Posted by: AT&T Blog Team on February 15, 2012 at 12:03 pm
The following statement may be attributed to Bob Quinn, AT&T Senior Vice President of Federal Regulatory and Chief Privacy Officer:
“While we will need to review the FCC’s order, we are pleased that the Commission was willing to work with us to focus on rules that give the agency visibility into outages that affect 911 service for Voice over IP subscribers. We look forward to continuing to work with the FCC to ensure that its regulations are narrowly tailored to achieve their stated goal of protecting consumers.”
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Posted by: Joan Marsh on February 9, 2012 at 12:47 pm
Yesterday, Kevin Fitchard over at GigaOm wrote a blog post on my Super Bowl post, in which I highlight some spectrum lessons from the big game. While he acknowledges that we need more spectrum in a tweet, I want to focus on a couple of points in his blog post with which I disagree. Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading his take, and appreciate his time.
First, he concludes that it’s “strange” for AT&T to use a one-off event like the Super Bowl to make a point about the need for more spectrum, asserting that this is exactly the type of scenario where more spectrum wouldn’t help. That’s not correct. As I note in my blog, one of the core network enhancements AT&T made to prepare for the Super Bowl was to add more UMTS carriers to its existing cell tower infrastructure. You can only add additional carriers if you have spectrum free to support them (a minimum of 10 MHz for a UMTS carrier). In many areas, AT&T is close to exhausting spectrum available to add additional carriers and thus will no longer have that tool available to it to increase local capacity.
Setting that aside, there’s a broader point that I was trying to make. Customer usage at a big one-time event is simply a window into the average data usage profile of tomorrow. Five years ago, carriers did not worry about supporting massive video uploads at Super Bowl-like events because video (upload and download) simply wasn’t part of the customer wireless experience. That has now dramatically changed and the gigabytes being driven in Lucas Oil Stadium demonstrate that. In its most recent traffic study, Ericcson predicted that by 2016 the number of high-traffic smartphones will increase more than 5 times and generated traffic will grow around 12 times. Tablet subscriptions will grow 10 times and associated generated traffic will increase about 40 times. Those increases will be driven predominantly by video. The Super Bowl numbers simply give us a glimpse into that video-centric wireless broadband future.
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Posted by: Bob Quinn on February 8, 2012 at 4:23 pm
Sometimes a blog just writes itself. Other times, the beneficiaries of the FCC’s so-called “competition policies” write your blog for you. And that is the situation I found myself in when I happened upon the transcript from this morning’s Sprint 4Q2011 Earnings Call. To bring you back up to speed if you’re not a regular reader of our Public Policy Blog, when last we met, I was suggesting (ok, saying) that the FCC has enacted “Roaming” policies over the last two years that have actually cost the American economy much needed network infrastructure investment and the jobs associated with that investment. At the time, I was commenting on Sprint’s recently announced decision to “roam” at regulated rates in large portions of Kansas and Oklahoma (where it owns spectrum) rather than make the investments necessary to replace its network infrastructure in those areas.
While those comments were met by denials and accusations that AT&T was anti-consumer, Sprint’s CEO today, speaking to analysts confirmed our assessment of those business decisions and actually quantified exactly how many billions of dollars that Sprint avoided investing by “trading off” roaming for capital investment and job creation.
To preempt any criticisms that Mr. Hesse’s comments are being taken out of context, here is the entire section in which these remarks were made:
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