Verizon's CFO Fran Shammo has said the carrier has no objections against the propsed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile

Leading US Carrier Verizon Wireless has no concerns over the proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile USA, as long as it does not result in increased industry regulation. The company’s CFO Fran Shammo made the revelation to a Morgan Stanley conference in Spain last week, according to a report by Rethink-Wireless.

Shammo admitted that he did feel that the US wireless carrier industry did need consolidation, but not at the expense of increased interference from US regulator the FCC.

The FCC is currently debating the proposed $39bn merger, and has raised the ire of other players in the market such as number three US carrier Sprint Nextel, and also the US Department of Justice, which claimed that the deal would “substantially lessen competition”.

For its part AT&T has said that if the merger goes through it would create 5,000 jobs, though Sprint has countered with a report that claimed that this was unfounded.

AT&T wants to merge with the struggling T-Mobile USA, owned by Deutsche Telecom, in order to gain access to its wireless spectrum and improve its LTE spectrum coverage. The move would make it the largest player in the US market.

Verizon Wireless currently offers LTE in 179 cities markets, covering a population of 186 million, compared to just 15 markets for AT&T. It said it plans to cover 70 million people with LTE by the end of the year.

At the conference Shammo also said that Verizon wants to see changes in the device eco-system, no doubt as a response to the growing power of the device OS manufactures, namely Apple and Google. This would mean welcoming a third player in the market, most likely Nokia’s Windows Phone powered devices, with RIM’s Blackberry struggling to retain market share.

Click to launch the full edition in a new window

Alternatively click here to download a copy of the Mobile Communications International October edition in PDF format.

Stephen Bye, CTO, Sprint

US carrier Sprint officially announced plans to begin offering LTE services to more than 250 million potential customers in early October. As the industry’s worst kept secret the move came as no surprise, but what did raise eyebrows was the firm’s target launch date of mid-2012 with a view to full network build out by 2013. A full two years sooner than anticipated.

We caught up with Stephen Bye, chief technology officer of Sprint, just a few days after the announcement, and spoke to him about the challenges ahead and the groundwork that has already gone into the programme.

Bye moved to Sprint from US cable carrier Cox Communications, which had been dabbling with LTE as a platform for rolling out services over wireless. But Sprint represented a whole new set of challenges. As well as the WiMAX network at 2.5GHz, it also runs a CDMA EVDO 3G network at 1900MHz as well as Nextel’s legacy iDen network, operating at 800MHz. Operating all these technologies together makes for a large, bulky and relatively inefficient macro base station set-up, a challenge that has already been addressed by the firm’s Network Vision initiative, which is a universal rebuild of the network on a next generation multi mode cabinet architecture.

While the announcement on October 7 was the news everyone had been waiting for, Sprint’s CTO is eager to highlight the importance of the Network Vision project, unveiled in December 2010, as the foundation stone for the network upgrade.

“October 7 wasn’t the ‘now let’s begin’ point of our network upgrade. A lot had already happened by then, work had been going on for months, to develop the roadmap for the technology and make sure there was a device ecosystem,” Bye says. “In fact, a much bigger announcement was the Network Vision initiative that came out almost a year ago.

“This is the real network modernisation plan. We’re rebuilding the network with multimode base station capabilities. This is what really laid the foundation for us, so the LTE announcement is really just the next chapter of that, the next step along that continuum.”

An overhaul of the operator’s basestations packs more equipment into a smaller space and replaces ageing, signal degrading coax with fibre. Multimode cabinets allow Sprint to use different RF technologies on different frequency bands, so the firm can have a combination of CDMA, LTE or WiMAX across different radio bearers, be it 800MHz or 1.9MHz. The idea is to make the addition of new technologies much smoother, but Bye is careful to avoid the term “rip and replace” for the network upgrade.

“No, it’s not a rip and replace strategy. We already have over 50 million customers on our network and a sustainable and solid business with infrastructure in place today. But we recognise the move forward will need us to modernise that network, so Network Vision enables us to deploy a next generation platform in parallel with our existing business and then as that platform turns up we migrate those customers over and at a future point in time we will take down the legacy iDen network,” Bye says. “The key here is that we can manage that transition very gracefully. It’s not like we have to rip and replace, we complete the migration then take down the other network and reduce a lot of costs we’ve had to bear with that previous network. It alters our cost structure fundamentally, but allows us to migrate and upgrade going forward.”

