Unlimited usage plans and video services in the mobile business now place a new value on spectrum holdings, for obvious reasons: demand is going to grow substantially.
“What the return of unlimited really highlights, and that is the industry's position in terms of network capacity, because if the industry is going to stay with unlimited, we're prepared and can probably sustain it better than anyone else because of our spectrum position,” said AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson.
“We now have more than 60 megahertz of fallow spectrum that we're ready to light up, and we'll be deploying all the bands simultaneously starting this fall,” said Stephenson. “Our goal is to put one gig speeds in our customers' hands no matter where they are on our network.”
AT&T executives now speak of a “new world, where capacity, networks, and entertainment intersect.”
“A year from now, we may look back on the return to unlimited plans as the moment when the battle for network reach and capacity began,” said AT&T CFO John Stephens.
Google Fiber, meanwhile, seems to be preparing for a big new test of its fixed wireless strategy.
If fixed wireless assaults mount, and as fiber-based gigabit offerings expand, the pace of investment pace of investment is going to remain high, for competitive reasons.
Mobile bandwidth also has grown substantially, with T-Mobile US and Dish Network gains in the 600-MHz auction, new activity to add millimeter wave spectrum on the part of AT&T and Verizon, and more coming as shared spectrum in the 3.5-GHz band becomes available, and the Federal Communications Commission moving to release huge amounts of new millimeter wave spectrum as well.
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