobile USA, the No. 4 U.S. mobile provider, has agreed to sell the rights to 7,200 of its wireless broadcast towers to Crown Castle International Corp for $2.4 billion. Under terms of the deal announced on Friday, Crown Castle will have the rights to operate the towers for about 28 years and have the option to buy the towers from T-Mobile USA at the end of the lease. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/28/tmobileusa-crowncastle-idUSL1E8KRJZT20120928?type=marketsNews

Guys I'm sure that Southern Co. and Solinc have looked and are looking at all their options with respect to Nextel going away. We will see what happens.

Every power company that I know, and I know quite a few, runs an private LMR system, except Southern Co who runs an IDEN based system. The rest of the companies don't have any external customers so they have to eat the cost of running an LMR system. There are certain uptime requirements and SLAs associated with running a utility communication system. Unless Sprint hardened their sites and network infrastructure, they probably could not meet the uptime and SLAs that utilities require.

Robert, I agree with you that it will be a great thing if Solinc and Sprint cooperated. I'm not 100% sure if the QChat license Sprint has with Qualcomm is exclusive only for 3G or extends to LTE.

Let me answer your purported comment. Once the Nextel network gets decommisioned they will lose their nationwide roaming privileges. Let me answer it by differentiating between the two main customer groups: Internal customers and external customers. As long as the internal customers are within Solinc's area they can still use the service. The requirements for PTT is that is almost always local. The Interconnect part (the normal cell phone part) will need to be addressed by either providing them with roaming capabilities on one of the nationwide cell cariers in a hybrid handset or by providing certain people (executives) with an additional handset with one of the cell carriers or subsidizing their personal handset. The external customers that travel outside the Solinc area would be accommodated by providing them with a hybrid handset. Alternately, they could be jettisoned, leaving Solinc with just providing service to their own people. Of course Sprint can come up with a proposal that would give migrate both internal and exteranl customers with Solinc internal customers given priority access while in the Solinc coverage area. If they could give Solinc SLAs that are satisfactory at a price that Solinc could not refuse, then it might be a go. Otherwise Solinc is prepared to go it alone.

All those results show that symmetrical spectrum allocations are so 90's. Asymmetrical and TDD spectrum will rule the future.

Solinc is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Southern Co. They use Solinc as the wireless communications enabler for their own workers. The external customers are just gravy, helping to defray some of the operational costs. I have no idea what they're going to do with their spectrum. From Sprint's perspective it would be great to have a spectrum swap for their 900MHz SMR spectrum. As far as USCC is concerned they could make USCC a wholly owned subsidiary and task them with being their rural service provider. USCC knows how to make money in rural areas and they have a very good reputation. They could assign them their 800MHz SMR spectrum and have them develop a great network. They could probably pick up the remnants of ATNI while they're at it.

They have about 6M customers. Not all the AWS is rural. I'm sure that you can find people to buy it. A seamless roaming partner like Alltel that ends up getting acquired by Verizon? No thanks. Sprint has a $1B annual roaming bill. You can build a whole lot of rural sites and absorb USCC for that kind of money.

They had both. For example in Jacksonville, FL they had 1900. I think that Alltel was aiming for a merger not a buyout of Sprint. According to the former Alltel CEO Scott Ford, they approached Sprint 3-4 times about a merger and they were turned down each time. Scott would have probably been the CEO. Here's a map of Alltel's 1900MHz holdings: http://people.ku.edu...alltel_pcs.html Here is a link to their 850Mhz holdings by region: http://people.ku.edu/~cinema/wireless/regions.html

Craig Moffett and Roger Entner are just blithering idiots that sound informed to the uninformed. The one eyed, myopic mentally challenged leading the blind.

T-Mobile would be a nightmare to integrate. They would almost have to run them as separate companies until they converge on LTE. If they want to buy T-Mobile, they will have to do it before T-Mobile starts LTE on AWS. Otherwise Sprint would have to support LTE on EBS/BRS, PCS, AWS and SMR spectrum. Not to mention voice. USCC, Metro and Leap much simpler and cleaner. Sprint rejected simpler and cleaner with Alltel and instead went for complicated and look how long it took them to get out of that mess.