The legacy iDen network, Sprint inherited as part of its merger with Nextel has been both a boon and a burden. It’s been a success with many vertical customers, but is now outdated and adds further complexity to the multi-0technology network. Hence it’s eventual decommissioning.

“We still have vertical segments that like the Push To Talk (PTT) functionality of iDen and we need to preserve that relationship by giving them something better than they have today. But this upgrade also allows us to take down the iDen network and the costs associated with it. It’s been a burden but as we turn up the new network we are recreating the PTT experience on CDMA with better performance and coverage. In fact, we launched our first CDMA PTT phone on October 2, which is just the start of a portfolio we will use to migrate users over to CDMA,” says Bye.

The device ecosystem is something Bye considers as of the utmost importance. The operator plans to launch dual mode CDMA/LTE devices by mid-2012, with approximately 15 devices—including handsets, tablets and data cards—set to hit shelves throughout the year. The CDMA/WiMAX devices that Sprint currently offers, such as the Nexus S 4G, will continue to be sold throughout 2012.

According to Bye, the biggest challenge in the industry right now is how many spectrum frequencies you can squeeze into a device, in order to ensure global roaming, capacity and keep the device cost effective. A tall order in a world that is moving from being one dominated by voice to one dominated by data.

“It’s a moving target that presents a technology challenge for all of us in the industry,” says Bye. “Not long ago people were struggling to put dual band radios together, now we’re talking about hexaband. “But it’s a good thing that devices are getting bigger,” he says referring to the tablet trend. “It was more challenging when devices were getting smaller but now we have more real estate to play with. These devices are more of a mobile computing device than a cellphone.”

As an industry we will continue to be challenged by the data demands on the network and will continually be looking for ways to improve spectral capability and network performance. In the past when voice was king, it was these demands that drove the network model. “Voice is deterministic. People would talk in minutes and it was easier to plan for capacity. Networks were semi static,” Bye says. “But with data, we are moving to a supply constrained model. If you put in capacity, users will take advantage of it. We have moved from feature phones to mobile computing devices and usage on those devices is taking advantage of the capacity available. This makes life very challenging as a network planner as you have a more dynamic load,” he says.

“To build and manage a network today is now an order of magnitude more complex than it was for voice. So in order to deliver a satisfactory experience we’ve got to make sure the network can support that data but we cannot forget about voice as this is still the biggest indicator to the customer of the quality of the network.”

An oft quoted phrase in this industry is that the customer experience counts more than anything. So as an engineer, Bye’s task is to deliver the experience the customer expects but to do it cost effectively. “It’s easy for us to get to enamoured by technology,” he says, “But customers don’t care. Our job is to hide that complexity and give customers what service they expect regardless of what the pipe is.

“If you peel apart the acronyms: LTE; WiMAX; whatever, you’re fundamentally talking about an OFDM technology. So that’s what you’re putting on chipset. While the acronym has shifted from WiMAX to LTE, we already have a lot of learning on the OFDM front as the first carrier to launch WiMAX,” he says.

“So last year, Network Vision, was the beginning of that journey. Our next generation, multi mode basestation technology. Adding LTE is a much smoother migration than it would have been otherwise. Other carriers are essentially building out a new network, but we’ve said no, lets go back and rebuild and re-engineer our CDMA network onto a new platform that now makes it easier for us to upgrade to LTE or whatever might come next in terms of LTE Advanced or future releases. We now have a much more future proof platform that we had before.”

Sprint's LTE service will begin in 2012, with Network Vision to be launched shortly after

US carrier Sprint has announced plans to begin offering LTE services on its 1900MHz spectrum by mid-2012. The company said it will cover more than 250 million people across the US when the network build-out is completed, which is expected by the end of 2013.

The operator plans to launch dual mode CDMA/LTE devices by mid-2012, with approximately 15 devices—including handsets, tablets and data cards—set to hit shelves throughout the year. The CDMA/WiMAX devices that Sprint currently offers, such as the Nexus S 4G, will continue to be sold throughout 2012.

Sprint also announced plans to accelerate the deployment of Network Vision; its plan to consolidate its multiple network technologies into one network to increasing efficiency, network coverage and data speeds for its customers.

The company said it had concluded trials of its multimode technology and is on course to complete its deployment by the end of 2013 – two years sooner than originally scheduled. Network Vision could cost up to $5bn but is expected to deliver $10bn to $11bn in net economic value to the company between 2011 and 2017.

“Over the long term, continued execution on Network Vision as well as other improvements to our core operations are expected to result in overall margin expansion, improved return on invested capital, and, ultimately, increased value for our shareholders,” said Joseph Euteneuer, chief financial officer at Sprint.

