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The 700 MHz Auction is (Finally) Almost Over plus Lots of Other News
We are close to finally seeing the back of that pesky 700 MHz auction plus there are other important news in the WiMAX world.
First off the 700 MHz auction has surpassed round 132 and is closing in (slowly and seemingly endlessly) on a $20 billion ($19.6) price tag. I actually think the auction won't quite reach the $20 billion dollar number as the last 25 bids only brought in $644,000. Fierce Wireless is reporting that there are 1,089 licenses that have already won bids. It looks like, per FW, that the areas still seeing play are E-blocks in Maryland, Delaware, Louisiana, Virginia and Georgia. Plus there are some A-blocks seeing bids in North Dakota, Kentucky, Georgia and South Carolina. Man I am ready for this one to be over.
The Wall Street Journal is saying that Sprint should never have bought Nextel. I suppose that one is hard to argue with. The WSJ's contention is that having now written down $30 billion in relation to Nextel that this amount is virtually the market cap that Nextel held before the merger. Each company had a market cap of around $33 billion before the merger. The combined company value now is about $25 billion. With Sprint forecasting a loss of an additional 1.2 million postpaid subscribers in the coming first quarter the bleeding has by no means stopped. This is more subs than it lost in all of 2007.
My take on this is that this is a classic clash of corporate cultures, where both sides pointed fingers and did little to make the merger work. Far better probably if one or the other had just overwhelmed the other. Will Sprint survive and will its WiMAX initiative. I think so, but Sprint has some serious heavy lifting ahead of it.
Meanwhile on a happier note the cellular-news is reporting that the WiMAX equipment market grew 46 percent last year. It is always nice to hear good news and Infonetics Research reported that WiMAX equipment sales topped out just under $800 million in 2007. The WiMAX footprint now stands at 80 countries. Infonetics forecasts the 2011 market at $7.7 billion.
And Telecommunications magazine reports on the potential growth of the Internet to Zetabyte levels by 2015. I thought this very interesting as the article seemed to indicate that fiber initiatives would have strong traction. I can't disagree with that as my recent research for Maravedis on US WiMAX Opportunities and Challenges indicates that carriers are expecting customers to demand as much as 100 Mbps services in the next 5 years. Still this article is intricate and uses a lot of economics theory to support its contention.
And all of this coming on top of a new record by Alcatel-Lucent in the transmission of data across fiber optics. Alcatel-Lucent has succeeded in performing a 1500+ mile fiber transmission at 16.4 Terabits per second. All of this is in support of the goal of achieving 100 Gbps transmission channels. Folks want bandwidth and folks, the bandwidth is coming.
Tim Sanders,
www.TheFinalMile.net
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