Sidecut Reports

The tweets were direct and to the point — “HTC Inspire 4G will be available on Feb. 13 for $99.99 with contract!,” said the corporate feed from AT&T. While that seems like an aggressive price for such a full-featured smartphone (humongous screen, Android 2.2, all the assorted bells and whistles), you really have to dig deep to try to find out where you might actually be able to experience AT&T’s version of “4G” speeds — and then be prepared to dig deeper to find out how much you will actually have to pay to enjoy such service.

Let’s start with the 4G coverage issue — as you may recall back at CES AT&T jumped onto the 4G marketing bandwagon with both feet, by proclaiming that not only would its later-in-the-year LTE network be a “4G” entity, but that it was also claiming its ongoing rollout of HSPA+ services also qualified for the 4G label. We will put aside for now the argument about whether or not HSPA+ is really a big step forward and ask a simpler question: Where can customers actually get HSPA+ services from AT&T?
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LAS VEGAS — Just some quick thoughts on a bunch of wireless spectrum talk that surfaced today at CES; while I will try to formulate some longer thought pieces on this subject I know that if I let it sit over the weekend it might never get done. So before Virgin whisks me back home some thoughts, reactions and instant-analysis from some policy panels I attended today at CES.

EVERYONE WANTS MORE SPECTRUM. BUT WHERE YA GONNA GET IT?. It would be hard to find anyone to disagree with FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, who reiterated his earlier claims of a “looming spectrum crisis” in this country’s wireless broadband marketplace. But even as Genachowski and CEA CEO Gary Shapiro talk about “bipartisan support” for a pending bill that would authorize the FCC to conduct an auction of spare broadcasters’ spectrum, don’t hold your breath for it to happen anytime soon.

In the back of the room at Genachowski’s speech some telecom insiders were talking about the chances of such a bill passing in the upcoming Congress — “the chances are zero,” said one large telephone carrier representative. Why? A lot of the broadcaster spectrum sits in the hands of rural providers, whose Congressional representatives rely primarily on over-the-air TV to contact consituents (and run re-election campaigns). City dwellers on both coasts may want to give up the “unused” airwaves so they can have more connectivity for their iPads — but the power and numbers right now are still with the rural opposition.
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LAS VEGAS — Just a quick blog post whilst we are waiting for the big Verizon press conference to start: After sitting through a well-scripted presentation from wireless provider T-Mobile, I still can’t quite agree that all the numbers the company cites add up to a real “4G” network and service.

While I’m not as hung up as some people over T-Mobile’s decision to call its HSPA+ network a 4G offering I do think that the company is heading down a murky road with its continued use of speed and coverage numbers that don’t hold up to even a modest bit of fact-checking. We’ll try to follow up more thoroughly when we have a chance to really research the claims, but our BS-meter pegged into the red when the first chart offered by T-Mobile was a proclamation that a Nielsen survey found T-Mobile to have the “fastest data [service] in the top 100 markets.*”

What I want to call to your attention is the asterisk — because in fine print at the bottom of the slide the asterisk said that the survey measured T-Mobile against other providers’ 3G services, not the 4G LTE service from Verizon or the 4G WiMAX service from Sprint and Clearwire. So why put up such a slide? Because it all seems to fit with T-Mobile’s strategy of using bluster and a cheeky attitude instead of hard solid facts.
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