WHY VERIZON’S TOWER SALE WILL SET THE MARKET Verizon has hired an investment bank to assist it with the possible sale of its tower assets. Macquarie Securities analyst Kevin Smithen estimates that there are 12,500 towers that might be part of the offering. We suspect that the actual number will be smaller than that but […]
Crown Castle (CCI) is the largest of the Big Three U.S. tower companies, and currently owns 40K towers nationwide (followed by American Tower with ~28K and SBA with 15K). In September 2012, CCI bought 7,200 cell towers from T-Mobile, and in October 2013 it purchased 9,700 from AT&T. CCI spokesperson says the company is now […]
Are U.S. carriers holding out on Wi-Fi offloading until after next year’s spectrum auction? WiFi offloading is when carriers use WiFi hotspots as an accessory to support the demand placed on cellular networks. Internationally, top-tier carriers are relying heavily on Wi-Fi hotspots to augment skyrocketing mobile device usage, especially in Asia, due to limited spectrum […]
Open Internet Rights Group Public Knowledge plans to file net neutrality complaints against Verizon and possibly other Big 4 wireless carriers over traffic throttling. Public Knowledge attests that the carriers are violating the FCC’s 2010 transparency requirements for net neutrality.
Verizon’s latest ploy to move its customers away from unlimited data plans to a pay-per-gigabite model is under criticism by FCC Chairman Wheeler. Verizon stated that, it order to optimize its network, it would need to throttle data (slow it down) to the 5% of its customer base that uses the most. Wheeler questioned Verizon […]
Spectrum sharing is a new trend in wireless telecom deployment and makes sense for many reasons: spectrum is rare and expensive, so sharing is profitable, but it’s also efficient and provides (via carrier aggregation) a faster, less congested connection for subscribers. Verizon, Ericsson and Qualcomm recently filed applications to test sharing of a large piece […]
Wireless network infrastructure management, from day to day tower maintenance and technology upgrades, to managed IT and cloud based services is offered by companies like Ericsson and Cisco. Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that the nation’s top two wireless carriers AT&T and Verizon were discussing managed services with Ericsson (which has been engaged in a […]
In recent months, there have been a number of merger rumors and announcements between various wired and wireless telecom companies. AT&T announced its proposed acquisition of DirecTV, while Comcast and Time Warner announced their merger. Sprint and T-Mobile have been seen dancing together since the beginning of the year, and their union is currently at […]
Which carrier pays the most for their leases on a general basis? To answer this question, Steel in the Air turned to our cell site lease database with more than 8,000 records of cell site lease information. We found every instance in the database where a carrier was a party to the lease and where […]
Clearwire Corporation (NASDAQ CLWR) is a leading provider of fourth generation, or 4G, wireless broadband services. Clearwire owns the rights to radio frequency spectrum in the 2.5 GHz range and provides service primarily using the 4G mobile WiMAX standard. According to a study by the FCC and Citibank, Clearwire has over 130MHz of spectrum.