Sprint needs partners to help it compete with its larger rivals in the US mobile market, particularly if AT&T’s planned acquisition of T-Mobile USA is approved. For Sprint, which just reported a net loss of $847m in the second quarter, the deal brings a welcome injection of $9bn in cash over 11 years, which will help the operator modernize its network and launch LTE. In addition, the deal gives Sprint an option to buy up to 50 per cent of LightSquared’s LTE capacity, which could help Sprint reduce the cost of its expected LTE deployment.

For LightSquared, the deal is vital and expected because its initial business plan was not viable, which the group realized as it struggled to land enough funding to build a new nationwide mobile network from scratch in a mature market such as the US. Doing a deal with an existing operator was always on the cards because it would dramatically reduce the cost and time of its deployment, by using the mobile sites and equipment of an existing operator. That was confirmed in today’s announcement that the deal with Sprint could slash LightSquared’s network deployment costs by more than $13 billion over eight years.

But the deal also brings risks. For Sprint, a strategic partnership with 4G LTE wholesaler LightSquared will complicate its existing relationship with and investment in 4G WiMAX wholesaler Clearwire. The deal also complicates – and may delay – Sprint’s transition to LTE, partly since it will now have to spend time and energy building LightSquared’s LTE network.

For LightSquared, the deal calls into question its relationship with Nokia Siemens Networks, which it tapped last year in a $7bn deal to deploy and run its nationwide LTE network. LightSquared will now pay Sprint to deploy its LTE network, and Sprint recently signed other vendors – Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and Samsung – to overhaul its network in the runup to LTE.

Finally there is a significant risk for both Sprint and LightSquared that the deal will fall apart, if LightSquared cannot resolve concerns that its L-Band service may interfere with other services such as GPS.”

The Informer thought he was having a senior moment on Thursday when news broke that US wholesale player LightSquared has tapped Sprint Nextel to deploy an LTE network on its behalf. It’s an interesting one: LightSquared will pay Sprint up to $11bn in cash over an 15-year period to deploy and operate a nationwide LTE network using L-band spectrum, but as a wholesale only player, LightSquared will then sell the capacity back to US operators, including Sprint.

But what becomes of the $7bn deal LightSquared made with Nokia Siemens Networks in July of last year? LightSquared had approved an eight-year deal with NSN to deploy, install, operate and maintain the nationwide 4G network amounting to around 40,000 cellular base stations.

The actual details are a bit hard to verify. The Informer is sure he remembers a press release that came out on July 20, 2010, yet it does not appear to be on either the NSN or LightSquared websites. Perhaps it’s a senior moment. But then the Ministry of Truth appears to have been at other parts of the LightSquared site as well. A few days ago the network info page harped on about an “agreement, the largest of its kind for the U.S. wireless industry,” with NSN, but today that same page reads quite differently, only mentioning Sprint.

At the time, Martin Harriman, EVP at LightSquared told the Informer: “It’s an extraordinarily complex deal as we try and capture an eight-year partnership that pretty much does everything. We’ll get there, but it’s a big, big deal, both for us and for NSN.”

Not any more. NSN confirmed that it would no longer be involved in the running of LightSquared’s radio access network, with that now in the hands of Sprint Nextel, which will “use its own vendors.”

However, an NSN spokesperson assured the Informer it was still involved with LightSquared through a new deal for the design, installation, testing and systems integration of the core network. But the value of this latest contract has not been publicised and the suggestion is that NSN might be significantly out of pocket over the reversal. That’s gotta hurt.

But the Informer feels for the 2,000 staff a little further north, which have gone missing from Canadian firm RIM’s roster. The company is to slash more than ten per cent of its workforce, as “a prudent and necessary step for the long-term success of the company.” The firm’s flagship tablet product, the Playbook, was launched to a mixed reception earlier this year and is not exactly starting fires in the market.

The BlackBerry maker said its workforce has quadrupled over the past five years as the company has enjoyed rapid growth, but since RIM has been faring less well it’s time to trim some of the bloat. During the second quarter, net income came down to $695m from $934m for the same quarter in 2010. The costs of the 2,000 redundancies will not be revealed until September 15th.

