Sidecut Reports

With each passing day, we are getting closer to the planned launches of Long Term Evolution services from the leading U.S. providers, Verizon and AT&T. But since the actual ship dates are still at some undetermined future point in time, executives from those companies are caught in a bit of a no-man’s land — they need to start publicizing their 4G plans now as to not appear behind competitors, but they also don’t want to show their cards on details like pricing and availability before they absolutely have to.

What does that leave us with? With some not-so-informative interviews like the ones that have popped up in the past week or so, a couple with Verizon’s Anthony Melone and one with AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega in which the execs are let off the hook by either not being asked any tough questions, or by not actually answering the tough questions they were asked. Unfortunately for the audience of potential 4G services users, we are no more informed about LTE now than we were before the interviews, especially when it comes down to the money questions of how fast, how much, and where and when can I get it.

For Verizon, the responses by its wireless-division’s executive VP and chief technology officer “Tony” Melone are nothing but positives — in this breezy Q-and-A with Network World, the exec gets to spin everything in a Verizon fashion, with news nuggets like “I’m happy to report that we’re ahead of where we thought we’d be as far as site readiness goes.” While there’s nothing in the Network World interview that Verizon hadn’t said before, in a subsequent talk with the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) Melone is quoted as saying Verizon would have LTE handsets by mid-2011, which the story claims is “about six months earlier than the company had said before.” While both stories touch on the fact that Verizon will need to use its 3G network to support voice calls for LTE users, that’s not news to anyone who has been following LTE developments.

The fun thing to watch over the next year may be to compare the aggressively LTE Verizon with AT&T, which is downplaying its move to LTE by citing the lack of available devices. So while Verizon is chipper about having a handset by mid-2011, on the other hand you have AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega telling Fierce Wireless that it doesn’t think LTE devices will be available so soon:

With LTE, we think that there will be a lack of devices in the short-term. Our deployment is designed around those devices, so our network will come at the time when the devices are available.

What the two big providers do have in common is a desire to ditch “unlimited” data plans for their forthcoming 4G services, a problem WiMAX providers like Clearwire aren’t facing. While we’ve already talked about AT&T’s attempts to promote pay-per-bit plans, Verizon’s Melone echoed Verizon CTO Dick Lynch by calling for an end to all-you-can-eat data plans (which, as Karl Bode over at DSL Reports notes, Verizon has actually never offered). Quoting from the Wall Street Journal story:

Plans offering “as much data as you can consume is the big issue that has to change,” Mr. Melone said.

Looking forward to hearing more about LTE plans at CTIA!

Pretty interesting to see AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson saying basically that his company really doesn’t want to sell you a 3G-powered iPad, since he thinks you will probably use it over Wi-Fi anyway. Easy for us to say we told you so, but it’s not like that was the most original take. Anyone who has been watching AT&T’s wireless network struggles over the past year can’t be surprised that Ma Bell isn’t going to go out of its way to promote yet another bandwidth-hogging device.

Perhaps even more interesting are Stephenson’s quotes about what he sees in the future for AT&T wireless customers — namely, consumption-based pricing, especially if you are a heavy data user. From the Reuters story today, this quote from Stephenson:

“For the industry, we’ll progressively move towards more of what I call variable pricing so the heavy (use) consumers will pay more than the lower consumers,” Stephenson said.

While most observers also think that Verizon will price its launching-sometime-this-year Long Term Evolution services in a similar fashion, the folks at Clearwire were headed in a different direction Tuesday at their developer’s workshop in Santa Clara, Calif. — namely, talking about all-you-can-eat data plans at much faster download rates than comparable 3G cellular data plans from the big carriers. What really caught our eye was a graph showing what happens to your monthly costs when you start exceeding the 5 Gb monthly data caps that 3G “unlimited” plans all have attached — the 3G costs go up like the proverbial hockey stick, while the Clearwire WiMAX pricing stays the same. (The presentations from the developer confab are supposed to be posted soon; we’ll put a link in here when they are up.)

