At 08 Oct 2008 20:43:52 +0000 Dennis Ferguson wrote:

> > As it stands now, the 800-lb gorillas (Verizon and AT&T) see less
practical
> > advantage to roaming agreements, because "Podunk Cellular" in East
Cupcake,
> > Nebraska needs AT&T or Verizon to provide them with a "national
footprint"
> > more than Verizon or AT&T needs them to provide great backwater
Nebraska
> > coverage.
>
> I don't know, but if you look at these
>
> http://www.wireless.att.com/coverageviewer/
> http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/C...atorController
>
> comparing prepaid to postpaid coverage it becomes clear that
> almost half of the nationwide coverage Verizon and AT&T make
> a big deal of selling (measured by land area, at least) comes
> from roaming agreements which are almost certainly reciprocal.

Off topic, but does anyone besides me appreciate the irony that T-Mobile,
the national carrier with poorest nationwide coverage actually has far and
away the best nationwide prepaid coverage of the big four since they
include roaming in their prepaid offerings?

> Since nationwide coverage and those near-complete coverage maps
> are what the big guys sell, while rural carriers do a lot more
> business with regional plans, I'd argue that the big guys have
> at least as great an interest in cheap roaming as the little
> guys do.


It's certainly a two-way street, but I'm guessing the lanes are wider in
one direction! The big guys need the little guys to complete their maps,
but the little guys need the big guys to have a map at all! ;-)

If everything were equitable, Verizon and AT&T likely wouldn't be opposed
to the proposed FCC ruling that would require any carrier receiving USF
money to offer roaming at "fair" rates. The little guys aren't against it-
just Verizon and AT&T, which makes me wonder if they're trying to protect
the ability to negotiate "unfair" rates!

> > The less money everyone spends on
> > redundant little-used networks, is the more money they'd have to deploy
new
> > technologies and services.
>
> I don't think anyone builds redundant networks in rural areas much
> at all any more. What happens instead is that rural carriers build
> out the infrastructure and customer base in their licensed area until
> one of the big carriers decides they'd like to offer service in that
> area, at which point there's an acquisition and the owners of the rural
> carrier have their payday. Eventually there will only be a few big
> nationwide carriers, the rural carriers which exist now are the farm
> teams for the big guys.

That's a great analogy.

> As an example of how it goes, at one point I'm pretty sure Verizon
> thought they'd build a network in west Texas since they spent a
> fair bit of cash buying 30 MHz PCS licenses there. Note from
> the map above, however, that Verizon did nothing with these, which
> turned out to be pretty smart since their acquisition of Alltel
> instead gives them coverage in the same place in nice cellular
> spectrum, customers included.
>
> Having little carriers band together to form bigger, nationwide
> carriers might somehow advance the interests of consumers but
> I think the carriers themselves, both big and small, are pretty
> well taken care of by the current system. Oligopolies can be
> profitable.


True- however, getting back to my original point, if we'd had only one
digital standard in the US, there might be better roaming agreements since
both types of carrier (national and regional) would have more carriers to
negotiate with, rather that simply having to aligning themselves with the
one(s) who chose the same technology. Viaero Wireless, a regional GSM
carrier in Nebraska and Colorado, for example, can't leverage Verizon or
Sprint as a "threat" when negotiating rates with AT&T and/or T-Mo.

On a personal note, the Verizon purchase of Alltel is giving me, a T-Mo user,
the willies, since I doubt that Verizon has any vested interest in
continuing to operate Alltel's GSM network (acquired in Alltel's purchase
of Western Wireless and operated exclusively for roaming revenue) for the
convenience of their competitors once the current roaming agreements expire.

In an all-GSM or all-CDMA nation, scenarios like that wouldn't be an issue-
roaming agreements would simply be a function of getting the best mutual
deal, not the best out of a limited field of like-technology operators.

(Although, I suppose, it could equally be argued that our dual-technology
nation actually benefits rural areas with more choice- it might not be as
attractive to build another competing rural network if the incumbent one(s)
already had roaming deals sewn up with all the national carriers. With our
system, there's an incentive to build a rural GSM network if the pre-
existing one(s) are all CDMA, or vice versa, to attract roaming revenue
from the previously unrepresented like-technology carriers.)




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