Sprint extends purchase deal with US Federal States
A national association of States has selected Sprint as an approved wireless provider, extending the company’s contract to serve as a supplier of wireless products and services to state and local governments across the nation for an additional year.
The consortium — Western States Contracting Alliance (WSCA) — extended the contract with Sprint through Oct. 31, 2012.
The latest deal extension, worth an estimated US$360 million, increases the total lifetime value of the contract to US$1.4 billion since 2006.
The Western States Contracting Alliance (WSCA) enables cooperative multi-state contracting to help states acquire quality services in a cost-effective and efficient manner. States purchasing Sprint’s products and services under WSCA include Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. State and local governments in most states are able to utilize this dynamic contracting vehicle.
Sprint’s Business Markets Group is composed of sales, support, marketing and operations personnel solely dedicated to enterprise, small and medium-sized business and public sector customers.
Integra Telecom names Stephen Zimba Chief Marketing Officer (Portland)
Integra Telecom Inc., a fiber-based, integrated wholesale and retail telecommunications provider for business, has hired Steve Zimba as chief marketing officer.
He will work to strengthen Integra’s long-time reputation of having innovative and user-friendly solutions that leverage Integra’s extensive fiber network and meet the needs of businesses of all sizes.â€
Zimba brings 23 years of experience in the communications and technology industry where he has led the development and growth of several new products and businesses. Prior to Integra, Zimba held a variety of roles including vice president marketing and products at Cbeyond, director of strategic development at BellSouth, and managing director of the Global Telecom Business at Microsoft. He attended Syracuse University where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in economics and policy studies as well as a master’s degree in public administration and finance.
Steve brings extensive marketing expertise and telecommunications and managed services knowledge to Integra’s executive management team,†said Dudley Slater, CEO of Integra Telecom. He will work to strengthen Integra’s long-time reputation of having innovative and user-friendly solutions that leverage Integra’s extensive fiber network and meet the needs of businesses of all sizes.â€
About Integra Telecom
Integra Telecom Inc. provides voice and Internet solutions to thousands of business and carrier customers in 11 Western states, including: Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah and Washington. It owns and operates a best-in-class fiber-optic network comprised of metropolitan access networks, nationally acclaimed Internet and data networks, and a 4,700-mile high-speed long haul network. The company has earned some of the highest customer loyalty and customer satisfaction ratings in the telecommunications industry. Primary equity investors in the company include Goldman, Sachs & Co., Tennenbaum Capital Partners, funds managed by Farallon Capital Partners and Warburg Pincus. Integra Telecom and Electric Lightwave are registered trademarks of Integra Telecom Inc. For more information, visit: www.integratelecom.com.
First LTE phone launches in Las Vegas
Samsung Mobile has launched the very first LTE phone, ‘Samsung Craft’ in the United States. This is the launch of the very first commercial 4G LTE network with MetroPCS in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Besides the LTE chips inside, the Craft comes with 1x EV-DO CDMA radio, Wi-Fi/GPS/Bluetooth, a 3.3″ AMOLED touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard, a 3.2 Megapixel camera, and a 2GB microSD card with support for cards up to 32GB in size. The Craft is pre-loaded with a full-length copy of Star Trek on its SD card.
The Craft will be available for US$299 from MetroPCS, and the company’s new 4G Plans include a standard Unlimited Voice/Text/Web plans for US$55 per month and the company also launching a premium unlimited plan which will include 4G Video On Demand which streams TV from 14 stations including NBC, BET, and Univision.
MetroPCS’ network will cover both 4G and otherwise, which is quite limited, so this launch is more of a ground breaking launch for the city of Las Vegas, as it is the only city in the United States to have live WiMAX, LTE, and HSPA+ networks running concurrently.
Huawei hires ex- official of Bush administration (USA)
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: A prominent former Bush administration official has been recruited by Huawei who worked on national security issues. With this move, the Chinese telecoms equipment maker seeks to make inroads in Washington and assuage concerns that it has ties to the Chinese military. John Bellinger, a partner at Arnold & Porter has been hired as an adviser. He has served as chief attorney at the State Department and advised the National Security Council under George W. Bush.
The move also suggests that company is aggressively seeking to convince US defense and security officials that it should be allowed to make acquisitions in the US. Huawei wants to gain market share in the US by weighing a bid for a unit of Motorola. However, there are speculations that the company will move ahead with the bid only if it can be certain that the deal would not be blocked on national security grounds by the Obama administration. After getting the indication that Bush administration would block the transaction, Huawei was forced to abandon a joint bid for 3 Com in 2008. The Bush administration was understood to have resisted the deal because 3 Com was a supplier to the defense department
Takeovers of sensitive US assets by foreign companies might be blocked by an inter-agency panel called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) on national security grounds especially in the case of technology and telecom assets which are considered critical infrastructure and sensitive.
Any especially controversial foreign transactions have been confronted by the Obama administration though attorneys who work on such deals in Washington say it is only a matter of time before The White House faces a politically contentious bid by a non-US company. A Chinese buyer abandoned a bid for Firstgold, a US gold mining company based in Nevada in February after it was told by the Obama administration that the deal would be blocked.
