At a press conference today, T-Mobile USA said it plans to spend $2.66 billion over the next three years on a UMTS/HSDPA network, building out its AWS auction winnings.
T-Mobile USA CEO Robert Dotson said they want to mobilize services and applications that consumers are actually using…but not Qualcomm’s MediaFlo, the live television service for cellphones, the top company executive stressed.
T-Mobile USA doubled its spectrum in the top 100 markets, spending some $4.2 billion at the FCC’s AWS auction last month.
Based in Bellevue, Washington, T-Mobile USA paid some $4.1 Billion for 120 licenses covering the continental United States, Hawaii, Puerto Rico/U.S. Virgin Islands, Alaska and major markets including New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago. The network upgrade is expected to roll out in mid-2007, in stages.
Their GSM/GPRS/EDGE network in the United States (including roaming and other agreements) reach more than 275 million people. In addition, T-Mobile provides Wi-Fi access at more than 7,800 public locations throughout the country.
According to market researchers there are a total of 219.4 million U.S. wireless subscribers with penetration at approximately 74% and likely to exceed 78% by the end of the year.
Cingular, the largest cellular company in the United States, has (57.3 million customers), Verizon (54.8 million subs), Sprint/Nextel (51.7 million subs) and T-Mobile USA (23.3 million subs).
T-Mobile USA is the last of the four national operators in the United States to launch a 3G network, but Dotson sees it as an advantage. That’s because prices of UMTS equipment have come down and because they can leverage the buying power for 101 million subscribers with T-Mobile International.
Even the $4.2 billion costs for AWS frequencies, the cost per MHz per person of population (POP) were relatively inexpensive at $.63, considerably lower than in most of the prior frequency auctions in the United States.
T-Mobile USA has about 23.3 million subscribers, but the carrier wants to increase that by 50 percent by 2015. Deutsche Telekom CEO Kai-Uwe Ricke said at the news conference that he expects T-Mobile USA will become the largest single company in the organization. Deutsche Telekom bought T-Mobile USA for $35 billion in 2001 and the carrier has already become the largest source of wireless revenue.
Dotson declined to say which vendors have been chosen to provide the UMTS equipment, but Merrill Lynch said in a research note that it expects the leading base station providers will be Ericsson and Nokia-Siemens, with Tellabs and Alcatel providing backhaul solutions.
Dotson said the carrier sees a great opportunity to boost its numbers through personalization features such as linking to communities like MySpace and YouTube. Dotson said 30 percent of the subscribers who use T-Mobile USA’s Sidekick devices use them to access MySpace content. But not MediaFLO – a proprietary system developed by Qualcomm. Whether Crown Castle’s DVB-H (Modeo) was still on the table is uncertain.
EV-DO Forums compares service from Sprint/Verizon EVDO and Cingular HSDPA.