One of the data points to emerge from Clearwire at the conference was the fact that so far its WiMAX customers are chomping up a lot more data — around 7 Gigs per month each, according to Clearwire, a figure also headed up. As we’ve said before we think Clearwire has a good message to get out when it comes to being the value leader in wireless data services. Expect to hear more about this theme from Clearwire and its WiMAX partners as the year progresses.

At the Clearwire developer confab today in Santa Clara, Calif. … we are inside at the Santa Clara Convention Center using the Clearwire Innovation Network that is live in several areas around Silicon Valley.

The question — does WiMAX work indoors? Here’s our answer:

Any questions?

While we don’t have any insider knowledge as to what the company will say, here are a few topics we will be looking for more information on during the Clearwire (Nasdaq: CLWR) quarterly and year-end conference call this Wednesday, and our guesses as to what the answers might be:

MARKET LAUNCHES: Clearwire said publicly last year that 2010 will see a lot of new market launches, including the important big-city markets of New York, San Francisco, Boston, Houston and Washington D.C. With Verizon starting to ramp up the publicity machine for its Long Term Evolution market launches later this year, it behooves Clearwire to offer more clarity on “when” its 4G WiMAX services will hit the Big Apple, Beantown and the Left Coast. Our guess? Look for NY and SF later in the year, Boston and D.C. in the summer.

THE WIMAX SMARTPHONE: Since its partner Sprint upped the WiMAX smartphone ante by leaking some launch details to Forbes last week, Clearwire will likely be questioned closely on shipping dates for the hybrid 3G/4G smartphone that Clearwire CEO Bill Morrow had previously promised to ship sometime before Christmas 2010. Our guess is that this is something that Sprint wants to have first, so Clearwire’s own version may have to wait.

WHOLESALE MARKETS: While we don’t believe the rumors of Clearwire getting out of the retail business, it does make sense that the provider’s big-name wholesale partners — like Sprint, Comcast and Time Warner Cable — may eventually end up with more total customers than Clearwire corporate. While it’s still early days for the wholesale partners (who only really started reselling services in the middle of 2009), it would be interesting to hear some actual wholesale-customer subscriber numbers (which neither Clearwire nor its partners have provided so far) and perhaps some predictions about how big a percentage the wholesale business will be to Clearwire over time. Our guess is that it’s probably still too soon to hear any detailed numbers or predictions, or any information on a possible spectrum lease to someone like T-Mobile.

Having missed this week’s quarterly earnings call from Sprint, we checked in on the always-reliable Seeking Alpha transcript to see if Dan Hesse and crew had any kind words for their WiMAX efforts, via the network run by Clearwire. Though Sprint didn’t release any 4G subscriber numbers — as we’ve said before we think honesty (even if the count is low) is the best policy — Hesse did drop some foreshadowing that should make 2010 a busy year in terms of WiMAX market and device launches.

Here are a few 4G-related bon mots from Hesse’s remarks during the Q & A to pass on:

– a reiterated promise for a hybrid 3G/4G device that looks and feels like a phone, shipping in 2010

– new markets that cover roughly four times as many potential customers as the markets Clearwire and Sprint enabled during 2009

– continued no-data-limit contracts for the WiMAX part of any service equation

After saying that the WiMAX/3G phone would “make a big difference,” Hesse added:

So internally we call 2010 the year of 4G. It’s going to be the year that we’re the only game in town and it’s a combination of we need to get more markets turned up and we need to get a better device lineup and then we think we can really start to show some sizable progress in that regard.

We should hear more about markets when Clearwire reports its Q4 numbers Feb. 24. Publicly the company has said 2010 will see launches in San Francisco, New York, Boston, Houston and others… check back after the Mobile World Congress LTE love-fest to hear more about where you can find live 4G services, this year. And not LaTEr.

Thanks again to Seeking Alpha for the call transcript.