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.

There was plenty of insider-baseball info relayed Tuesday at the Clearwire Developer confab in Santa Clara, much of which we will try to wrap into our next Clearwire NTK report (coming soon). But one factoid that jumped out was when Dow Draper, Clearwire Vice President for product development and innovation, told the audience that the average Clearwire customer is already using 7 Gigabytes of downloaded data per month — a number that Clearwire only expects to increase over time.

All on good behavior, the Clearwire folks here Tuesday didn’t let any previously unannounced info slip — other than to say vaguely that the Bay Area can expect commercial services by “late 2010,” and that “multiple phones” would be running on the Clearwire network before year’s end. As we said, more details soon when we get our next Clearwire NTK (Need To Know) report out the door.

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?

On the Clearwire conference call right now, but the numbers are in and they are good for Clearwire: According to its press release, Clearwire added 87,000 net new subscribers during the fourth quarter of 2009, meeting the company’s predicted goal of adding more new users in the last 90 days than during the entire previous three quarters of 2009.

Clearwire also broke out wholesale subscriber numbers for the first time, claiming that partners Sprint Nextel, Comcast and Time Warner Cable combined to add 46,000 additional 4G subscribers during 2009. In terms of new markets scheduled to launch in 2010, Clearwire said that Houston will be the first next big market, going live sometime in the next few weeks. Planned launches in New York City, San Francisco, Boston, Washington D.C., Denver, Minneapolis and Kansas City would take place later in the year, probably closer to the end of 2010.

On the subject of a hybrid 3G/4G WiMAX phone the company did not provide any new details — while Clearwire CEO Bill Morrow confirmed that the company is planning to provide a WiMAX smartphone, all he would say on timing is that “we expect that to happen later this year.” Sprint, however, said last week that it expects to deliver a WiMAX/3G phone sometime this summer, a device that would use the Clearwire network.

More on the numbers later as we check our math with the Clearwire folks. Our back of the envelope figures show the 4G subscriber count for 2009 at:

– 168,000 total net new 4G subscribers added
– 46,000 wholesale 4G subscribers added
= 214,000 4G subscribers out of Clearwire’s new total of 688,000 subscribers overall (which includes subscribers in existing pre-WiMAX markets)