People have been disappearing at UK network operator Everything Everywhere too, but this time they’re on the customer side. Although the joint venture, which runs the Orange and T-Mobile network, increased its contract subscriber base during the second quarter, it still lost 390,000 users during the year to end-June as fickle prepay users took their leave. As a result, revenue took a slight dive from £1.7bn last year to £1.6bn in the second quarter of this year. Not bad going and the company seems to be cutting dead weight. The Informer recently met with Andy Sutton, chief network architect at Everything Everywhere who mentioned that when the company started capping data usage, it lost around 2,000 subscribers instantly. But those 2,000 subscribers were responsible for something like seven per cent of network data traffic. Good riddance, he probably thought.

There might also be some chicanery going on in Greece too, where second and third placed operators Vodafone and Wind Hellas have been put at risk of losing their 900MHz spectrum.

The country’s national regulator, the EETT, has issued a proposal for the re-auctioning of GSM spectrum licenses, which are due to expire in 2012. The move is controversial because it is an unusual renewal process, but also because the authority has set reserve prices at more than double the European average.

The obvious conclusion is that the Greek Government wants to use the auction to squeeze as much cash as possible out of the market’s operators in a bid to dig the country out of its financial black hole. A reserve price of €46.6m for each 5MHz block in the 900MHz GSM frequency band has been called “excessive” by one operator.

But one person close to the situation told the Informer there are machinations at work to ensure ex-state owned incumbent Cosmote – seen as the only nationalistic choice by Greek citizens whose alternatives are Vodafone and Weather owned Wind – gets its hands on some valuable 900MHz spectrum.

As it stands Cosmote owns 25MHz of 1800MHz spectrum, while Vodafone and Wind hold 20MHz apiece of 900MHz spectrum. It is this 900MHz spectrum that will go under the hammer first. The reallocated spectrum would also be awarded on a technology neutral basis, giving operators the opportunity to deploy 3G or any other technology in the 900 band.

It has been suggested by Stefan Zehle, CEO of spectrum auction specialist Coleago Consulting, that the operators could boycott the auction and choose not to bid in order to protest against the pricing. A similar situation arose during the French 3G allocation in 2001 when, the G fixed the price at a high level, based on the amounts that were paid for 3G licences in the UK and Germany. While SFR and France Telecom bought a 3G licence, Bouygues Telecom refused. As the government wanted to preserve at least three operators in France, it was forced to substantially reduce the price of the 3G spectrum licence.

In Greece, there is, theoretically at least, the potential for new entrants to come into play during the auction process, although the state of the country’s economy should be enough of a deterrent.

On the other side of the scale, Vodafone’s economy is doing better, £2.8bn better in fact, after the operator received its first windfall from its 45 per cent stake in Verizon Wireless since 2005. Head honcho Vittorio Colao was on hand to say that the money would be used to pay a sizeable dividend to shareholders, while the company speculated that it could get an annual payout of a similar sum from its investment. Vindication at last for Voda’s dogged resistance to offloading the Verizon stake.

The Big V was also on hand this week to announce a partnership with social butterfly Facebook, introducing the world’s first ‘official’ Facebook phone targeted specifically at the prepay market. At a London press conference, the Informer got to chat with Vodafone’s group terminals director, Patrick Chomet, who explained that the device, which is manufactured by Alcatel (the French vendor’s brand was acquired by Chinese vendor TCT Mobile in 2004) and runs a proprietary OS, took an in house team a year to develop.

In dedicating this level of resource to the programme, the operator clearly expects a strong return on its investment. Chomet pointed to Vodafone’s second quarter results, announced last week, which revealed that data revenue grew by 24.5 per cent year on year to £1.5bn, representing 13.7 per cent of group service revenue. More importantly, this growth brought about an inflection point where income from data services for the first time offset the decline in voice revenues.

In a bid to harness this trend, the Facebook phone will be used to capitalise on the opportunity afforded by data usage in the prepay sector, by deeply integrating the social networking experience with the device. Upon activation, users are presented with the option to either sign up or sign into a Facebook account, after which the user’s Facebook friends list becomes integrated with the phonebook. Automatic updating is user definable at a granular level enabling users to keep costs down, which for Vodafone delivers an opportunity to cash in on data usage from a relatively untapped sector, and for Facebook opens up the opportunity to increase its user base in rural, emerging markets where fixed line internet is nonexistent.

Kumar Ramanathan, chief marketing officer for Vodafone Essar, flew in from India to give his perspective on the device launch in his market, which he believes will be an easy pitch for both urban and rural areas due to Facebook’s popularity in the Indian market. “We have 60 million mobile internet users in the country and around 40 per cent of those use Facebook on mobile. We have a huge number of young people and social networking will drive growth in the mobile space,” said Ramanathan.

