Sprint CEO Hesse on 4G pricing plans
On the same day (and at the same investor conference) that AT&T’s Mobility and Consumer Markets CEO Ralph de la Vega talked about how his company is preparing consumers for usage-based billing models, Sprint (NYSE:S) CEO Dan Hesse shared his own thoughts on the subject.
“When you think about post-paid — and I don’t know what’s going to happen — it’s not just going to be your phone,” Hesse said. “It’s going to be your camera, your iTouch, your gaming device – they’re all going to become wireless, so what’s going to be the right plan for those? As we move into 4G, it’ll be much less about minutes and more about gigabytes (GB) as the main driver of what customers are buying per month, because it’s going to be VoIP-oriented. Minutes will be largely irrelevant. It’s going to be data-oriented. Customers may buy 100 GB of data rather than by month, they may buy monthly contracts or 1- or 2-year [contracts]. We want to have the flexibility — in wholesale and retail, prepaid and post-paid, with multiple brands — to move and morph, because business models are going to change…The biggest growth will come from non-traditional wireless devices.”
December 10th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
If wireless turns into a VoIP environment…then those VoIP packets will need to be treated differently that browser traffic. Those packets are sensitive to loss, latency and jitter. To me a business plan should properly price a service that provides guaranteed voice capability and that means including the cost of Near Real Time class of service for voice (and video for that matter). Otherwise voice and video will turn into a bad Internet experience when congestion occurs on the tower (which it will). Surprised that’s not part of the discussion, minutes may be irrelevant, but Quality of Service isn’t.
December 10th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Don makes good points about differentiating traffic sources and the ability to prioritize traffic according to type to insure QOS. One of the reasons the executives prefer to talk about how the services will be packaged and delivered, and priced, is that is the area they have to preach and answer to day in and day out. These are CEOs talking let’s not forget. From the technical perspective, a prominent feature of 4G is the implementation of mechanisms to guarantee high quality of service for all the different types of multimedia traffic that will originate, traverse and terminate on the next gen network. One of the goals of the standard is the implementation of effective data rates no less than 100Mb/sec, end-to-end anywhere in the world, up to 1 GB/sec for static wireless connections where the transmitter and receiver are not moving at high speeds relative to each other. This will certainly go along way toward minimizing the latency and jitter effects with respect to real-time transmissions like voice over VoIP (let alone HD voice over IP which is on its way). Efficiency in hand-off across the heterogenous elements, and even networks, that will lie in the path of the end user, end-to-end communications experience likely will be one of the biggest challenges to achieving the above.
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