ATLANTA – One year after Sprint Chairman Masayoshi Son electrified the Competitive Carriers Association stage in San Antonio with bold partnership opportunities for rural and regional mobile carriers, the organization hosted a luncheon discussion to provide a progress report.
The discussion, led by MobileNation CEO Terry Addington, included representatives from a pair of Son’s companies in Sprint and Brightstar, as well as a pair of rural operators and CCA. The consensus? While challenges remain, progress has indeed been made in terms of broadening LTE roaming support and device availability.
For those who have forgotten, Son said he wanted to partner with rural carriers in order to expand LTE services across the country and provide a more compelling fight against larger rivals. That included building upon CCA’s Data Services Hub as a clearinghouse for reciprocal roaming agreements with Sprint, as well as Sprint’s push to include the 700 MHz Band Class 12 support in its devices.
Panel members for the most part noted the LTE roaming aspects of the deal were running smoothly, highlighted by Sprint’s previously announced roaming deals with 27 rural operators. Ryan Sullivan, VP of product engineering and development at Sprint, noted the deals were a boon for the carrier’s ongoing battle against its larger rivals Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility, both of which count more than 300 million potential customers covered with their respective LTE networks.
More compelling for the rural operators was the Band Class 12 support Sprint had pledged for its device portfolio, which will allow a broader base of devices that will allow many carriers to offer compelling devices compatible with their 700 MHz spectrum assets. That Band Class was initially at the center of a controversy with AT&T, which had left out the lower-700 MHz A-Block licenses acquired by a numer of rural operators in its Band Class 17 proposal. That initiative was eventually settled, with AT&T stating plans to support the A-Block in its devices.
Addington explained that Sprint’s support of Band Class 12 was more significant as the carrier lacks any 700 MHz spectrum licenses, thus showing the carrier’s support for its roaming partners. That support could have rightfully been called into question considering the amount of upheaval around Sprint since Son’s keynote address last year. That included Son’s planned acquisition of T-Mobile US scuttled by negative regulatory comments and the eventual firing of long-time Sprint CEO Dan Hesse in favor of former Brightstar CEO Marcelo Claure.
Aaron Gillespie, director of operations for Kansas-based Nex-Tech Wireless, noted that while the LTE roaming agreement was significant in that rural customers demand the ability to access LTE services wherever they roam, the device support was perhaps more important for the carrier. Gillespie explained that the device hub provided the opportunity to have more certainty in device and business planning because of greater certainty on availability and pricing. In fact, he said he is looking forward to an expansion of the deal to at some point include tablet devices and mobile hot spots.
While the LTE roaming deals often built upon previous 3G roaming agreements and thus were seen as being somewhat standard, nearly all panel members talked about the difficulty inherent in expanding device availability. Sullivan explained that hardware interoperability was an issue that required a significant amount of time to work through, but that the bigger remaining challenges are on the software and network operations side in getting that device to be recognized as a home device on a carrier’s network and not a roaming device.
“Roaming requirements are different than a device working as a home network device,” Sullivan said, adding it comes down to provisioning and activation on the network. “We have a unique way of doing this, so making this work with all carriers was the challenge.”
The device hub is still somewhat limited in its selection because of these challenges, with Sprint looking to have up to 12 Android-powered smartphones available through the program by the end of the year. Nathan Robson, senior director of marketing at Ntelos, added that he hoped that support would work its way through a broader segment of device categories, including midtier, ruggedized and potentially mobile hot spots.
While that expanded support could take some time, Sullivan looked to assuage fears about Sprint’s ongoing support of the program noting that the carrier has put into place more assets since the carrier’s management change.
“We stand to gain as much as everyone else in this room,” Sullivan said. “[Son] in his speech said we need to look out for the new duopoly. Sprint is a challenger to those two and that is not something that is going to change overnight so we need partnerships to expand our footprint to match the larger carriers.”
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