Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We hope you enjoy it!
And without further ado:
Of course … Spark! What else would Sprint name its plan to roll out high-speed wireless broadband services to customers using the deep spectrum pool it gained control of for that cool $5 billion it paid to Clearwire. (Thanks Dish!)
While Sprint was too modest to say so, the main point of Spark is to deflect all of this LTE marketing talk away from the breadth of coverage and to the important topic of “mine is faster than yours.”
In announcing the Spark program this week, Sprint made a point to point out the speeds the offering will provide to consumers, including claims of 1 gigabits per second speeds it witnessed in a lab environment. Of course, few of us live in a lab environment where we would be the only person tapping into the Spark service, so … your mileage may vary.
For now we will also overlook the issues Sprint is likely to face with its Spark plans when customers roam outside of the limited coverage provided by the 2.5 GHz spectrum band’s limited propagation characteristics and fall back to the 5 Mbps or so they will see when falling back to the speeds provided by the base 800 MHz and 1.9 GHz spectrum. Sure, 5 Mbps is still pretty fast, but when you are out promoting speeds in excess of 50 Mbps, customers being limited to speeds one-tenth of that magic number in most locations will surely dim that spark.
Despite the potential short falls, I am all about this Spark program for several reasons. First, it’s just good to see Sprint back out there making outlandish claims. It sort of takes me back to the days when Sprint was all about “4G” this and “4G” that with its WiMAX network, which I think we can all agree might have been “4G” in theory, but well from “4G” in practice.
(Small anecdote on Sprint’s past “4G” claims. Over a two-year period where I carried a “4G” device all around this country, I could count the number of times I actually had “4G” service – even in markets where “4G” was launched – on three fingers. Yay marketing!)
Also, a mentioned earlier, I can now only hope that something as varying as “speed” now becomes the marketing buzzword to sweep the wireless space. I think we have all seen the “map” ads currently used by carriers to tout their LTE coverage, which are great if you are a map nerd. (Which I am, but have found out through conversations with many that I am in the minority.) But, speed! Now that is something everyone can get behind. Who doesn’t like to speed?
And there is nothing better than speed claims that will have no basis in reality. Isn’t that what advertising is all about anyway? Setting expectations for life that can never actually be attained? This Spark thing seems ideally positioned to set such expectations.
OK, enough of that.
Thanks for checking out this week’s Worst of the Week column. And now for some extras:
–The future-makers over at SK Telecom recently began selling a robot with a smartphone for a brain. (Go ahead and let that sink in for a minute.)
The creature, dubbed Atti, which SK Telecom said is Korean for “close friend” or “buddy,” is as the carrier describes it “a cute, friendly-looking robot.” Atti was unveiled at “Robot World 2013,” which I am pretty sure was the same event where Skynet was unveiled before being deployed by the U.S. military in 1997.
Anyways, SK Telecom said Atti was designed to “enhance children’s multiple intelligence through interactive learning features and well-made educational contents,” or basically to teach children to be smarter than their parents by the age of four. Not that there is anything wrong with robots teaching our youth to be smarter than us, but I say we leave robot teaching to a topic they “know” more about: dancing!
–Speaking to analysts at an event this week in New York City, Verizon Communications executives expressed interest in participating in upcoming spectrum auctions if as one analyst noted in a research note those licenses were “available at the right price.”
The right price?!? For Verizon!?!
Isn’t this a company that is in the process of acquiring a 45% stake in Verizon Wireless for $130 billion? $130 billion! That is more money than I think there actually is. This is also the company that throws tens of billions of dollars at just about any spectrum auction it comes across, or for that matter anytime there is the word “spectrum” used to describe something on EBay.
And, now Verizon is all, “we might be interested in buying the resource that we need to survive and that by buying will keep our competitors from getting their grimy little hands on and thus crippling their ability to compete, but only if we can get it at a fair price.”
I would hate to know what a “fair” price is for Verizon.
–Finally, the Federal Aviation Administration this week announced it would relax rules for the use of electronics devices on aircraft. The new rules will allow for the use of “portable electronic devices” during “all phases” of a flight.
Details of the rules will basically allow passengers to keep their devices “on,” though they will have to be in “flight” mode during take off and landing, or basically they way things are now in the real world. Passengers will also be able to turn on all device functionality while in flight, though zooming 30,000 feet above a cell site at 500 miles per hour will likely result in sub-par cellular service.
One caveat to the rules is that passengers will not be allowed to make “voice” calls while on the plane in a move that I assume is meant to prevent people from yelling into their phones: “Guess where I am calling you from?”
(Of course, not sure why there is a no-calling rule now when there did not seem to be any issue with calls on planes when wired phones were embedded in the backs of seats.)
Lucky for those tasked with enforcing this condition, no one actually talks on their phone anymore.
I welcome your comments. Please send me an e-mail at dmeyer@rcrwireless.com.
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