Leap launching first AWS market

Leap Wireless said today it will launch commercial service in its first market using spectrum acquired in the Advanced Wireless Services auction. The deployment, in Oklahoma City, marks the first time an operator has offered consumer service in a band other than cellular or PCS in the US.

Leap has already begun seeding its customer base with new phones embedded with 1.7 GHz/2.1 GHz radios in nearby markets, but on the launch date, April 8, Leap will open five Cricket retail stores on Oklahoma City as well as offer service through 58 retail partners and its Web site, mycricket.com. The initial network will include 98 cell sites, covering a sprawling footprint that encompasses outlying cities Norman, Guthrie and Shawnee and linked to its current PCS market in Tulsa.

Leap now has four devices that support the AWS frequencies: two from Samsung, one from UTStarcom and a UTStarcom wireless PC card for data access over its 1X network. However, Leap has said it eventually plans to phase all of its phone sales and customer base over to dual-band PCS-AWS phones, allowing its customers to roam between the two footprints easily.

“With the launch of Oklahoma City, we are entering what we believe to be another major growth phase for our business,” Leap President and CEO Doug Hutcheson said in a statement. “The AWS spectrum that we acquired in 2006 from the FCC enables us to again double the size of our Cricket footprint and covered POPs.”

Oklahoma City adds 1.1 million people to Leap’s already substantial footprint of 55.1 million POPs covered. But it has a lot more room to grow. In the 2006 AWS auction, Leap acquired a huge regional license covering the states surrounding the Great Lakes and including the major metropolitan center, Chicago. Leap has awarded AWS infrastructure contracts to Nortel, Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei, and as vendors typically are awarded contracts geographically, two other markets could follow the Oklahoma City launch shortly.

The other AWS winners are likely hot on Leap’s heels with their own deployments in the new band. MetroPCS said it would launch its first AWS market, Las Vegas, this quarter. T-Mobile, which is building its UMTS/High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) network in the band, has put off its commercial launch of 3G several times. Its latest indication is that the network will go live this summer.