Speaking of emerging markets, Swedish giant Ericsson, no doubt gloating over NSN’s US mishap, has scored a major deal from Bharti Airtel, through a five year managed services contract for its African operations. Under its first multi-country managed services deal in Africa, Ericsson will manage and optimise Airtel’s mobile networks across 16 countries in the region, while under a separate two year agreement, Ericsson will also modernise and upgrade Airtel’s mobile networks for 3G.

Bharti bought Zain’s African operations for $10.7bn in 2010 and rebranded, making Airtel the master brand for all the group’s 19 operations in Asia and Africa covering over 200 million customers. In its second quarter results announced last week, Ericsson said managed services sales were down for the first time ever, compared to the second quarter 2010. Managed services sales decreased by 16 per cent year-over-year to SEK4.7bn and were down four per cent sequentially. Yet “The underlying fundamental growth drivers for the services business remain and customer interest is high,” the company said.

There’s a couple of other developments before the Informer toddles off on his holidays. Taking a leaf out of Google’s Chrome-book, Mozilla has unveiled plans for a web-based operating system of its own that will be targeted at mobile and portable devices. Oh joy, just what we need, another Linux-based OS.

Boot to Gecko (B2G) is designed to be a “complete, standalone operating system for the open web,” and will be based on the lowest level elements of the Android platform – the kernel and device drivers. However, the dev team will use as little of the actual Android code base as possible and the finished platform will not run Android compatible apps. For now though, this vague reference is all you get, although the team referenced recent work done on the development of HTML5, which goes towards making it a superset of PDF, and added: “We want to take a bigger step now, and find the gaps that keep web developers from being able to build apps that are — in every way — the equals of native apps built for the iPhone, Android, and WP7.”

Meanwhile, UK operator BT has been charged with the seemingly insurmountable task of policing the internet for copyrighted material. As many people feared, a high court judge has ruled that BT must block all access to Newzbin 2, a link aggregation forum which provides many links to pirated material. While the intention is sound, BT will be forced to use CleanFeed, the inspection software it currently uses to sniff out child abuse sites. But as the Internet Service Providers’ Association notes, at present CleanFeed is policing a rural road in Scotland, turning it onto its new task would be like policing a major motorway – something the software was not designed to do. That, and Newzbin 2 has threatened to sabotage CleanFeed if it is used against it.

But more worrying is the ruling, which seemingly makes network operators responsible for hunting down illegal content. It’s a slippery slope…

But not as slippery as the one that Zhang Chunjiang, a former deputy general manager at China Mobile, is on. Zhang has been sentenced to death by the Chinese state, having been found guilty of corruption. The bribes he confessed to having received amounted to $1.16m in between 1994 and 2009 when he held senior positions at the Liaoning Provincial Postal Administration, China Netcom and lastly China Mobile. That’s $77,000 per year. It doesn’t seem worth it to the Informer. On the bright side however, the death sentence is suspended for two years and may be commuted to life imprisonment pending good behaviour, because Zhang confessed to the crimes, and the money was returned. Death, or life in a Chinese prison. Crime certainly doesn’t pay.

Righto, that’s it for this week. The Informer is off on his holidays now and wishes all those of you following suit a safe trip.

See you in September,

The Informer.

Sprint Nextel's CTO Stephen Bye

Ahead of the LTE North America conference in Dallas on the 8-9 November, at which he will be a keynote speaker, Telecoms.com speaks to Stephen Bye, CTO of US carrier Sprint Nextel.

As the world transitions away from 3G to next generation mobile services, the US market in particular is in a state of flux. MetroPCS and market leader Verizon have launched LTE and AT&T is due to follow suit imminently; and if regulators allow, AT&T will next year swallow Deutsche Telekom’s US play, T-Mobile.

Big changes are also afoot for third-place mobile player Sprint. The company drew the first ‘4G’ blood when, in late 2008 and in conjunction with partner Clearwire, it launched a WiMAX network across the US. However, it is LTE that has come to dominate the next generation mobile network landscape over the last couple of years, and it’s an open secret that Sprint will soon be making a move towards LTE.

When Telecoms.com spoke to Stephen Bye, chief technology office of Sprint, that move had yet to be made official. What the firm has been talking about is its Network Vision program, a comprehensive network upgrade strategy that, as Bye says, will enable it to, “very easily upgrade and support whatever’s coming down the pipeline”.

