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The 2004 State of the Wireless Union
Yankee Group, The, June 2004, Pages: 24
The U.S. wireless industry had another interesting year, to say the least, in 2003. Never before was wireless covered as much in the news media. Wireless number portability (WNP), the ability to take your current phone number along to another carrier in the same area, was more closely tracked than any other technology topic since Y2K. Unfortunately, WNP turned out to be a more pervasive problem than Y2K.
- Subscriber growth rebounded and new subscriber segments were opened. The trend in 2002 of declining gross addition, declining net additions, and a decrease in the percentage of new users as a proportion of all gross additions was reversed in 2003. It remains to be seen if the expansion of postpaid subscribership will come at the expense of bad debt or if the industry has been able to tap into a previously under-penetrated segment with prime credit. In any case, the industry has a reprieve from an increasingly competitive redistribution of the market share pie. However, growth has come from increasing the size of the market pie.
- WNP turned out to be a typical “too little, too late” project, which resulted in a public relations nightmare for the industry. For weeks and months, television, radio, the Internet and the print media covered the horror stories of wireless subscribers being caught in limbo for days and weeks while trying to switch carriers and keep their number.
- AT&T Wireless, which had the hardest time with the implementation of WNP, was its first casualty. After many rumors of a possible acquisition of AT&T Wireless surfaced, it decided to take control of the situation and put itself up for bid. Ultimately, Cingular Wireless, a joint venture between SBC and BellSouth, won it for $43 billion, including debt.
In the regulatory arena, the so-called Consensus Plan championed by Nextel surfaced, which would allow Nextel to move its operations from a discontinguous band in the 800 MHz range to 10 MHz of contiguous in the 1900 MHz band to decrease interference with law enforcement and rescue services. As expected, the plan is drawing a lot of criticism from Nextel’s competitors, while being supported by the law enforcement and rescue community. A decision of how to proceed has not been made yet.
Economies of scale are a cornerstone of economics and are one of the benefits of becoming larger—a company can serve the incremental user for less than the previous user. When a regression analysis of the financial and user metrics since 2000 for 13 of the largest U.S. carriers was conducted, it was discovered that the U.S. wireless industry had weak to negative economies of scale. This should significantly alter the perception of the viability of smaller carriers and the efficiency gained or lost by becoming larger.
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