“Sprint has the spectrum it needs to deploy its network architecture of the future”, Claure said.
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Sprint on Sunday said that its airwaves at present are sufficient enough to provide its current and future customers great network coverage. The bulk of Sprint’s airwaves are high-frequency, which don’t travel well through buildings but are good for expanding network capacity and carrying more traffic.
Over the weekend, Sprint announced that it would not participate in the highly anticipated spectrum auction next year. The agency still managed to rake in record-breaking revenue in 2008, the last time TV broadcast spectrum was auctioned off. An auction of a separate range of spectrum, which ended in January, raised $45 billion. It means that Sprint will have to either rely on its 800-MHz spectrum, of which it owns just 2×5 MHz, or deploy more cell sites running at 1900 MHz or 2.5 GHz in order to provide long-range coverage.
A spokesman for Sprint said that the carrier is only prioritizing to spend its financial resources for the near-term, as participating in the auction will not lead to any benefits to subscribers until by the year 2020 at the earliest. It’s created to grant access to a special type of radio waves, or spectrum, that can carry cellphone calls and mobile data across long distances and through thick urban walls.
Moody’s, in its report, highlighted Sprint’s need to balance its airwaves holdings so it can compete effectively with rivals across low-, mid- and high-frequency signals. To prevent the big two carriers from dominating, the FCC is reserving up to 30MHz in each geographic area for carriers that don’t have significant amounts of low-band spectrum in the region. In August, Sprint lost its position as the third largest carrier to T-Mobile.
Wireless carriers of all sizes plan to use this spectrum, which operates at frequencies of 600 MHz, to expand their mobile broadband networks.
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The 2016 scheduled Spectrum auction under the aegis of FCC is created to allow content broadcasters who have been saddled with excess spectrum inventory to off load the same to the spectrum starved telecommunications sector players in the mobility space. The wireless networks are expected to shell out even more money for more spectrum at the beginning of next year. It’s also the reason why Sprint’s absence from the upcoming auction is notable. Company chief executive Marcelo Claure told Reuters last week that Sprint would be “stronger and more formidable” if it merged with a cable company.
