bigsnake49

In some areas. Where they had to. Not nationwide.

Hungry smaller vendors are well motivated. Old bureaucratic ones not so much.

I think Claure is correct and I am sure that he has had his financial people run the numbers. That's why you see a willingness to sell what they don't think they can use productively. That and they will need some money to participate in the 600MHz auction. Plus force Charlie's hand.

Sprint really has no choice but to accept vendor financing because their own credit rating is bad and the interest rate they pay is much higher compared to the vendors. It's like financing an iPhone by charging it on the credit card vs Sprint or Verizon. The interest rate will be lower.

I just don't see the economic justification in most areas. While peak speeds are fine for e-peen purposes, I just can't see the utilization of all that bandwidth.

Then let's see them utilize it. I don't think they have plans for more than 3x20 carrier aggregation in the b41 band. Now if they use as supplemental download for their PCS then theoretically they can get close to 400Mbps on that 3x20. The problem then becomes where is the revenue that justifies 1.2Gbps per site going to come from. I see very few places (NYC, San Fran) that have the population density to absorb that bandwidth and to provide the income. Unless they are the dumb pipe for somebody like Google or Apple's or Dish's OTT video plans. Then you will need much cheaper backhaul plans.

I like spectrum that is fully utilized not warehoused.

I think that what made it very difficult for Sprint to project manage the whole thing is that NV was vendor financed. Their money, their schedule. Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile would only release money when a milestone was met. That's a powerful incentive. When it's vendor financed, other consideration come into play besides meeting milestones like maximizing crew utilization, just in time delivery of backhaul and equipment, etc.

Don't laugh, without that money, T-Mobile would be in the dumps...

When AT&T went through the installation of RT's they had to do so much work to untangle all of the lines which were all screwed up they might as well have installed fiber to the curb.

Personally, I'd rather the schools and catholic church get stripped of that spectrum. They were given that spectrum in the early 70's for remote learning classes. There is nothing educational or remote learning about Sprint or anybody else using that spectrum for mobile data. They have no right to that spectrum anymore.

I have 3 lines on AT&T and 1 on Sprint. Although AT&T coverage is very good, their call reliability leaves a lot to be desired. Sprint's on the other hand has been exemplary.

Long term I think the B41 intra band CA and then the b41-b25 CA where b41 serves as an additional downlink to b25 will go a long way to ameliorate Sprint's data problems. Sale of EBS spectrum should provide them with some cash for the upcoming 600MHz auction.

I think that as Sprint Root Metrics improve, the perception among the geeks will change. The geeks are influencers so do not discount their influence among the general populace. At the end of this year, Sprint's network would have improved by leaps and bounds.

I just looked at the closest root metrics area: Palm Bay, Florida. Sprint is top in call performance and text performance but trails badly in speed. As 2015 rolls along I believe their speed will definitely increase. Palm Bay is the worst place to cover, suburban and exurban with nary a tall building to put an antenna on. That Sprint gets great call reliability can be attributed to the greater range of the 800MHz signal. Edit: I just looked at the test area. Almost all of Brevard County. I wonder why they did not cover the whole county. Hmmmm...

Metro deployed DAS outdoors, maybe they did indoors as well, but they deployed it in places where they did not have enough subscribers to justify a full BTS. It worked very well for them.

Sprint needs to do something with EBS. It's only leased spectrum and the leases will expire at some point or another. So right now it pretty much lies fallow and costs them money. So whether they sell the leasing rights to Verizon, offer fixed wireless on it in conjunction with Dish, they need to do something with it.

It can be done but you have to do it on the cheap. MetroPCS covered Florida very well on PCS, where they they had spectrum by employing a lot of DAS. So did Verizon by actually deploying a lot of regular basestations but they were subsidized by their wireline division. Neither Sprint nor T-Mobile did. Why?

It pretty much is if you want to have a credible story to tell as far as rural coverage.

I fully agree with you. Sprint could have merged with Alltel and USCC and other rural providers. That would have given them a very credible story about rural coverage. They could have densified their urban coverage. They chose not to.

Verizon does not need to buy Dish. The only standardized spectrum they have is AWS-3. Granted, they have the heft to do it but I think it will be much cheaper to buy EBS spectrum from Sprint. I don't think that Dish wants to become a wireless carrier. Their best best is to have their spectrum hosted by Sprint or T-Mobile. I have long advocated that Sprint use their EBS spectrum to host Dish's fixed wireless and OTT/DVR ambitions while Dish sells their Near PCS spectrum (2000-2020MHz download link, + PCS H). Combine it with PCS G and you have a nice 30x10 band. Both companies sell fixed+mobile wireless+Dish service.

I am hearing that a lot of the PS wants to move to the 700MHz. There is a movement afoot to forgo LMR and go strictly PTT over LTE and devote the PS 700MHz LMR band to LTE as well. It won't happen overnight but it will. That will free up the 800 SMR band.

P-cell is a great way to accomplish that but the drawback is that it needs a lot of cheap fronthaul.

No this is long term.

Because they need the spectrum. Not now but soon. They would also do it to stick it to Dish.