AT&T lights 11 LTE areas, says spectrum gap may hike prices
updated 02:20 pm EST, Thu January 5, 2012
ATT warns it may use spectrum to push prices
AT&T's Business Solutions chief John Stankey at Citi's ongoing media and telecoms conference confirmed that the carrier had switched on LTE-based 4G access in 11 areas over the holidays. New York City's core, San Francisco, San Jose, Austin, Chapel Hill, Los Angeles, Oakland, Orlando, Phoenix, Raleigh, and San Diego all now have the more authentically 4G Internet access. The faster coverage should be finished by the end of 2013, Stankey said.
Alongside the expansion, the executive also repeated the carrier's frequent demands for more wireless spectrum and warned of the consequences should it get worse. Demand was exceeding capacity at the current rate, he said, and pricing could go up or change if AT&T didn't get enough more spectrum.
Stankey didn't say if he thought the buyout of Qualcomm spectrum or the T-Mobile roaming deal would alleviate the crunch and keep prices normative.
Regardless of additions, he claimed that the current habit of having streaming video represent 30 percent of mobile data traffic was "unsustainable" because of the expense. He insisted on a familiar though heavily disputed claim that the top five to ten percent of users make up a disproportionately huge amount of traffic and wanted this to change. Just moving to 4G wouldn't necessarily fix this.
Critics have usually disputed these arguments, noting that both wired and wireless providers often confuse the amount of bandwidth used in a month with the load on the network at any given moment. A heavy user may not be any more demanding than a casual user at the same point in time.
Stankey was direct and relatively unpolitical in explaining the reasons for dropping attempts to take over T-Mobile. Although AT&T thought the $39 billion acquisition would have been the quickest route to solving spectrum problems, it backed off wanting to avoid a protracted fight with the DOJ and FCC. Carriers work in long-term rollouts and consider uncertainty to be "death," he said, and it was better to start working on plans now than to not know whether or not it can go ahead.
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Jul 2006
Start thinking creatively
Someone with technical expertise should tell these executives to quit whining about spectrum and begin to shrink the size of the cells in their existing cells while adopting creative ideas such as nanocells in business environments and broadcasting (via digital TV stations) for popular data streams.
I knew this almost thirty years ago when I was doing frequency allocation for a cellular company (McCaw). There's only so much spectrum. They've got to start thinking creatively about how use it and reuse it better.