Latest Commentary

According to a detailed report from New Street Research analyst Jonathan Chaplin on wireless carriers in the first quarter, fewer people are buying smartphones. This means that wireless carriers as a group will no longer benefit from millions of people upgrading from a feature phone to a smartphone--those who want smartphones already have them, and those who don't most likely won't buy one anytime soon.

Sprint Nextel's announcement last week that it had inked a deal with module provider u-blox to be Sprint's preferred module provider for its 2G (1xRTT) CDMA network caught my attention for a few reasons, mainly because it's clearly designed at winning away machine-to-machine business from AT&T Mobility, which plans on shutting down its 2G network by 2017. I think Sprint can steal some of this business, and even though the customers and connections are low-bandwidth and provide low average revenue per user.

This morning Dish Network announced a $25.5 billion unsolicited offer to buy Sprint Nextel, which was followed shortly by the revelation that Verizon Wireless made an unsolicited offer to purchase Clearwire's spectrum license leases in major markets for up to $1.5 billion. Certainly there are pros and cons to all these scenarios but what seems apparent to me is that Dish's bid for Sprint and Verizon's bid for Clearwire will likely put Sprint's future plans in limbo while these deals are evaluated by shareholders, the FCC and the Department of Justice.

U.S. wireless operators will be flocking to New Orleans in a couple of weeks to attend the annual Competitive Carriers Expo, which takes place April 17-19 at the New Orleans Marriott. I expect such hot-button topics as incentive auctions, data roaming and IP transition will likely be debated at the conference.