Among the issues facing mobile operators in the United States is the impact of unlimited usage on user behavior, network resources and therefore user experience, not to mention business metrics such as churn, average revenue per account, gross revenue and profit margins.
Some are concerned consumers will boost consumption, straining networks and leading to consumer dissatisfaction. Others might see a shift to capacity-based competition as an advantage. T-Mobile US, Sprint and AT&T all believe their spectrum assets will prove advantageous in any such competition, especially compared to Verizon.
Of course, spectrum abundance or scarcity also is a direct function of the number of customer accounts a service provider serves, not simply the amount of available spectrum. Since Verizon and AT&T have the most customers, they actually “need” more spectrum, compared to the smaller customer bases served by Sprint and T-Mobile US.
In that regard, AT&T executives are more confident than might be inferred from a spectrum standpoint.
“If you look at our current holdings of spectrums and...about 40 megahertz of underutilized or unused spectrum from WCS and AWS-3...we have a unique ability to put a whole lot more capacity out there, said John Stephens, AT&T CFO.
If it wins the FirstNet contract, AT&T also expects to gain another 20 MHz of spectrum in the 700 MHz frequencies.
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