Moffett is a total idiot. So is Entner!

It was that stupid nincompoop Forsee that rejected Alltel's advances. Alltel had very low debt and was run very well. Sprint would have gained instant credibility as a true nationwide provider, particularly if they also went into an alliance with USCC to the point where USCC's coverage appeared as native. Nextel would have been icing on the cake giving them 800MHz in the sticks and the cities along with PCS block H. Or they could have waited and bid on 700MHz.

Nothing really new here and we have talked about it here before. I think that Leap would be the first one to be absorbed, then Metro. Sprint can then trade their AWS spectrum with the AWS gang for 1900PCS spectrum particularly adjacent to their holdings. I just don't see the FCC or FTC allowing them to absorb T-Mobile. I still don't know about USCC. I would like for Sprint to acquire them, then sell the 850MHz and AWS spectrum to AT&T or Verizon and obtain either 1900PCS spectrum, or roaming rights or both.

I think they average about 3MHz per market nationwide. They used it for the overflow during rebanding. It is not contiguous. It would be great for IDEN or two way type communications. Or Sprint could give it back to the FCC and try to get some credit towards 1900Mhz Block H.

First of all, I did not upgrade to 6.0 so it does not affect me. I let the bleeding edge folk debug it for me. Second, Google Maps when first came online waylaid me plenty of times. Third, I actually paid for Navigon which happens to be the best navigation package period end of story. Fourth, if your still want Google Maps go to maps.google.com and then put a link in your homescreen. Problem solved. Fifth, the Google provided Youtube app is the one that sucks not the one that Apple removed which was Apple's Youtube app. Same with the old Maps. It was Apple's interface based on Google's data. Sixth, Apple has added a lot more channels including Hulu, NetFlix and Vimeo to their AppleTV product. They're not removing, they're adding. It's not Apple's problem that Netflix offers old and unknown movies.

It would definitely be beneficial to both Sprint and Solinc if they cooperate on the buildout of an LTE network. They could also swap spectrum, Sprint's 900MHz for Solinc's 800Mhz.

That's why I avoid all phones except the iPhone:). Still have my 2007 iPhone working like a champ. Take it to overseas trips and have it on prepaid on AT&T.

Why do you Why do you think it will only be those two?

Yeah, they are so good in looking ahead that they managed to fragment both the PCS and AWS bands. Not to mention the 700, 800 PS band. Does anybody want to guess how many PS bands we have up and down the spectrum?

It's just possible that a decision made earlier this week by the Mexican authorities could have a significant impact on the 4G spectrum decisions of other countries in Central and South America and even elsewhere. The country's regulator, the Comisión Federal de Telecomunicaciones (Cofetel), is to license the 700MHz band for 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) services and is adopting the APT (Asia-Pacific Telecommunity) model for segmentation, judging it to be more efficient than the scheme used in the U.S. in the 700MHz band. According to Cofetel (translated from the original announcement in Spanish): "As the APT 700 plan segments the band in two portions of 45MHz with a 10MHz block between the transmission and reception sub-bands, it provides greater flexibility in spectrum use and caters to the future demands of mobile broadband services. In addition, this model has guard bands to protect adjacent spectrum, both the television in the bottom of the band and the cellular at the top." http://www.lightread...&doc_id=225148 I like it much better than the US model that managed to fragment the spectrum into way too many bands and small allocations.

BTW, my world clock does not show that design. Do I have to put in a Swiss city? Oh, never mind it's for the iPad. I have not upgrade yet.

I am sure they will change their design of their clock. Not a big deal! Probably some junior designer saw a clock design that he liked and was not aware it was copyrighted. If the money demands are not exorbitant, they might elect to pay. Either way the guy will probably lose his job.

There are people working to simplify and make the "RF glue" a lot more programmable that it is now. RF filters are now programmable. Other parts are getting worked on as we speak. There are also software tunable antennas (not necessarily for handsets yet)