Thursday, September 20, 2012

T-Mobile, this is what you have been waiting for!

This week, Time Warner Cable announced that they are about to get rid of its 7.8% stake in Clearwire. The reason for this deal appears to be that the Clearwire stake represents somewhat of a conflict of interest when Time Warner Cable now are cooperating with Verizon on their AWS deal and acting as a reseller for Verizon.

This deal could not have come at a better time for T-Mobile.

Sprint and T-Mobile have several times been rumored to contemplate a merger or at least some kind of network sharing deal. Unfortunately, they have never been able to make this into reality.

If the new CEO of T-Mobile will act on this opportunity remains to be seen but it is a golden opportunity for T-Mobile to get their hands on one of the best LTE capable spectrum positions in the US while at the same time turning up the heat on Sprint in regards to network sharing.

The Clearwire spectrum is among the best, if not the best, band for LTE deployments in the US market today. It is optimized for the efficient TD-LTE technology, a very large coherent band, and almost aligned with international spectrum bands in Europe and Asia, increasing the likelihood of a healthy device ecosystem. This band is worth more if held together instead of broken up. 

Unfortunately the prospects for this development appears to be dim at best. The Clearwire CFO recently said that he can not see a scenario for when he would need their entire spectrum position to execute their business plan. 

This is how misfortune descend upon a company. Letting the CFO set the strategy.

The reason Clearwire have not been very successful is not because they are sitting on too much spectrum, it is having a perfect storm of owners not known for rampant success in the wireless space.

Mr. Legere, get in on the action and save Clearwire and Sprint from themselves. This is a one-time opportunity!

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