Sidecut Reports

I kid you not. Have a Barnes & Noble Nook and are looking for some LTE content to peruse? All you need to do is hit the Nook Bookstore and type “Sidecut LTE” in the search field and you will find us there, ready to fill your noggin with news and analysis with our 4G LTE Market Report for January, 2012.

Today’s news about Verizon selling 1.6 million 4G LTE phones is anticipated and explained in the report — for $2.99 put it in your Nook, it’s like a book, you can share it in a box with a fox. No rhymes, just a lot of reason. And I am outta here before I defile the memory of Dr. Seuss any further.

(Our thanks to the folks at Lulu for their e-book distribution system. Thumbs up from Sidecut Reports!)

It looks like Sprint’s strategic decision to focus on the iPhone has finally allowed Verizon Wireless to sell more 4G phones than Sprint, according to financial numbers released Tuesday. According to Verizon the company sold 1.6 million 4G LTE smartphones during the quarter, as well as another 700,000 4G devices like USB modems and Wi-Fi hotspots. And while Sprint never calls out its 4G numbers its 4G partner Clearwire today pre-announced some Q4 metrics including 900,000 new 4G wholesale activations, which you can pretty much translate into being mostly Sprint 4G smartphones and a small number of other devices, like hotspots and USBs.

(Editor’s note: You won’t find the 4G LTE device breakout numbers in the Verizon press release; the numbers were discussed during the conference call, and a quote with the figures was provided to us by Verizon.)

What’s the 30-second analysis on all this? Sidecut Reports sticks by the premise of our latest report, the 4G LTE Market Report for January, 2012, in which we conclude that 4G LTE phone sales for all providers, including Verizon, are going to stay essentially flat until we see an LTE-capable Apple iPhone hit the market. As proof of the iPhone’s continuing popularity look no farther than Verizon’s Q4 numbers: 4.3 million iPhone activations vs. 1.6 million 4G LTE phone activations. Almost a 3-to-1 preference for the 3G iPhone vs. any 4G LTE choice.

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Editor’s note: Conspiracy theorists, start your engines. Just a few days after we noticed AT&T’s switch to make its smartphone customers pay $45 a month for a 4 GB data plan AT&T announced a further change that would mirror Verizon’s plan and now require a $50, 5 GB plan to use that mobile hotspot feature on your phone. All the analysis from the original post below still holds. More on this topic soon.

I haven’t paid attention to the AT&T 4G LTE site for a few months, so I was surprised by a new twist in AT&T’s top-network data plans. If you want to use the snazzy portable Wi-Fi hotspot feature found in almost every new top of the line smartphone, you’ll have to throw down on the “DataPro 4GB” plan, a $45 per month data plan which includes 4 GB of downloadable data and access to the hotspot feature. Don’t want to buy the big plan? Then you aren’t going to be able to use the hotspot feature, according to an AT&T rep I just had an online chat with.

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