Sidecut Reports

One thing to think about as you consider that shiny new 4G phone purchase — if you are looking at the snazzy new LTE devices from Verizon Wireless or the upcoming ones being promised for later this year from AT&T, get used to the fact that your data service won’t “roam” when you are outside of your carrier’s 4G coverage area. Instead, you will likely drop back to 3G or slower service when roaming — and that’s going to be the case for quite some time.

Why is this happening? Mainly because the biggest carriers in the U.S. market, AT&T and Verizon, are using different parts of the 700 MHz frequency band for their LTE networks — and right now it’s cost- and management-prohibitive to put additional chips into the new phones just to support roaming onto another carrier’s service.

Fierce Wireless has a good recap of some hearings in Washington D.C. yesterday where smaller carriers are fighting the big boys, trying to get the gubmint to require that data roaming for 4G services in the 700 MHz band is made possible. There might eventually be some FCC prodding, but the bottom line for consumers is that this ain’t happening anytime soon.

Right now the 4G phones from Verizon as well as the forthcoming ones from AT&T are loaded with little radio chips, and there simply isn’t room or the budget for more. In AT&T’s case, the phones will need to support the company’s several flavors of 2G and 3G networks (EDGE and HSPA+), its forthcoming LTE network which will run on two different bands of spectrum (700 MHz and AWS, needing a separate chip for each), as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth — we are guessing that in a pinch if you are cold you can turn on all the radios and let the phone heat your house.

Customers who have purchased 4G devices from Sprint or Clearwire are also subject to this problem, mainly because their 4G implementation uses WiMAX at a frequency that no other major carrier has yet implemented. The Clearwire/Sprint network right now covers 71-plus markets, while the Verizon network is at 45 city markets and 60 airports, with plans to add another 140 to 170 by the end of the year. AT&T has not yet said how many markets it plans to cover with LTE in 2011, only that it will launch some services before year-end.

So for 4G data customers — when you are in your provider’s coverage area you are fine, but when you are roaming about you may be slowed back down to the world of 3G. And it’s going to be that way for a while.

Hat tip to our old pal Andy Abramson for tracking a legal development in the VoIP world — seems like the factually elusive Daniel Borislow got his MagicJack VoIP scheme slammed by AT&T and the FCC. Andy’s post has a thorough explanation of the beef, which we will try to distill further — basically it appears that Dan was trying to subsidize the “low-cost” MagicJack plan by billing AT&T and other large carriers for completing calls, a la the old Iowa-based Free Conferencing dodges of the near past.

It was interesting to see that the FCC didn’t rule that MagicJack’s plan was illegal, immoral or unlawful — it simply agreed with AT&T that MagicJack had tried to fudge the way it described its service and that error meant that MagicJack can’t charge AT&T the fees it is claiming. What that means for us MagicJack and Borislow fans is that the Dan show probably ain’t over yet, though as we stated before you have to wonder how people can continue to put good money into a stock of a company that calls something like this a financial release.

While we are waiting to hear back from Dan (who sometimes responds to our emails, but sometimes not) anyone seen the heralded magicjack Plus or the hinted-at femtojack, which less cynical “news reporters” apparently expect to hit the streets any day now? C’mon Dan, can we at least see if one of your promises comes true?

UPDATE: Dan Borislow apparently replied to a blog post by Forbes’ Eric Savitz on this subject. You have to click to open the comments but our man Dan is in a fighting mood… as he says (we have every reason to believe it is really Dan posting) about AT&T, “We are owed the money, we suplied [sic] a valuable service and when AT&T tried to strongarm us, we told them where to go.” Read the blog post for more.

ORLANDO, Fla. — In his numerous panel appearances Tuesday here at the CTIA Wireless show, AT&T Chief Technology Officer John Donovan had a simple, one-word answer for the reason behind the proposed purchase of wireless competitor T-Mobile: “Spectrum.”

Specifically, Donovan said in a brief interview with Sidecut Reports following one of his panel appearances, T-Mobile’s big swath of AWS (Advanced Wireless Services) spectrum and the role it might play in AT&T’s 4G network of the future is a big reason why it makes sense for AT&T to offer the big bucks — $39 billion of them — to buy T-Mobile outright.

“It’s all about the future,” said Donovan in the interview, explaining both his and AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega’s insistence that Ma Bell is facing a potential “exhaustion” of its existing licensed spectrum assets. While some industry observers have accused AT&T of hoarding a big patch of unused spectrum while crying wolf, Donovan said AT&T already has plans for all the spectrum under its current ownership, including plans to use both its own AWS spectrum and its 700 MHz spectrum for its forthcoming LTE network rollout.

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