Cricket parent Leap Wireless to trial LTE this year, go big in 2012

Leap Wireless, parent company of the contract-free Cricket brand that recently went nationwide through partnerships with Sprint and Best Buy, got specific yesterday, during its third-quarter earnings call, about the transition to LTE that it has been pointing to for some time.

Later this year, said CFO Walter Berger, the carrier will launch LTE in a trial market, and then over the course of 2012 expand the 4G coverage to approximately 25 million people, at a cost of less than $10 per head.

"Just to give you a sense of our longer term view, we expect to deploy LTE to about two-thirds of our network footprint over the next two to three years," said Berger, according to a transcript from MorningStar.

The 2012 rollouts paired with new LTE-enabled smartphones (Unfiltered: Leap music customers keep Muving up; a model for operator service delivery?), said CEO Hutchenson, who added that to facilitate Cricket's transition to 4G, Leap has the option of shifting its voice and data traffic to the Sprint network, to help free up spectrum assets.

That said, he continued:

We are comfortable that our spectrum position supports our current plans for 4G roll out. Leap has on average 23 megahertz of spectrum in our operating markets. Of course, while we believe we have adequate spectrum for the launch of LTE, from time to time we will continue to evaluate opportunities in the marketplace to improve our spectrum position.

Until the 4G rollout is complete, it expects its 3G assets to drive the majority of its "data value creation," helped by falling 3G handset prices.

Further, said Hutcheson, Leap has a four-part strategy going into its LTE transition:

-- to keep a focus on its Muve Music service (CP: Cricket's Muve Music service succeeding by untraditional means), which now has more than 270,000 subscribers;

-- to expand distribution, which it plans to do with 200 new Cricket-branded stores in the fourth quarter and 5,500 new retail selling points in Best Buy and Walmart stores;

-- to improve its device lineup, with seven smartphones and five new Muve Music handsets by year's end (by the end of Q3, a third of Leap's customers were either smartphone or Muve users); and

--to launch a new advertising campaign with an emphasis on free music and value.

With its music offering a success, the carrier is now also focusing on video — a far less forgiving, more data-hogging medium, Cricket's senior director of business has conceded, but one that he expects its more spectrum-efficient LTE network will help it to deliver.