Skip: I understand your point about more "sectors" being utilized in one market vs. another.. However, both Salt Lake City and Phoenix are both what I would qualify as "urban sprawl". Not allot of high rise buildings, etc.
However, unlike your typical wireless SP, actual sq. kilometer coverage is not really the issue in CricKet's network topology. The key factor is POP coverage and capacity per sector calculated so that when you achieve X% penetration in relative POP's you can provide a certain level of Quality of Service, and in turn generate a profit. Other operators designed their networks of coverage, we designed ours for capacity.
If you can cover 90K POP's per cell site with a coverage area of 5 square miles in Salt Lake City, or 20 square miles in Fayetteville, AR the POP coverage per cell site is a function of network design. The level of capacity that you can serve those 90K covered POP's is related to the amount of spectrum that is available.
Using your theory. If they knew they had 11 carriers available in Salt Lake City. They should have designed their network differently, than if they only had 3 carriers.
In my opinion, you design a CricKet type network for a covered POP per base station level. Then you use your spectrum, and or current/future technology (1X, dual antennas, smart antennas) to increase the capacity available to that number of covered POP's, or provide additional services, or serve additional POP's within that cell site if the tele density grows in the future. A design in this fashion allows you to sub-aggregate and sell off additional spectrum that you can not fathom using in the future.
Regarding your $20 dollars a day download figures and the 2 cent figure Qualcomm has been advertising. Well, the figure is closer to 3 cents a minute and at 100 Mbytes a day, the cost is only $3. But, what you need to examine are the basis for this 3 cents a Mbyte cost.
qualcomm.com
Notes:
6. Greenfield deployment (start from scratch network)
7. Assumes 7 year straight line depreciation
This report was done to show a prospective "greenfield" new build WCDMA operator the cost advantages of deploying a 1XEV-DO system in comparison to WCDMA/GPRS. These are not the numbers associated with a current CDMAOne Service Provider who already has built the network, and the associated depreciation costs are already being accounted for under the voice sector.
It also seemed to me that you had some extra doublings in your driveby estimate of how much more would be available a few posts back. The time I was talking about Mark was getting pretty expansive, but he seemed to be suggesting high teens on the existing CDMA 1A system, doubling with 1X (which seems to be a bit overstated as I've been hearing more like 1.7 times or something) and then a whole list of other possibilities which would bring the system up to 70% or so of all the covered pops.
My doubling effect was in comparison to when Auction 5 took place (1996) When Qualcomm was barely deploying IS-95A. Since then we have had a double with IS-95B, another with 1X, etc. And of course the double is the reported gains published by Qualcomm.. So you should apply some sort of real world "fudge factor". But, the underlying message is the same.
The other concept that I think you need to understand is what IJ spoke about in detail at the last shareholders meeting. This concept is "Dynamic Network Optimization"
What we are talking about is an Intelligent Network that self Optimizes itself on a demand basis.
In other words let's look at a given cell in Chattanooga (5 carrier pairs).
Chattanooga is a non-1X market, and I believe that Chattanooga has achieved a 10% penetration. So growth should increase at a rate of 1 % per annum after the second year. So according to your data. Chattanooga use 2 - 3 channels for non 1-X peak voice demand.
And would look something like this to handle peak "busy hour" voice traffic.
|----V---V---V---4---5----|
So now the network is upgraded to 1X and peak "busy hour" voice traffic still requires 3 Voice Carriers because the system is still populated with non-1X phones. But now you deploy 1XEV-DO on you other two carriers
|----V---V---V---D---D----|
(1X busy hour configuration)
So Peak "Busy Hour" voice traffic requires 3 1X carriers (until you re-populate your user base with 1X phones, which shouldn't take you more than a couple of years given the usage rate of the phones in question. They don't last forever at 1100 MOU per month)
However, are this many voice channels required at 8PM in the evening, or 2 PM in the afternoon, or 10 AM in the morning?
Probably not! So as voice traffic decreases from "peak hour" use. The "Dynamic Network Optimization" can reconfigure on a cell by cell basis the voice and data-only utilization matrix.
So at 8PM.. your network channels could look like this..
|----V---D---D---D---D----|
or some combination in this fashion.
And we haven't even started talking about capacity gains with smart antennas, etc
The key for LWIN and other mixed voice/data wireless service providers is to Dynamically Optimize their over the air networks via historical and real time analysis of network usage between the various services being rendered to generate appropriate service availability over the entire day.. Not a static network configuration that is optimized for peak traffic periods of a given single service.
PCSTEL |
