Company / division: Sprint
Sprint and Windstream Sue FCC Over Telecom Price Deregulation (May 11, 2017)
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★ Sprint Reports Revenue Growth From Selling Old Phones, Announces Network Plans (May 3, 2017)
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T-Mobile, DISH and Comcast Among Big Winners in FCC Spectrum Auction (Apr 13, 2017)
The FCC recently held an auction of spectrum to be freed up by broadcasters and made available for wireless services, in the 600MHz band, which is well suited to long-distance and in-building coverage. T-Mobile was the only wireless carrier among the big winners, with the two largest carriers having cleaned up in the previous auction, and a cash-constrained Sprint sitting this one out too (AT&T did win licenses worth $900 million, but T-Mobile spent $8 billion). The other big bidders were DISH, which spent nearly as much as T-Mobile ($6.2 billion), and Comcast, which recently announced its wireless service based on Verizon’s network but could eventually launch its own network. Though T-Mobile has always crowed about how much spectrum it has per customer, that was always more of a reflection of its smaller number of customers rather than a massive spectrum trove, and it lacked low-band spectrum. It has now made big strides in solving that problem, and plans to put at least some of that spectrum to work right away (though much of it will be unavailable for several years while the broadcasters go through the process of vacating it, with much of that unavailable spectrum covering the densest markets). It’s also worth noting that no phones in the US today support the 600MHz band – that support is likely to come early next year with a new Qualcomm modem, so even if T-Mobile does put a third or so of its new spectrum to work this year, it won’t do anyone any good until then. So, if you’re a US wireless customer today, none of this makes any difference for now, and it’ll only make much of a difference a year or several down the line if you’re a T-Mobile customer (or in limited cases an AT&T customer). Or as and when Comcast and DISH decide to put that spectrum to use.
Sprint Ditches 50% Off Promotion and Focuses Exclusively on Unlimited (Apr 6, 2017)
There were reports earlier this week that Sprint was ditching its 50% off promotion, which has run since 2015, and it has now confirmed that news. Instead, Sprint is now focusing exclusively on unlimited services, ditching its tiered plans as well, and offering a $10 per line discount through June 2018 on new plans, making them in some cases 30-40% cheaper than equivalent Verizon or AT&T plans. Sprint’s 50% off plan became untenable when the two larger carriers reintroduced unlimited plans, because in practice under the promotion Sprint had seen most customers keep their spend at the same level as at their previous carrier while moving to a higher speed tier, which isn’t possible when switching from unlimited, meaning Sprint really would be charging 50% less for the same service. Instead, then, it’s competing on price in a less dramatic way going forward, but it’s worth remembering that price discounts in wireless have a direct correlation to perceptions of network quality. As such, these ongoing price discounts are a recognition that Sprint can’t be competitive unless it’s charging quite a bit less than competitors, because of poor perceptions of its network, perceptions that are unlikely to change at its current historically low network investment levels.
via Sprint
ISPs say your Web browsing and app usage history isn’t “sensitive” – Ars Technica (Mar 20, 2017)
CTIA, which is the industry association that represents the largest US wireless carriers, is arguing before the FCC that it shouldn’t be subjected to new rules on sharing data it collects on its users. The carriers have argued that Google and other online service providers aren’t subject to the same rules (those companies are regulated primarily by the FTC rather than the FCC) and so for consistency’s sake the carriers should be treated the same way. This is really about a technical definition of the word “sensitive” – clearly the kind of data being talked about here is indeed enormously sensitive, but the real question is how disclosure of that data is regulated. This matters because, for example, AT&T as a fiber broadband carrier in certain parts of the country has offered a service discount for customers who consent to tracking of their web browsing history and so on, something which it argues Google does all the time without explicitly asking for users’ permission to do. What the carriers are arguing here is that it should be allowed to continue to do this kind of thing without having to ask users to opt in first. The carriers look likely to win given the current hands-off policy stance of the FCC, which means more erosion of user privacy for users, but the proper approach would be for the FTC and FCC to work together to craft a set of consistent rules that would apply to all players that get access to similar data, rather than each regulating in a vacuum.
via Ars Technica
Verizon: Unlimited Data Plan Lures Sprint Customers – Fortune (Mar 8, 2017)
The reintroduction of unlimited plans by AT&T and Verizon in February makes this one of the least predictable periods in the recent history of the US wireless industry. The presence of unlimited plans at Sprint and T-Mobile and their absence at the two larger carriers has been a defining characteristic of the market for so long that the rapid turnaround is likely to lead to quite a bit of change in competitive dynamics and growth rates. Here’s the first evidence of that in the form of comments from Sprint’s CFO at an investor conference that churn will be stable rather than down this quarter as originally anticipated. T-Mobile hasn’t really commented yet, but has been introducing a set of promotions throughout the second half of the quarter in an attempt to keep its own growth going at previously expected rates. The impact in Q1 will actually be a little muted because the changes didn’t kick in until halfway through the quarter – it’s in Q2 and the rest of the year where we’ll see the biggest impact, though the exact scale and nature of that impact is still up in the air.
