Sidecut Reports

It was shown at CES, but it hasn’t yet been made available — but the Samsung LTE Mobile hotspot is apparently making appearances in the wild, since the SSID list pulled up from our hotel room here in Orlando Sunday night saw the Verizon SCH-LC11 Samsung tag. Too bad it was locked, preventing us from doing some in-hotel wardriving to see if that LTE network is really as hot as folks say it is. C’mon Verizon insider! Share the wealth!

An availability announcement might be on tap this week — but it might get lost in the discussion of the week of CTIA that is already trending on Twitter as #ATTMobile. Sidecut Reports hadn’t been in Orlando more than 15 minutes before hearing barroom chatter about AT&T and T-Mobile while watching the end of the Kansas-Illinois game. The good thing is that while we were traveling many hard-working telco reporters were cranking out some great instant reporting and analysis. Links below. And if you have a working Samsung mobile hotspot, tell us how it performs!

GigaOM’s Stacey H with a straight news take w/Sprint comment

GigaOM’s Stacey again with a good regulatory/DOJ take

All Things D’s Ina Fried does a Q&A with AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega (who finally admits that his company has a spectrum depth problem and is willing to pay $39 billion to fix it)

Since Sidecut Reports is en route to Orlando today for the now supremely interesting CTIA show, this missive will be short but there is no small amount of news and analysis of AT&T’s stunning plan to acquire T-Mobile USA for $39 billion. (The best take we’ve seen so far not surprisingly comes from our old pal Om Malik who doesn’t see a happy future for the mobile ecosystem or customer base).

Though nobody can claim that they saw this particular move coming, readers of Sidecut Reports know that we have for a long time now pointed out that AT&T did not have a spectrum position that suggested it could build out a network worthy of the term 4G. And though over time AT&T executives have always professed nothing but confidence for their spectrum holdings, you don’t have to read very far into the interview Ina Fried had today with AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega to hear him cite “spectrum exhaust challenges” as a primary motivation for the deal.

Obviously we will write more about this proposed deal in the days ahead but we can’t help but wonder whether or not Clearwire’s spectrum holdings all of a sudden just got more valuable. And of course we also can’t wait to see the next T-Mobile TV commercial, and how the relationship between the T-Mobile girl and the AT&T guy might change.

On a year-end financial conference call that left most of the big questions surrounding its business unanswered, nascent national WiMAX provider Clearwire Thursday nevertheless retained a bullish outlook on its ongoing operations, even predicting the possibility of becoming profitable as early as 2012.

While denying rumors that it would close down or cease its retail business, the leading provider of 4G wireless broadband services in the U.S. did say it would emphasize the wholesale side of its business in 2011, while it also slows down network buildouts and scales back retail operations to conserve cash. But even as Clearwire expects to only add a few new rural markets in 2011 the company also predicts it will double its subscriber base from the current 4.4 million to 8.8 million by the end of the year, with most of those additions coming via wholesale deals such as via sales of Sprint’s 4G smartphones, which run on the Clearwire network for their high-speed connection.

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