T-Mobile $10 Billion!

T-Mobile: $10B in 3 Years

Posted by samc on January 15th, 2008

T-Mobile USA expects to spend some $10.3 billion over three years ending 2009. Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile USA’s parent, relies heavily on the unit for profits. It said investments in the unit will hurt profitability growth at the division in the next two years. T-Mobile is the fourth-largest U.S. wireless company by subscribers, and it has fallen behind the others in rolling out speedier 3G networks.

T-Mobile spent $4.2 billion on the AWS band (1.7/2.1 GHz), in 2006. That doubled the amount it had in the top 100 cities. At the time, it said it would start making the newer technology available halfway through 2007, with most markets having 3G by 2008.

Top 10 Highest AWS Bidders
Bidders	Net total of high bids
1. T-Mobile	$4.2 billion
2. Verizon Wireless	$2.8 billion
3. SpectrumCo	$2.4 billion
4. MetroPCS	$1.4 billion
5. Cingular	$1.3 billion
6. Cricket	$710 million
7. Denali Spectrum	$365 million
8. Barat Wireless	$127 million
9. AWS Wireless	$116 million
10. Atlantic Wireless	$81 million
Click here to find out who is backing these bidders.

T-Mobile caters to younger subscribers, says the NY Times. Today, 47 percent of its 18.3 million subscribers are between 13 and 34 years old, the highest such concentration among the major carriers, according to M:Metrics, a market research firm based in Seattle.

T-Mobile’s subscribers are avid users of data services. Compared to subscribers of other carriers, T-Mobile’s customers are 33 percent more likely to use their phones to send text messages and 90 percent more likely to use instant messaging.

T-Mobile has also built the most extensive network of hot spots in the United States, with about 500,000 paying customers and 25,000 global access points. Though the company does not break out financial figures for the Wi-Fi service, analysts say it stands the best chance among Wi-Fi providers of turning a profit.

Meanwhile, Sprint Nextel is preparing to cut thousands of jobs, according to the The Wall Street Journal.

The company’s new CEO Dan Hesse is supposedly trying to show investors that he is serious about cutting costs, the newspaper’s Web site reported late on Monday. A Sprint representative declined to comment on the story.

Exactly how many people could lose their jobs is not yet known. Last year the company cut about 5,000 jobs. At the end of the last quarter Sprint reported it had roughly 60,000 employees. Sprint, which has 54 million wireless customers, is lagging far behind AT&T and Verizon Wireless in subscriber additions and is suffering from poor customer service.

Sprint and Clearwire previously planned to interconnect their WiMax networks, sharing costs and offering services to about 100 million people by the end of 2008. Sprint would focus its efforts primarily on 185 million urban dwellers, including 75 percent of the people located in the 50 largest markets, while Clearwire would focus on areas covering approximately 115 million people.

Sprint, which acquired their 2.6 GHZ spectrum for a song, previously said it would spend some $5 billion by 2010 on building out WiMax infrastructure.

source : dailywireless.org