Spectrum ‘Exhaust’ Varies Across Cell Sites, Markets, Sprint CTO Says
SAN FRANCISCO -- Sprint’s perspective on spectrum “exhaust” centers on delivering a good user experience to its customers, Chief Technology Officer Stephen Bye said during a GigaOm conference Thursday. “One of the challenges is just how one defines exhaust,” Bye said. “If I have one cell site that may be, under certain load conditions, very congested, one might argue I have exhausted spectrum on that site,” he said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean I have exhausted spectrum across an entire market,” or nationally, he said.
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"Could we do with more spectrum? Absolutely. We could also do with more crude oil,” Bye said. Companies need to make the best of what they have to work with, he said. Furthermore, projections about growing data usage typically don’t account for the amount of spectrum that’s available to be used or the capital expenses required to build wireless networks, Bye said.
Smaller cells are one way to increase efficiency in the network, but adding cell sites can be difficult, Bye said. The strategy is not a “be all, end all” solution, he said. “The challenge is physical deployment,” he said. “People don’t like to see a new tower next to their home or office.”
A lack of competition in the wireless backhaul business is another challenge to deploying more small cells, Bye said. Sprint has been encouraging startups to get into the business of providing high-speed wireless backhaul, he said. “We would like to see far more competition in the backhaul, which is really critical when you start talking about small cells,” he said. Still, Sprint expects small cell deployments to have a material benefit to the company -- otherwise it wouldn’t be pursuing the strategy, he said.
Sprint is committed to marketing its mobile broadband product in an “unlimited” pricing model, Bye said. “The challenge is as a company, we look at that and say how do we continue to preserve that value proposition?” The plan is to drive down the cost so that Sprint can continue to offer unlimited plans “at a price point that is attractive to customers,” even as usage increases, he said. Sprint hopes the plans are a major point of differentiation from other carriers as it is the only carrier offering unlimited LTE service on the new iPhone, he said. (See separate report in this issue.).
When asked, Bye wouldn’t share any details of Sprint’s discussions with Apple over accommodating Sprint’s LTE service, which uses some 800 MHz spectrum. “We're pleased that we have LTE and Apple has been a good partner of ours,” he said. “We're very pleased to have the iPhone and the iPhone 5 with LTE.”