“The cable operators are a totally new entrant coast to coast. That has never happened in the wireless business before,” says Townsend. “In the past, people have been able to get regions—the East Coast, the West Coast —but no one has ever been able to cobble together an entire nationwide network right out of the box.”
It’s still unclear, however, just how this cable/Sprint Nextel partnership will use its spectrum. “There’s a huge difference between what you could hypothesize that the cable companies could do—what options are available to them—and what is realistically achievable for these guys to do,” comments Amoroso. “If cable companies are going to launch themselves as a wireless carrier, they need to have a strong, enormously compelling value proposition to be successful. What is that radically compelling proposition that’s going to launch a cable company to really successfully compete with wireless? It has to be something beyond what we now have in wireless.
Amoroso continued, “The cable company’s partnership with Sprint and Sprint’s WiMax investment is not accidental. I definitely think there’s some finagling going on there in terms of someone being able to bring cable to the masses wirelessly, although that’s very far in the future, five to six years.”
“I think you will see a lot more innovation in terms of advanced services,” adds Arun Bhikshesvaran, vice president/general manager, strategy and market development for Ericsson in North America. “The pace at which they will do it, we will have to just wait and see. Obviously wireless is a new area for them, it’s not an incremental act of the business, it’s a new capability. So I think they will take a
little bit more time in deciding and formulating the product and making sure that the experience is done right from an end user’s perspective.”
Improved experiences for consumers
No matter which carriers consumers choose, they can expect enhancements to their service within the next few years as carriers improve or build new networks to make use of the additional spectrum.
“You’re going to see coverage and quality of voice service continue to get better, because all the national carriers as well as some regional carriers improved their overall spectrum footprint. They now have more bandwidth to enable more voice traffic to go over their network, especially in highly congested places like NYC
and other metro urban areas,” says Amoroso.
“The wireless or mobile Internet experience that was perhaps over-hyped at the turn of the millennium is happening now,” adds Plummer. “We’re really seeing a true, rich, full Internet experience in the palm of your hand.”