If any operator is experienced enough to take on the challenges of a new technology it is Sprint, which as Bye wryly puts it, supports “an interesting mix of different technologies”. This is a reference to the fact that as well as the WIMAX at 2.5GHz, it also runs a CDMA EVDO 3G network at 1900MHZ as well as, uniquely, an iDen network, operating at 800MHz.

Operating all these technologies together makes for a large, bulky and relatively inefficient macro  base station set-up, something the firm’s Network Vision upgrade is intended to address, by moving to one-cabinet, multi-mode units.

“We’re putting into place basestations that allow us to use different RF technologies on different frequency bands,” Bye explains. “So for instance on one side we can have a combination of CDMA, LTE or WIMAX across different radio bearers, be it 800, be it 1.9, on all the frequency bands that we have support for. We’re well on the way to deploying Network Vision, which gives us the flexibility to carry a lot of traffic over different bands on the basestations on the core network”.

While Bye isn’t able to nail Sprint’s colours to the LTE mast just yet, he says that the network refresh will give Sprint, “the opportunity to upgrade to whatever technology we decide to adopt going forward—at a much lower cost. It future proofs our business and it also gives us the flexibility to take advantage of other spectrum, as and when that comes to market”.

Bye also says that, as well as enabling it to keep up with next generation mobile technology, Network Vision will also be of great benefit to those replying on the older 3G CDMA network. “There are things that we’re doing to substantially improve the coverage and capacity on that network. Because what you can buy today in terms of technology is far superior to what we were deploying five or ten years ago. The one thing that we will see is much better coverage and much better quality.”

At the time Sprint was hoping that its early move into WiMAX would enable it to build up an unassailable lead in 4G. Of course it didn’t work out that way and Verizon’s relatively early move into LTE has, to a large extend headed it off at the pass. But has that speculative WiMAX play given Sprint any first mover advantage at all?

“There’s a benefit to that experience to having been in the market earlier, and the experience of building and managing capacity in that network is not lost us as we go forward,” he says. “How do you engineer the network? How do you optimise the network? How do you tune the protocols to maximise performance? That absolutely gives us a competitive advantage. And that’s really the benefit of having time to market.”

It can also be argued that, on a technical level, there are a lot of similarities between LTE and WiMAX, as Bye points out. “That knowledge that we have developed over WiMAX is easily transferable and extendable to any other OFDM technology, because WiMAX is OFDM – LTE is no different from WIMAX in that respect. The structure of the MAC layer and the uplink is different but there’s a lot of learning about our technology that is easily transferred over.”

Bye also offers up some thoughts on the FDD vs TDD debate running in the industry and believes that it’s not an either-or scenario. In fact, he points out that the selection of one over the other is actually unlikely to be a technology decision.

“The spectrum allocation will determine which of those solutions you end up deploying. If the licences are granted in paired blocks, then FDD is really only the feasible solution you can use. You can argue the merits of one technology over the other, but it really comes down to the licensing and the band structure that will determine how much TDD and what FDD you use, and how do you maximise the available spectrum that you have. So it’s likely that you’ll end up with a combination of the two.”

The only real downside, he says, is that having to support both will inevitably push up the complexity, and therefore cost, of end-user devices. That said, he believes this to be a price worth paying in order to solve the data challenges all carriers are facing.

“If we can at least get to a common baseband technology, then I think there will be economies of scale that will be afforded by that”.

Bye also reveals that Sprint will be using small cells to ensure that it deals adequately with capacity issues which, like all carriers in the industry, is a challenge that Sprint is facing. In fact it’s been a victim of its own success according to Bye. “Of all the carriers in America, we probably have the highest penetration of smartphones and of 4G devices—we are seeing tremendous consumption on those”.

It certainly not an issue that’s going to go away, especially if Sprint is looking to continue to stand alone in offering an unlimited data package, as it currently does for its WiMAX customers—something of which Bye is evidently proud. “We have an unlimited data plan and we are the only carrier in North America that continues to have one. And of course that is good for our customers. Most carriers in North America have chosen to go for tiered data offerings and that just makes it complex for customers. But we’ve stayed with a simple unlimited offer.”

One topic that draws no response from Bye is Sprint’s deal with LightSquared. As part of the proposal, LightSquared would pay Sprint a total of $20bn towards the build out of an LTE network, and Sprint would then lease those towers back from LightSquared as a customer. According to reports, LightSquared owner Philip Falcone has already written to its investors informing them of the deal, but with the would-be wholesale LTE operator currently mired in regulatory troubles over its GPS interference issues, Bye declines to comment.

