Still no details of Sprint’s ‘Next Generation Network’ initiative, which is expected to favor small cells
Speaking this week at the Converge Tech Conference in Hong Kong, SoftBank President Nikesh Arora said the Japanese service provider is committed to making Sprint, its U.S. subsidiary, a success.
SoftBank bought 80% of Sprint in 2013 for more than $20 billion. Sprint is struggling in the U.S. domestic carrier race having recently lost the No. 3 carrier spot to up and coming T-Mobile US, which is also owned by a foreign interest, Germany’s Deutsche Telekom.
According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Arora said, “telecom business is a long-term business. … It takes a while to shift the direction in the industry. It just requires capital to transform the products.”
Back in May, Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure, hired in 2013 by SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, traveled to Japan to meet with SoftBank executives about as-yet unannounced plans for Sprint to improve its network quality. At the time, Claure took to Twitter to note that he was on the way to headquarters “to visit my big boss and finalize our new network plan.”
Telecom industry watchers expect Sprint’s network improvement plan to heavily favor small cells as a way of adding coverage and capacity, particularly in dense metropolitan network scenarios.
Claure potentially gave a preview of the broader strategy based on a meeting he had in June with Miami Mayor Carlos Gimenez. The Miami Herald reported that Claure and Gimenez discussed a potential expansion of Sprint’s Miami-area network. Specifically, the paper reported that Claure wanted to speed up the permitting process giving Sprint access to government-owned buildings for small cell deployments.
The $75 million Sprint plan would add 800 new small cells in Miami-Dade County in the next 18 months along with the addition of 17 new stores in the area. Miami is apparently one of the rollout cities for Sprint’s as-yet vague “Next Generation Network” drive.
SoftBank, in addition to its U.S. foothold with Sprint, has been pursuing other foreign investment opportunities, a subject Arora also discussed at the Converge event. In China, SoftBank is the largest shareholder of Jack Ma’s Alibaba, and in India SoftBank has invested in e-commerce platform Jasper InfoTech, among other tech/telecom ventures.
“China has its own vibrant ecosystem,” Arora said of startup companies, according to The Wall Street Journal. “You don’t have to be in Silicon Valley.”
