Gearing up for 700 MHz

With the dust settling from this year's 700 MHz auction, the winners will begin to formalize their plans for that spectrum — and vendors already are gearing up to develop equipment for deployment by 2010.

Both Verizon, which won the coveted C Block licenses covering nearly all the U.S., and AT&T, which won a large number of licenses in the narrower B Block, appear certain to use their new spectrum to deliver mobile broadband services that could support high-speed data and voice over IP.

Sandip Mukerjee, vice president of wireless portfolio and strategy for Alcatel-Lucent, is particularly enthusiastic about mobile broadband. “From our primary market research, this is where we see a willingness to pay,” he said. “Be it mass-market consumer or enterprise, this is what makes the most business sense.”

The U.S. is ahead of the curve in freeing up 700 MHz spectrum by requiring UHF broadcasters to vacate the spectrum by 2009. That will give U.S. operators a rare opportunity to lead the rest of the world in their deployments, Mukerjee said.

U.S. operators, he said, “will get the opportunity to redefine traditional [average revenue per user], where part comes from end-user paid services such as voice, messaging and data access; it also ushers in non-user paid revenues from things like advertising, wholesale capacity sales and open-access devices and applications.” Noting that ARPU has been declining in recent years, Mukerjee said, “This should drive it up.”

Broadband mobile services, Mukerjee added, “will be video-rich and will be based on social networking and productivity gains from the enterprise segment.”

Because 700 MHz networks will operate at a relatively low frequency, they will provide excellent propagation characteristics, enabling base stations to cover a larger area than they would in a network operating at a higher frequency.

“Coverage will be excellent, and in-building penetration will be really good,” said Fred Wright, senior vice president of cellular networks and WiMAX for Motorola.

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