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This is a quick overview on the 2 earnings calls, T-Mobile and Sprint, and how they may affect the field for design, installation, integration, commissioning, and optimizations. Yes, those 2 hours of my life I will never see again but I wanted to share them with you. I have much more commentary in the podcast, so if you’re interested make sure you listen!
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So, first the T-Mobile call. Earnings call here. I have to tell you that I really enjoy listening to Legere, he is just a cool guy. He is fun and he not only answers the questions to the press but also to Twitter, which was really cool his call was loose and fun. So they basically said that they plan to continue the rollout at the pace they are going. I take this to mean that he will continue to build out the LTE system as needed, concentrating on the larger urban markets and working their way down. He also mentioned that the Voice of Wi-Fi will be pushed but they need other carriers to catch up. So, LTE and VoLTE is a priority, VoWiFi as a priority. For deployment teams, including installation, commissioning, design, integration, and optimization teams, this will continue.
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Sprint? Earnings call here. They are a very uptight bunch, that call had so much tension on it. I admire Claure but come on, lighten up a little. Softbank’s Son was there and he seems like a very smart guy. I hope he can make things happen in the US like he apparently did in Japan. That guy thinks all of the networks stink in the US, and he admitted that Sprint did not have a good network, it stinks too! So I guess he intends to make the densification project a success no matter what. So here is how I interpret that for deployment, commissioning, installation, integration, design, and optimization. I 
expect them to go balls to the wall in 2016 to make this happen. Will they pay top dollar, hell no, but this will be all new sites along with the upgrade of the Macro sites, that is what I heard. So get ready, they expect to build out big time, but not macro. They expect to use mini macro and small cell. This is going to be s blast for deployment but not for the existing OEMs in the USA. I think that they are going to use people they trust. When I say they, I mean Softbank, let’s face it, Softbank is going to run the company. So the success or failure will ride with Mr. SON. He will be the one to take the glory or the blame. I would imagine he will work with vendors that they trusted in Japan to offer a reasonable price and results. So get out-of-the-way! Make room for Softbank USA! Let’s get busy and build! Just keep it simple, when you did network vision it was too complicated! This was Sprint’s fault! They have no one to blame but themselves, even though now they point fingers, that’s all history, let’s move ahead!
History – let me tell you how in the beginning Sprint had all the cool feature, and they had Nextel. Well, now Nextel is gone, along with the subs they had with Nextel. They also are on a level playing field with the rest of the carriers, and they dropped to #4. They desperately need leadership! I think that Mr. Son will provide that. My opinion!
So lessons learned? KISS – keep it simple stupid! Keep the build and network as simple as possible for the deployment. T-Mobile figured it out! They learned quick after UMTS problems. Keeping it simple makes it profitable. That is the secret. When you penny pinch and do all that you can not to pay the people who are installing and commissioning and integrating, you have problems. Just deploy, test, and pay your vendors. That way everyone is happy.
Dan Hesse regrets all the outages that he had with the NV cut over. Let me tell you, they made things so much more complicated and caused more problems than they needed to. I know for a fact they wanted it their way, so how did that work out? If they would have done a clean overlay roll out it would have worked so much better, it may have looked like it cost more in the beginning, but in the long run it would have been so much more profitable. Just because you think it’s cheap, doesn’t mean it’s profitable. Well, was it worth losing all those subs? Was it? I don’t think so but I am a fan of a clean and organized roll out. http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/former-sprint-ceo-hesse-unexpected-disruption-network-vision-was-very-painf/2015-08-05?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal
