Sidecut Reports

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

ORLANDO, Fla. — According to AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega, one of the “big drivers” of his company’s proposed purchase of T-Mobile was simply “the need for more spectrum.”

Though Ma Bell has been mum in the past when asked whether or not it had enough spectrum to support its current and future network plans, with its pending deal headed toward intense regulatory scrutiny AT&T is now playing the “we need spectrum” card as a pitch to help it provide better service to its wireless customers.

De la Vega made his spectrum-crunch comment as part of a three-CEO panel that opened this spring’s CTIA wireless show here, a gathering that also included Sprint CEO Dan Hesse and Verizon Wireless CEO Dan Mead as well as bombastic TV personality Jim Cramer as the Red Bull-powered moderator. Though Cramer noted that the New York Times among others had found reasons to criticize the pending deal, De la Vega said the combination of AT&T and T-Mobile spectral assets would help prevent what the company now describes as a pending “spectrum exhaust” for many U.S. markets.

Spectrum, the licensed wireless airwaves used to transmit cellular signals between consumer devices and antennas on towers, is typically obtained by companies like AT&T in auctions authorized by the government. Though FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski used his keynote speech here Tuesday to pitch his agency’s idea for voluntary auctions for existing spectrum holders such as television broadcasters, any such transactions are years away in producing usable spectrum, making commercial transactions such as AT&T’s pending purchase the only fast way for companies to obtain more wireless airwaves quickly.

“It’s in the public interest to solve the [pending] spectrum exhaust,” said De la Vega, trying to put a bigger-picture spin on AT&T’s planned acquistion.

With big 4G wireless network promotions coming later this year from leading cellular providers AT&T and Verizon, it still looks like the hardest job is going to fall to the potential next-generation wireless customer — who will be forced to pick and choose from a dizzying array of devices and prices, without much help or guidance from the carriers providing the services.

Two things I read over the weekend reinforced my belief that potential 4G customers are going to need a lot more measurement tools if they are going to make sense of what is coming from the biggest providers. The first was a report on the Boy Genius Report site that purportedly was a precursor of some of AT&T’s forthcoming 4G LTE pricing plans that would include sort of an ad-hoc ability to purchase bandwidth on demand. At the very least, such thinking seems to mean that the days of real unlimited data plans are truly at an end.

Read the rest of this entry »