Deutsche Telekom to Spend $2.7 Billion on U.S. Wireless Network
Oct. 6 (Bloomberg) — Deutsche Telekom AG, Europe’s biggest phone company, plans to spend 2.1 billion euros ($2.7 billion) to build a high-speed wireless network in the U.S. to expand T- Mobile USA into its largest division.
The three-year investment plan will add to $4.2 billion in spending on mobile-phone licenses T-Mobile won last month, Deutsche Telekom said in a statement today. By adding services such as video and game downloads, T-Mobile, the fourth-largest U.S. cellular-phone company, plans to increase its customer count by at least 50 percent to 35 million by 2015.
The investments would be the biggest by Chief Executive Officer Kai-Uwe Ricke since he took over, and come after sliding revenue from traditional phone services forced Bonn-based Deutsche Telekom to slash its profit targets in August. T-Mobile USA has been adding customers at a slower pace than bigger rivals Cingular Wireless LLC and Verizon Wireless, partly because of its lack of wireless spectrum.
“We are aiming to maximize revenue market share in the U.S. and make T-Mobile USA the largest single company within the group,” Ricke said in a statement handed out before a scheduled press conference in New York today.
Deutsche Telekom bought T-Mobile USA, formerly called VoiceStream Wireless Corp., in 2001 for $35 billion. The unit overtook the German mobile-phone division in 2004 as Deutsche Telekom’s biggest source of wireless revenue.
In the first half of 2006, the U.S. unit accounted for 22 percent of Deutsche Telekom’s sales, up from 16 percent in all of 2004. Deutsche Telekom’s merged broadband and fixed-line phone unit is the largest division, contributing 41 percent of the group’s revenue in the first half.
Network Construction
Network construction in the U.S. will begin this quarter, with most of the work scheduled to be completed in 2007 and 2008. Juan Jimenez, an analyst at Morgan Stanley had estimated the network to cost $2.3 billion over three years.
Deutsche Telekom, which also sells mobile-phone services across Europe, is attracted by the lower wireless penetration rate in the U.S. While everyone in Germany owns a cell phone, only seven out of 10 Americans have a handset.
Recent acquisitions among U.S. mobile-phone companies also helped reduce the number of competitors. Last year’s merger between Sprint Corp. and Nextel Communications Inc. to create Sprint Nextel Corp. cut the number of national wireless carriers to four from five. Cingular, owned by AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp., is the biggest U.S. mobile-phone company, followed by Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel.
Market Share
In the second quarter, T-Mobile USA added 613,000 customers for a total of 23.3 million. That’s a third of Verizon Wireless’s and less than half of Cingular’s. T-Mobile is the only major U.S. carrier that doesn’t have a so-called third-generation mobile- phone network that allows fast services such as video downloads.
T-Mobile USA’s total customers may reach 35 million to 40 million by 2015, the company said. The profit margin, measured by earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization as a percentage of total revenue, will exceed 35 percent in the “long-term,” T-Mobile USA forecast today. The second-quarter margin on that basis was 28.5 percent.
Total capital spending at T-Mobile USA will reach 5.6 billion euros this year, including the $4.2 billion for mobile- phone licenses. Capital spending will be about 7 billion euros in the three years through 2009.
Services such as Web browsing may help T-Mobile USA increase market share to 13 percent in the next four years from 10.5 percent, Morgan Stanley’s Jimenez estimates.
Competing Investments
Verizon Wireless, the No. 2 U.S. wireless carrier that’s jointly owned by Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group Plc, spent $2.8 billion for 13 licenses covering regions including the Northeast, the Southeast and the Great Lakes. The spectrum auction held by the Federal Communications Commission ended Sept. 18.
Verizon Wireless Chief Executive Officer Dennis Strigl forecast last month that the company will sustain $1 billion in quarterly revenue from wireless data services such as e-mail and music downloads.
Six years ago, Deutsche Telekom and five other companies bid an average 8.4 billion euros each for high-speed wireless permits in Germany. Only 24 million Germans had a mobile-phone at the time. There were 82 million subscriptions at the end of June, more than the population of Europe’s largest economy.
Sommer Ouster
Since the 2001 purchase of VoiceStream Wireless, Deutsche Telekom’s largest acquisition outside the U.S. was its 1.3 billion-euro purchase of a mobile-phone company in Austria. Ricke’s biggest investment to date was the $2.5 billion purchase of Cingular Wireless’s networks in California and Nevada in 2004.
Ricke’s predecessor, Ron Sommer, was ousted after $60 billion of acquisitions caused ballooning debt and a plunge in the stock. Four years ago, Deutsche Telekom said it may sell the U.S. wireless division. Ricke kept the unit and turned it into the biggest earnings contributor at Deutsche Telekom.
Ricke will hold a press conference to present T-Mobile USA’s strategy at 10:30 a.m. in New York. He will be joined by Chief Financial Officer Karl-Gerhard Eick, T-Mobile International CEO Rene Obermann and Robert Dotson, who heads the U.S. wireless unit.
Source- http://www.bloomberg.com
