Sprint's core postpaid business has been gradually shrinking
as seen by a net loss of approximately 3 million customers during the first
nine months of 2009. They have increasingly been focused on the prepaid market
with recent success in their $50 monthly unlimited prepaid rate plan. Their
subsidiary, Boost Mobile offers prepaid services to nearly 6 million customers in
the United States. Their recent acquisition of Virgin Mobile this summer for
$483 million provides Sprint another 5 million prepaid customers. Let's not
forget their other 48 million subscribers. Sprint has about $20 billion in
debt, 2.8 billion shares outstanding and with the recent price of $4.00/share;
Google could pick up the company for a 25% premium. This would only be about
$14 billion in Google stock with Google assuming their debt. At Google's share
price, that's only 7% of their outstanding shares. (See Exxon's recent
acquisition of XTO, all stock deal of $31 billion). Google would have the
spectrum, WiMax/4G, and access to Sprint's R&D. This is the fastest way
they can become a carrier. The open Android OS would still be available to
other handset manufacturers and market acceptance would be a result of who
creates the better user experience.
By building upon their heritage in personal information management
devices, Palm has extended good functionality to popular websites that appeal
to business users with the new Palm Pre. I believe this is the last Hoo-Haa for
Palm as they have struggled for several years (stock was $1.50 in December). They
redesigned the operating system, WebOS, from the ground up and many industry
observers like the new user interface. It makes use of MEMS to support tilt
like the iPhone. It received a lot of attention at the Consumer Electronics
Show this week. The browser is based on WebKit and developers who know XHTML,
Javascript, XML and Cascading Style Sheets should be able to develop for the
device without learning any new languages. Palm has many loyal users. Their
carrier partner, Sprint has experienced a severe drop in subscriber growth recently.
So you have two weak players making another go at it. If Verizon gets a hold of
it, that would help it flank AT&T's iPhone. We're not out jumping in the
stock yet, it went from $3 to $6 in a couple of days, mostly a short-covering
rally.
Sprint is merging its WiMax Xohm business with Clearwire in
a $3.2 billion investment backed by Google, Comcast, Intel, Time Warner Cable
and others in a move to save the technology in the U.S. The deal originally
fell apart last November but we thought some investors would come forward. Craig
McCaw is bringing together some of his early day pioneers such as John Stanton
(from Western Wireless, later became VoiceStream, then T-Mobile) and Dan Hesse
of Sprint. So far Sprint has only shown it can lose money and faces rapid extinction
to Verizon and AT&T. WiMax has already lost momentum to spectrally
efficient LTE (4G), I'm still not sure they can gain market traction. The real winner is Clearwire and a small pay
day for McCaw. Google wants to ensure it has a home for Android handsets and put
up $500 million. That's plenty of Zeros for the venture, but I don't think they'll
win.
The Wall Street Journal reported today that Sprint-Nextel
and Clearwire are abandoning their plans for a nationwide WiMax network that
would have reached 100 million people by the end of 2008. The departure of
Sprint's CEO, Gary Forsee presumably complicated the closing of the transaction.
This is a real blow to the burgeoning ecosystem being created around WiMax.
There were great expectations from the recent WiMax Forum with regards to
Sprint's Xohm service that was expected to be available in mid-2008. Perhaps
Sprint's investors want to see them improve their overall revenue picture before
launching down a $3 billion+ CAPEX road. This is a major setback to Craig McCaw's
Clearwire. One option under consideration was a spinoff of Sprint's WiMax
business and merging it with Clearwire. I'm not sure Clearwire can make it on
its own because estimates of infrastructure build out costs continue to
increase (from $600M to over $1 billion). Sprint also has been working to get
things going with Google, although nothing has been launched. Sprint is without
a leader and clearly that affects their ability to get strategic deals
completed. Don't be surprised if other companies in the supply chain come with
investment money to help Clearwire survive - Intel, Motorola and Samsung to
name a few. The shakeup of the weak WiMax players is well underway.
Sprint has announced progress with their mobile WiMAX
initiative, Xohm, saying they will have the service available in select cities
by Q2'2008. The company is enthusiastic about laptop and tablet PC
manufacturers claiming they will have embedded Mobile WiMAX in their next
generation machines. Sprint has placed a big bet with WiMax. Despite marketing
efforts by Intel and the WiMax Forum, the spectral efficiency and overhead signaling
in 802.16e-2005 has disadvantages compared with 4G standards, LTE (Long-Term
Evolution) and UMB (Ultra Mobile Broadband).
Improvements in
standards are all about spectral efficiency. The 3G and 4G debate places LTE as
leading with WiMAX and UMB competing for second place. 4G is characterized by
larger channels (up to 20MHz) and uses the popular OFDM modulation scheme. GSM
and WCDMA carriers will follow the 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project)
path to LTE as the 4G standard. UMTS is the dominant 3G standard and now with
improvements brought with HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) and even
HSUPA (uplink), we actually see good broadband performance in the wireless wide
area network. The second 3G standard is CDMA EvDO (used by Verizon in the U.S.).
What is confusing for WiMax is that the IEEE is already working
on improving the standard called, "IEEE 802.16m," due to be ready by 2010. No one
knows if this will be backward compatible with today's WiMax implementations. The advantage of UMB is it is
backward compatible with CDMA systems even though there is a dependency on a
single supplier of chips - Qualcomm. With WiMax-802.16e becoming commercially available
in 2008 and Intel's delivery of chips in laptops; it has a strong head start.
Intel was instrumental in establishing the explosion of 802.11 WiFi networking.
The big difference here is you are dealing with licensed spectrum where the
stakes are much higher than merely establishing a de-facto standard such as
WiFi. As Peter Gabriel says, "Too much at stake, ground beneath me shake; and
the news is breaking." I hope the monkey doesn't get hurt.
Paul Lopez is a 20+ year technology veteran whose career has spanned multiple disciplines such as product management, software development, engineering, marketing, business development and operations... read more