Sidecut Reports

Having stepped back a bit from the daily-news department it’s always fun to watch what happens when some real news drops on the wireless scene, like today’s earnings announcement from Sprint. The money line from today was Sprint CEO Dan Hesse in the conference-call Q&A telling an analyst that Sprint had signed up 1.7 million 4G customers during the quarter (a number that Sprint had never broken out before). And in Hesse style you had to like the way he said it, on the end of a longer answer about the relationship between Sprint and Clearwire, which supplies Sprint with its 4G network:

And this quarter we gave Clearwire 1.7 million new reasons to be pleased with the relationship with Sprint.

You’d never know it from reading most of the stories about the news (especially the one from CNN, which declared that Verizon had somehow “overtaken” Sprint in the 4G race) but Sprint’s announcement of 1.7 million 4G device subscriber adds during Q2 was pretty amazing, especially when you compare it to Verizon’s 1.2 million 4G LTE subscriber adds during the same time period.

That’s right: A network running WiMAX, the technology everyone already says is dead, whacked Verizon’s new “Rule the Air” 4G LTE campaign by a half-million new adds. Given that Verizon is roughly twice the size of Sprint in terms of overall wireless subscribers and probably even greater than that in terms of cash flow and marketing spend, it’s a victory along the lines of Japan’s recent defeat of the U.S. at the women’s soccer World Cup. It’s a huge upset. It may be an anomaly. But if it keeps up it may be a sign that the U.S. market knows a good deal when it sees one, and that Sprint’s true unlimited data plans for 4G are beating the pants off Verizon’s tiered data cap plans.

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The numbers are in for Verizon’s second fiscal quarter of 2011, and from a 4G wireless provider standpoint the market leader is still Sprint by a pretty big margin, since Verizon only added 1.2 million new LTE subscribers during the most-recent fiscal reporting period.

Now 1.2 million devices ain’t shabby — by our unaudited account when added to the half-million previous subscribers that gives Verizon approximately 1.7 million subscribers on either smartphones or portable modems for the 4G LTE network it launched back in December. But that 1.2 million number is well below the 1.6 million 4G smartphones actived by Sprint during Q1, according to more unofficial Sidecut Reports math that put Sprint’s 4G subscriber number somewhere in the 4 million ballpark at the end of Q1.

Thought Sprint is due to report quarterly numbers later this week we probably won’t get a handle on Sprint’s 4G numbers until its network partner Clearwire reports its quarterly earnings in early August, thanks to the kabuki dance Sprint performs by not just coming out and saying how many 4G devices it has sold. But with several new 4G devices launched this year it’s safe to guess that Sprint probably added maybe another million 4G subs during Q2, so Verizon is still way behind in the 4G race after 7 months of playing, by a score of something like 5 million to 1.7 million.

(I guess that is why the world needs analysts and reporters, to sort through the fiscal gymnastics. Since this is free of charge — you’re welcome! Especially all you scraper blogs. Thanks for the traffic.)

While Sidecut Reports wasn’t available to listen in on the call this past week — hey we were part of a great webinar on Thursday, you should listen to it — scouring the transcript of Verizon’s call on Seeking Alpha we didn’t see much “color” from the Verizon execs on 4G numbers. You can begin with Verizon’s reluctance to even break apart its “1.2 million LTE devices” number into segments of how many of those were smartphone subs and how many were LTE modems, either USB modems or the portable Wi-Fi hotspot models.

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The news that AT&T was finally getting serious about launching its late-to-the-game LTE service got us thinking about AT&T’s HSPA+ rollout map, the hunt-and-see game where you try to find active HSPA+ markets by rolling your cursor over a map (instead, of say, reading a list off a press release). If you remember in our first discovery the map wasn’t very active, with only 10 active HSPA+ markets (and at the time no HSPA+ compatible phones).

So how’s AT&T doing now? Apparently all that heaven and earth moving is reaping benefits — by our count there are 19 new cities or regions now designated as “active” with HSPA+ services. As usual with AT&T network performance your mileage may vary. But our new list includes the following locales:

California towns:
– Greater Los Angeles area
– San Diego
– Sacramento
– Bakersfield
– Modesto

Texas:
– San Antonio
– Austin

Florida:
– Jacksonville
– Tampa

Other towns and regions:
– Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minn.
– Hartford, Conn.
– Syracuse, N.Y.
– Greater New York City
– Southern New England
– Eastern Pennsylvania
– St. Louis, Mo.
– Kansas City
– “Michigan”
– Anchorage, Ak

What does this mean for the AT&T ‘4G’ customer? Well now there are more places where you may, might, kinda not sure but maybe, might get some faster network performance. As AT&T says itself when you ask how fast its 4G is:

Just how fast is AT&T 4G?
With enhanced backhaul AT&T is seeing network speeds up to approximately 6 Mbps. Actual speeds experienced will vary and depend on several factors, including location, device, environment, and capacity. LTE is expected to deliver even faster speeds.

The money quote: “Actual speeds experienced will vary.” True dat.