Speaking at the Deutsche Bank Leveraged Finance Conference, Carter said T-Mobile is well positioned to participate in the auction, and that he expects “robust” action from a variety of bidders, including potentially bidders from outside the wireless industry.
Advertisement
The statement issued on the cabinet decision had said sharing will be allowed “where both sharing entities are having administratively allotted spectrum” which means spectrum allocated without auction.
“All access spectrum, including traded spectrum, shall be sharable provided both licensees are having spectrum in the same band”, the guidelines issued by the Department of Telecom said.
The company will be disciplined, though, as “We don’t have the balance sheet” of AT&T and Verizon. “It’s still such a victory for us”. TMUS and C Spire Wireless had tried to put pressure on the FCC to increase the size of the reserve from 30 MHz to 40 MHz or at least half of the spectrum available in a given market. “I think someone else will come in, be it cable, be it tech”.
After the large spend in the AWS-3 auction, which raised over $45 billion, Carter said the competitive landscape for the incentive auction could be very different. Wireless carriers of all sizes plan to use this spectrum, which operates at frequencies of 600 MHz, to expand their mobile broadband networks.
A Dow Jones report this afternoon says the carrier will cut between $2 billion and $2.5 billion in costs in next 6 months, as well as cut an as-yet unknown number of jobs. “And we’re certainly not going to buy 30 MHz of spectrum at the auction”, he said. “And if it doesn’t happen, and we had to fall back to our primary strategy of getting a nationwide footprint with a few overlay, it’s still a huge win for us”.
At the event, Carter talked a bit about T-Mobile’s plan of attack for the auction, saying that T-Mo intends on buying 600MHz licenses that’ll cover the parts of the USA that aren’t already under its 700MHz network coverage. He said the carrier will continue to purchase 700 MHz A Block spectrum where it makes sense, and the price is right.
It is very likely that Sprint’s competitors such as T-Mobile US Inc. The carrier is looking to progressively upgrade of all of its existing sites to support all three of its spectrum bands while deploying new macro sites and tens of thousands of new small cells, in a move that could help to improve capacity as well as coverage.
Opting Out Gives T-Mobile An Edge: T-Mobile’s low-band spectrum position is relatively weak compared to the other major wireless carriers, which has been a big factor inhibiting its network quality. Signals on low-band spectrum like 700 MHz typically travel farther than those on mid-band AWS spectrum.
Advertisement
Carter also talked about T-Mobile being involved in merger and acquisition rumors, which seems to be an ongoing topic with T-Mo. “It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when and with who”, he said.
