by Devanshu Mehta
> Until last year, the wireless space in the United States was fairly
> dull. The wireless carriers such as Verizon and AT&T owned your house,
> guarded the doors, sold you the locks, and kept the keys. This year,
> things started to change. ...
I must admit I don't understand this article at all. It seems overloaded with breathless hyperbole and contradictions: "age has passed or has it yet to begin".
The wireless world is very dynamic. We don't need a long article to tell us that.
Ha ha. American mobile networks are walled gardens with walls that reach to the sky and little windows through the walls, each with its own toll booth.
Yes. Verizon did two surprising things last week. One was that they said that they will (sometime in the future) allow customers to use any handset they want so long as it's technically compatible. AT&T and T-Mo have done that for years, as long as they've been GSM. At the moment this only means CDMA equipment from Sprint, but ...
The other is that Verizon said that their upgrade path will be LTE, the next version of GSM, rather than Qualcomm's next generation CDMA. That means that in five years or so, you'll be able to use the same phones on VZW, AT&T, and T-Mo.
I wonder if this portends a Verizon move to acquire Sprint, possibly followed by a spinoff of any leftover legacy Nextel customers still on the old PTT platform and unwilling to change technology despite the enticements thrown at them? Maybe some white knight will pick Nextel piece up and ride it out as a pure cash cow. Unless VZ can just shut it down once and for all, but I suspect there is still some life left in the old gal (not to mention the $$ value of its spectrum allocation).
I can envision VZ then absorbing the existing Sprint wireless plant & its channels and then consolidating eventually into the mothership as a fairly marginal cost delta to its CDMA-to-LTE upgrade you also mentioned.
Can't see the regulators blocking such a move after letting Cingular (now AT&T) swallow up the old AT&T Wireless. Maybe they would force VZ to trade off or sell off a system here and there to throw a bone to the consumer advocates but otherwise no big deal.
***** Moderator's Note *****
I doubt that Verizon would make that move, and I also doubt the FCC et al would allow it. Spring has PCS spectrum, and they sublet a lot of it to Virgin Mobile, so I doubt they're hurting financially.
The Nextel users I've talked to would fight to _keep_ the "old PTT platform": they love the way PTT encourages shorter, to-the-point communications and cuts down on chatter amoung their staff and drivers. I don't know which spectrum Nextel has, but don't forget that there's going to be a boatload of it coming up after the analog TV allocations are available, so whatever the value of Nextel's piece now, its got a short half-life.
The regulators are, IMNSHO, interested only in preventing another Blackberry debacle: a situation where the entire network might have been shut down and the Federal government's top managers forced to switch to other services. That means they'll be skitish about any more consolidation, especially in an election year here in the U.S.
Cabling-Design.com Forums website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.