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Carriers Roundup: AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile
Thursday, November 20, 2008 | No comments
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The wireless race is heating up: AT&T acquired two companies in a week earlier this month, Verizon got the green light for its Alltel acquisition and T-Mobile launched the Android phone with Google. Let’s take a look at the recent performances of the major wireless carriers, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile.
On October 22, AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T), the leading carrier with annual revenue of $119 billion, reported third quarter results that were below analyst expectations. Revenue was up 4% to $31.3 billion driven by the growth in wireless revenues and wireline IP data revenues. Net income was $3.2 billion or $0.55 per share, up from $3.1 billion or $0.50 per share in Q307. Adjusted EPS was $0.67 versus the $0.71 consensus.
I was about to say that AT&T is the largest but someone beat me to it.
Also many people on this board are talking to US centric and not thinking about the big picture.
Personally I dont think it makes financial sense for Apple to make a Verizon version. The cost to make two platforms is fairly high, its not as bad for other companies that make several cell phones, but for Apple its currently just one phone and thats a lot of R&D and production costs to make the CDMA version. (not to mention what everyone else stated about Verizon crippling everyone phone on its network).
Think of it globally.
By the end of 2007 GSM based phones held about 87% of the market globally.
As much as some people may not like AT&T here, I think Apple made a better decision going the GSM route as it opened up a MUCH larger audience then it would have had going CDMA.
That being said there are talks that Verizon may be headed GSM themselves in the future or at least run dual networks which would open the door for the iphone.
The hardware changes to a phone to work on CDMA that was built for GSM is very little. They make a special SIM card that makes it CDMA enabled, and then the radio will just require a firmware update.
look at the razrs as example...
As for Verizon bashing the iPhone, i am convinced sprint and verizon held a conference to come up with as many things they could think of to bash the iphone about, or make up about the iphone.
I myself use sprint, and i have an iPod touch. I have a sprint broadband card that i put in my cradle point mobile braodband router that i plug into the cigarette lighter in my car.... this eliminates all my needs for at&t. (I used to work for at&t u-verse, i know all their problems, such as they don't even know who their customers are, and they can't port numbers from their own customers etc..)
When I went to the sprint store to get my phone fixed yesterday, I was talking about how i wished the iPhone was carried by sprint. As soon as the word iPhone left my lips, the guy had about 500 knocks on it. "well you'd have to get the 16 gig iphone as by the time you got done installing all those apps, you'd be out of space" "the iphone you can't even copy and paste on" "you can't replace the battery ever on the iPhone" "we have applications on the instinct" and he even said "the iphone isn't windows compatible so you won't be able to do anything like you can on a windows mobile phone"
I quickly defended the iphone with: "i have an ipod touch, its the same thing as the iPhone without the cellular phone components. Firstly the average app is about 3-5 mbs, so my 8 gig ipod touch if chosed to could hold many thousands of apps. Secondly YOUR WINDOWS MOBILE PHONE would never work with mobile me. Also apple doesn't use garbage batteries so the battery life-span is really good, and by the time the battery would need to be replaced contract would be over and a better iphone will be out anyways. As for copying and pasting, thats not a big deal for me, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to add it. Also you can't mod your instinct like an iphone can be modded.
Then he started to trash talk the camera, i then told him how a phone is made for doing its functions and a camera is meant for taking pictures, but if you can put a descent camera on a phone then go for it. I don't see any camera companies attempt to put phones in their cameras. I also told him that a camera is the least of my needs when it comes to my phone purchase and pointed out how I don't even have a camera on my current phone.
The blackberry touch is a piece imo, having to push down on the touchpad in order to type is ridiculous. RIM in general is going to die, just wait for apple to horizontally integrate and come out with different levels of iphones. I want a rugged iphone with push to talk lol.
Once verizon gets a deal with apple, they'll have to come up with some new iphone "well we weren't ready to get an unproven technology, but now that apple has proven themselves and improved upon their failures in the past, we are ready to accept the iphone into our network"
The instinct is garbage, even though samsung makes the iphone practically. the storm blows too.
First provider to provide a 4G network is sprint, its in the baltimore washington region. 4G wimax has a theoretical max through put of 100mbits per second. In comparison EV-DO rev A only has a theoretical throughput of 7mbps... so that means realistic speeds of wimax 4G could be around 10-15 mbps. I'd imagine wimax deployment will be mainly in urban and some suburban areas as it has range limits and requires more towers per square mile than GSM GPRS, or CDMA ev-do rev a. We are pretty much reaching the limits of realistic speeds in cellular networks with the given available spectrum. After february 2009, when the TVs switch over to digital, we'll have a ton of free spectrum, and then we'd be able to allocate wider channel bands and therefore more bandwidth.
As for Verizon bashing the iPhone, i am convinced sprint and verizon held a conference to come up with as many things they could think of to bash the iphone about, or make up about the iphone.
I hope you do realize that Verizon was the first carrier Apple worked with on the iPhone. After about a year or so of haggling about contracts, pricing, marketing and what not, Verizon decided back out of the deal and NOT bow down to Apple's strict demands and gave way to AT&T to be the exclusive provider of the iPhone.
Verizon is just bitter because of the success the iPhone is and that their competition is reaping all the rewards.
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"MiPhone's marketing manager Noel Esty, told Wednesday Business the Jamaican company would have to finalize the build-out of its GSM network prior to launching the service, but said it would happen before school is back in session in September."
