LAS VEGAS-Verizon Wireless is still mulling over which spectrum auction to participate in, company officials said at CTIA, and has not yet made a final decision over whether to go after Advanced Wireless Services spectrum in the auction this summer or bide its time and wait for the 700 MHz spectrum expected to be available in 2009.
“We will do one or the other; it’s very unlikely that we will do both,” said Denny Strigl, chief executive officer of Verizon Wireless. He added that the company feels it is in a good spectrum position until about the end of this decade. In terms of its network, Verizon made clear that CDMA 2000 1x EV-DO Revision A is on its to-do list.
“As soon as it’s available, we’ll start putting it in,” said Chief Technology Officer Dick Lynch. However, Strigl tempered that by adding that there is “an awful lot of hype” about Rev. A in the industry right now; Sprint Nextel Corp. recently announced that it plans to upgrade its network to make Rev A. widely available by 2008, and Qualcomm Inc. put out a news release outlining its Rev. B timetable.
Strigl said that Verizon will continue to push its Vcast music service and that the company is pleased with how it has done selling over-the-air music downloads. Verizon Wireless said that its music service had reached the 1-million download mark. However, Strigl noted the majority of his company’s revenue, close to 90 percent, comes from voice.
Asked about whether Verizon Wireless would disable the ability to stream video on its devices via services such as Slingbox Mobile, Lynch said that the company doesn’t “have any intention of doing that today.” However, the use of the services violates customer terms of service agreements, and Lynch added that streaming video eats up a large amount of network capacity. Lynch said that while such services may work well today because carriers’ wireless networks are lightly loaded with data users, Verizon Wireless eventually will have to change its pricing structure, possibly creating tiers of service that factor in the amount of usage.
