T-Mobile Claims Verizon Wireless the Least-Efficient Spectrum User
T-Mobile USA continued its war against Verizon Wireless’s planned purchase of advanced wireless services spectrum from four cable operators. The smaller carrier said in FCC filings and a conference call that Verizon Wireless is the least efficient of all the major wireless carriers in its use of spectrum. T-Mobile cited a study it commissioned from Roberson and Associates to dispute Verizon Wireless’s claim of superior efficiency. Verizon Wireless’s “spectral efficiency analysis” is “fundamentally and fatally flawed,” T-Mobile said. When the flaws are corrected to account for smartphone usage and compare Verizon Wireless against additional carriers, “Verizon Wireless’ spectrum efficiency is seen to lag behind that of the rest of the industry, in many cases by a wide margin” (http://xrl.us/bm9ymi), T-Mobile said.
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Verizon Wireless rejected the study, accusing T-Mobile of trying to “manipulate the numbers by putting its thumb on the scale to make itself look better.” T-Mobile’s claims are “meritless,” a spokesman told us, “and simply an attempt to distract from the fact that it and its parents at DT made a conscious effort to pursue other paths while we continued to invest.” AT&T abandoned in December its $39 billion deal to buy T-Mobile after the FCC expressed concerns.
Spectrum efficiency shouldn’t be the central concern of the FCC in deciding whether to approve the cable spectrum buy, said Steve Sharkey, a T-Mobile USA director. The decision should be about whether carriers have sufficient spectrum to deploy services, he said. Because Verizon Wireless repeatedly made the efficiency claim, arguing it was a “good steward” and “therefore deserved the spectrum,” T-Mobile “wanted to put facts on the table,” he said.
T-Mobile’s filing includes a declaration by Dennis Roberson, CEO of Roberson and Associates, who argued that Verizon Wireless’s analysis in two metrics -- the ratio of customer connections per megahertz of spectrum, and the ratio of spectrum share to customer connections share -- was “so flawed as to render it useless for meaningful analysis.” When correcting for “merely the most obvious of these flaws,” Roberson said he found that Verizon Wireless is “significantly less efficient than T-Mobile, particularly in the most spectrally constrained top markets."
Roberson said he corrected Verizon Wireless’s analysis by removing from each operator’s allocation spectrum it doesn’t yet have; analyzing the data on a market-by-market basis rather than in the aggregate; correcting for the different network demands imposed by smartphone users compared to featurephone users; and correcting for the relative spectrum efficiency differences between high- and low-band spectrum. “Without any of the corrections, Verizon still looks quite good,” Roberson said. “But as you apply the corrections to come to a real apples-to-apples comparison, Verizon’s position diminishes very, very quickly."
Verizon Wireless has claimed it services an average of 1.23 million customer connections per MHz of spectrum, compared to T-Mobile’s 600,000 customers per MHz (CD Mar 6 p5), but that it needs the additional AWS spectrum to supplement its 4G capacity. The Verizon Wireless spokesman said T-Mobile “cannot contest and has not even tried to contest” Verizon customers’ need for additional spectrum.