But he is happy to reiterate Sprint’s robust views on the proposed AT&T and T-Mobile USA merger. “We actually think it’s bad for customers,” he said. “We think that the deal is basically an opportunity for AT&T to consolidate and remove a viable competitor from the market. We think customers will be the losers in that and we think the industry will suffer for that consolidation, given the market structure post that kid of merger. That being said, what with being the 3rd largest in the US with or without that deal, we still have 50m+ customers. We just think that that proposed merger is no good for consumers and not good for the industry. We are very public in our opposition to that deal.”

For the time being, though, Sprint has enough consolidation issues of its own to focus on. It is widely accepted that the firm’s mix of network technologies is unsustainable and the firm’s future will look a lot brighter once it has embarked on the next stage of its technological evolution.

The LTE North America 2011 conference takes place on the 8-9 November 2011 in Dallas, Texas.

Sprint's Panasonic Toughbook Mobile Clinical Assistant

USA

US operator Sprint Nextel offers a range of wireless services designed specifically for the healthcare field as part of a growing portfolio of enterprise services across a number of sectors. Targeting health enterprises such as hospitals, it offers customised services and, through established partnerships with software vendors, offers healthcare-specific applications for use both within organisations and in the field.

Through its Emerging Solutions division, launched in October 2010, it is working with M2M partners under a newly launched M2M Collaboration Center to embed connectivity in devices such as patient trackers and rugged mobile computers.

Sprint’s aim is to provide healthcare enterprises with a holistic communications environment that incorporates 3G and 4G networks for secure and reliable communications both inside and outside hospital environments. This includes solutions for workers based in the field and for remote treatment of patients in their homes. Providing communications services to healthcare enterprises hits the company’s sweet spot, according to Dan Gillison, national director for public-sector and enterprise verticals at Sprint. “It’s all about the movement of data and information,” he tells Informa, something the carrier has being doing for years. It has also been delivering services to health enterprises for years, but healthcare is now one of the top priorities in its vertical-enterprise strategy, because, as Gillison says, the firm has identified both “the need and the opportunity.”

Sprint’s intention is to help healthcare organisations operate disease-management programmes, lower healthcare costs and improve healthcare-service delivery—three things the health industry is under pressure to achieve as ageing and chronically ill populations expand. This includes not only voice and data services used by healthcare professionals but also services for patients that are not designed to be adopted by a consumer market.

The mobile applications offered by Sprint and its partners include clinical data management, access to schedules, field-worker tracking and medical-imaging transmission. Voice services play as important a role as data services in Sprint’s healthcare portfolio, including those that Sprint says guarantee connectivity during network outages and enable group push-to-talk and priority communications for emergency and trauma scenarios.

Sprint’s chronic-disease-management tools are designed for clinicians to use with patients in their own homes and include patient reminders, vital-sign monitoring and teleconferencing for live video consultations. With over $1tn spent each year on chronic-disease treatment, according to Gillison, the argument for reducing costs by introducing efficiency via remote monitoring is clear, and as smart devices proliferate, the opportunities in this area will increase. Sprint deploys services that can be used in this context in partnership with telehealth firm American Telecare. According to American Telecare, a nurse can attend to up to 15 patients a day using remote teleconferencing, as opposed to five or six by travelling to see them in person.

Sprint’s M2M platform is used for several deployed healthcare services, such as Comfort Zone, a web application for caregivers. The application, developed by the Alzheimer’s Association, picks up location information from a tracker device worn by an Alzheimer’s patient. Using Sprint’s network connectivity, the ZTE-manufactured device, sold by tracking firm Omnilink, sends location information at either 15- or 30-minute intervals, depending on the plan purchased. Caregivers can also look up location at will, track constantly and receive panic alerts.

Sprint also provides embedded connectivity for the Panasonic Toughbook H1 Mobile Clinical Assistant, a lightweight (3.4lb), ruggedized touch-screen tablet device with an Intel processor, designed specifically for use by healthcare professionals. It is one of a family of Panasonic “toughbook” devices, a range of which are deployed in hospitals in the US with wireless connectivity based on 802.11, CDMA, GSM/GPRS, EDGE, 1xEV-DO and HSDPA technologies and provided by a range of carriers.

Although the mobile healthcare market is relatively nascent, US operators have existing relationships with health enterprises to build upon in the provision of new wireless services, and innovation in m-health technologies is especially well supported by a number of parties. Chip vendor Qualcomm is working with technology companies to foster wireless medical-technology innovation, industry body the Continua Alliance is developing interoperable standards for telehealth devices through cross-sector collaboration, and this year medical-research centre the National Institutes of Health (NIH), part of the US Department of Health and Human Services, has awarded more than $36m in research awards relating to mobile healthcare.