via Fortune
SoftBank eyes Sprint, T-Mobile deals – CNBC (Feb 17, 2017)
This isn’t a huge surprise – ever since Donald Trump won the US presidential election in November, the odds of a deal involving Sprint and T-Mobile have gone way up, because the incoming administration is likely to be much friendlier to consolidation. However, that’s no guarantee that a deal will get done – last time around SoftBank was the driving force behind the deal and very keen to control the resulting entity, whereas at this point it seems a lot less committed to its US wireless adventure. At the same time, T-Mobile USA is performing much better as an investment for Deutsche Telekom, making it less likely to sell. One option would be for Deutsche Telekom to take over Sprint, but it’s far from clear that it wants to (and it would certainly be awkward regardless given TMO CEO John Legere’s constant belittling of Sprint). Then, of course, there’s the question of whether a merger is a good idea. On the one hand, scale continues to be enormously important in the market, and Sprint and T-Mobile have a big disadvantage here, but on the other T-Mobile has been pretty well anyway by itself, while Sprint has been doing far less so (or growing by sacrificing margins and revenues). And it will be very hard to argue that a merger at this point would be good for competition, even with Republicans in charge at the FTC, DoJ, and FCC.
via CNBC
T-Mobile’s Network Cleans Up in Latest OpenSignal Report – T-Mobile (Feb 8, 2017)
T-Mobile likes OpenSignal, Speedtest.net, and other network testing services and apps which rely largely on reporting from users’ devices, as opposed to the industry’s traditional reliance on professional testing services like RootMetrics. And the reasons are obvious: T-Mobile consistently puts in a much better showing in these reports than it does on the ones used by the rest of the industry. On the basis of this OpenSignal report, it looks like T-Mobile is basically tied with Verizon for the network available in most places and at the highest speeds nationally. That totally flies in the face of the reporting done by the professionals (see this RootMetrics report for H1 2016), and also goes against official coverage numbers from the other carriers.T-Mobile reasonably make the claim that the OpenSignal results are from real people actually using its networks throughout the country, not from testers only going to certain places, but self-selecting surveys of any kind are always unreliable. The reality is that T-Mobile has caught up a ton over the last few years with the two big carriers, but it’s still behind in coverage and quality, and you’ll see far more people complaining about their T-Mobile coverage than AT&T and Verizon customers do. Perception also lags reality – T-Mobile still has a reputation for poor coverage and quality even as the true gap with the big guys narrows.
via T-Mobile
Sprint Continues Year-over-Year Growth in Net Operating Revenues and Postpaid Phone Net Additions with Third Quarter of Fiscal Year 2016 Results – Sprint (Jan 31, 2017)
Sprint reported its results this morning, the third of the four major US wireless carriers to do so (see AT&T and Verizon comments – T-Mobile reports on Valentine’s Day). Sprint is going through something of a renaissance lately, though only in relative terms. It’s still the smallest and least profitable of the big four, but has made lots of progress improving churn and therefore improving its customer growth numbers. The focus for both T-Mobile and Sprint is postpaid phone growth, and they’ve led the market there lately, while AT&T grows strongly in prepaid and things like connected cars, and Verizon tries to hold onto the customers it has without sacrificing margins too much through price wars. This is a fiercely competitive market, and one with relatively little growth in traditional phones. Sprint has done well to recover here lately, but has also begun to grow more strongly in connected devices (cars, machine-to-machine, and so on), while its prepaid business is falling apart (it removed over a million subscribers from its rolls in Q4 due to a change in churn standards, on top of the hundreds of thousands it reported as official prepaid subscriber losses). There’s a long way to go still for Sprint to turn itself around, not least on its network performance, where it continues to argue that it can produce the best network while spending far less on network capex than any of its competitors.
via Sprint
Sprint Acquires 33 Percent of TIDAL and Creates Game-Changing Partnership – Sprint Newsroom (Jan 23, 2017)
The one thing missing from this Sprint/Tidal press release? Subscriber numbers for Tidal, which have been the source of recent controversy. As I said in commenting on that news, Tidal may have a tough time surviving if its subscriber numbers are as bad as they seem, and I’m guessing this Sprint investment is designed to stabilize things a bit. Partnerships between streaming services and wireless carriers are old hat – Spotify has lots of these in Europe, and they’ve helped its paid subscriber numbers enormously, while we’ve seen several others here in the US too. From a Sprint perspective, this can be seen as a response to T-Mobile’s Music Unlimited program, which offers free music streaming from every major music service, though Tidal is a much more niche approach, which means it’ll likely have limited benefit unless Sprint heavily subsidizes the service for its subscribers.
via Sprint Acquires 33 Percent of TIDAL and Creates Game-Changing Partnership | Sprint Newsroom