Also, under the current administration the healthcare market is undergoing reform to improve efficiencies in healthcare management and expenditure, a challenge considered essential to address in view of increasing demands put on services by aging and chronically ill patients.

The health-enterprise sector is not a new one for operators such as Sprint, but it presents a raft of new opportunities in the provision of wireless services, and not only of those that are brand new and highly innovative. Incredibly, fully integrated communications (including voice) across mobile and hospital-based healthcare work forces do not seem to exist to the extent that one might expect. Gillison told Informa that Sprint is excited to be providing services in this area, which is unsurprising given the wide scope for innovation—particularly with partners—and the opportunity to become heavily integrated with customers. With revenues undisclosed, it is difficult to know whether such effort pays off, but it makes sense for Sprint to be early to market, particularly because its competitors are looking to expand their footprints in the same market.

LightSquared has signed netTalk as a new customer and is hitting back at its critics

Embattled LTE startup LightSquared’s woes appear not to have put off prospective customers, as the company announced yesterday that VoIP provider netTalk had joined Sprint, Best Buy and Leap Wireless as a wholesale customer of the telco.

According to LightSquared, the VoIP company will “develop its own branded voice and high-speed mobile data services” using the wholesaler’s spectrum on a multi-year agreement. The value of the deal has not been revealed.

NetTalk offers low-cost subscription-based VoIP services in north America, offering free calls for US and Canadian customers with “no computer required.” Company president Anastasios Kyriakides said the agreement with LightSquared gave the company “an opportunity to service new customer segments with very competitive services.”

Earlier this month, LightSquared finalised a 15-year deal with US carrier Sprint that will see the pair sharing infrastructure in a deal rumoured to be worth in the region of $20bn. That deal, which has yet to be officially confirmed (LightSquared owner Philip Falcone has written a letter to investors, informing them of the deal) would see LightSquared using Sprint’s towers to build out its network. LightSquared has also claimed to be in talks with upwards of 20 other business, including cable operators and consumer device manufacturers.

The announcement of the deal with netTalk on Tuesday coincided with an announcement from the New York City Fire Department that it had joined the Coalition to Save our GPS group. The Coalition is opposed to LightSquared’s planned LTE network, claiming the wholesaler’s technology interferes with GPS. Despite LightSquared’s announcement last week that it had resolved interference issues by switching bands, the Coalition is having none of it and has lobbied hard to prevent the company from launching its network. Late last week, a US House of Representatives committee passed a bill blocking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from granting LightSquared a waiver is needs to move forward.

The company has until July 1^st to report back to the FCC with results of a testing programme into the claimed interference. While the results have yet to be fully disclosed, early indications are that the proposed technology does interfere with a variety of public safety devices – something that LightSquared strenuously denies. The company is hitting back with its own public policy initiative and sponsoring a study that has found that the GPS industry in America receives an effective $18bn subsidy from the government because it uses GPS spectrum free of charge.

LightSquared and Sprint have agreed on a US$20bn network share deal

LightSquared, the US operator planning to build a wholesale LTE network, has finalised a 15-year deal with fellow carrier Sprint that will see the two sharing infrastructure.

While neither party has officially confirmed the news, Bloomberg said that it has obtained a letter from LightSquared’s billionaire owner Philip Falcone to his Harpinger Capital Partners hedge fund investors, informing them of the deal.

The agreement, which is said to be worth as much as US$20bn, will enable LightSquared to use Sprint’s towers to build out its network, greatly accelerating the process. Ironically, the deal means that Sprint could end up being one of LightSquared wholesale customers.

Sprint currently has an agreement with Clearwire to supply ‘4G’ services based on Wimax, but the LightSquared deal indicates that it is looking to make the move to LTE. The indications are that Clearwire itself will also make the move to LTE, and if this occurs it’s possible that Sprint could use both LightSquared and Clearwire for future LTE services.

LightSquared is hoping to become a disruptive force in the US telco market by offering an LTE network to customers on a wholesale basis, taking on incumbents such as Verizon, Metro PCS and AT&T. Its license requires that it covers 92 per cent of the US population by 2015 and to do that it has been looking at satellite coverage. However, it has recently faced a setback, with a number of recent tests confirming that its network causes significant interference with GPS signals on the ground and in space. LightSquared has agreed an extension of producing its own report on the interference, with a deadline of 1 July.