T-Mobile MVNO Solavei said on Wednesday it will fully support all of the HSPA+ radios in the new version of the iPhone 5. That means anywhere T-Mobile offers 3G service, Solavei will too. Previously all iPhones’ 3G capabilities were restricted to areas where T-Mobile had completed its ongoing network overhaul, which to date is about 50 cities. Solavei – which has adopted a multi-level marketing approach (think Amway) to distributing its service – is selling the unlocked iPhone 5 directly to customers for the steep price of $700 through its retail partner GSMNation. But unlocked versions of the device will work just fine with Solavei’s SIM cards.

Solavei, however, won’t get access to T-Mo’s latest and greatest 4G network though. The MVNO confirmed that none of its customers will be able to tap T-Mobile’s LTE network, no matter what phone they own. T-Mobile has only launched LTE in seven cities, and it appears to be keeping its new 4G service for itself for the time being. I would expect that change eventually though. Sprint, for instance, is already opening its new LTE network to its numerous MVNO partners.

T-Mobile’s 3G network, though, is nothing to scoff at. T-Mo the only U.S. carrier to offer dual-carrier HSPA+, which is now accessible by the iPhone 5 and many other devices supporting its Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) band. T-Mobile also has several other MVNO partners, such as Tracfone’s Straight Talk Wireless, that can theoretically support the iPhone 5. Solavei is the only one we know of that is selling a nano-SIM card that fits into to device, but many consumers are getting around that problem by cutting larger SIM cards down to size.

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Bottom line: if you have a North American GSM version of the iPhone 5 — whether you bought it from AT&T or Apple or got it in from Canada – it can connect to T-Mobile’s new LTE network. It just has to be unlocked. So for AT&T customers looking to switch sides, that means you have to finish your contract, and ask your carrier to unlock the device.

The device will also work on T-Mobile’s 3G HSPA+ network (which T-Mobile calls 4G), just not in every city today. T-Mobile is in the process of a big network overhaul that will align all of its networks with the radios in the iPhone and most other AT&T devices. It’s completed the upgrade in about 50 cities covering 142 million people, but other cities are getting converted quickly.

The source of the confusion is over frequencies, which is why we’ve been seeing all of these references to the Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) band. T-Mobile runs two technologies in the AWS band, it’s LTE network and a portion of its HSPA+ network. The iPhone 5 will support LTE in the AWS band, but it won’t support HSPA+ over AWS. The iPhone 5, and all previous versions of the iPhone, will work on its new upgraded HSPA+ systems in the PCS band.

Apple will release a new version of the iPhone 5 next month that will make all of the band differences completely moot. The updated version will support HSPA+ on both AWS and PCS band. It will even be able to access T-Mobile’s dual-carrier 42 Mbps HSPA+ network, which current and older versions of the iPhone cannot.

All of this is probably still extremely confusing so I’ve broken it down into a Q&A, which hopefully will answer any lingering questions.

How do I know if my iPhone will work on T-Mobile’s networks?

For the iPhone 5, check your model number. It must be the A1428, sold by AT&T, the Canadian operators or Apple. Older iPhone models will also work on T-Mobile’s 2G and 3G networks. All of these devices must be unlocked, though, or they’ll be blocked.

How can I be sure I’ll have access to T-Mobile’s LTE and HSPA+ networks?

For LTE, it’s simple. T-Mobile launched LTE in seven markets this week: Baltimore, Houston, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Jose, and Washington, D.C. New York City is scheduled to come online this summer along with a bunch of other yet unnamed cities.

For HSPA+, it’s a bit more difficult to tell since T-Mobile doesn’t have any kind of map that tracks which markets have HSPA+ running on the PCS band. They make regular updates on their blog and to the media. PCMag has the most the recent list of T-Mo’s 49 iPhone-optimized cities.

As a general rule of thumb, though, if T-Mobile has LTE in your city, then HSPA+ will be in all the right places, too. And if you get a new version of the iPhone 5 next month, it will work on all of T-Mobile’s network.

When will I be able to bring my old iPhone over to T-Mobile? 

You can do it right now if you like. T-Mobile already has millions of iPhones on its network, running over its 2G and 3G services. In order to access LTE though, you’ll have to wait until Apple updates iOS, authorizing the iPhone 5 to use T-Mobile’s network. Apple hasn’t given a date for when this will happen, saying it will come as an over-the-air update.

Will I be able to access dual-carrier HSPA+?

On a current iPhone, the fastest 3G network you’ll have access to is its 21 Mbps single-carrier system, since all of T-Mo’s dual-carriers are in the AWS band. T-Mobile will eventually launch dual-carrier in the PCS band, but that will take some time. It has to close its acquisition of MetroPCS and convert a lot of old GSM networks to 3G first. If you’re set on accessing the dual-carrier network in the near future, then you’ll need to get one of new versions of the iPhone 5.

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Even if you don’t happen to live in nTelos’s operating territory of 6 million people in the Virginias, Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina and Ohio, its name might still ring a bell. That’s because nTelos was one of the first small providers to land the iPhone during Apple’s big carrier partner expansion of 2012. Many people, including us, noted the irony that a tiny rural carrier could sell the iPhone, while a U.S. giant like T-Mobile could not. (T-Mobile, in addition to launching LTE this week, also joined the iPhone club).

nTelos has tapped Alcatel-Lucent for the whole LTE kit and caboodle. The Franco-American vendor will supply the wireless infrastructure, including its ultra-compact remote radio heads, and the LTE mobile data core. Alcatel-Lucent will also replace parts of nTelos’s older 2G CDMA network with a new 3G CDMA EV-DO architecture, giving customers faster data rates when they aren’t in 4G coverage.

No word yet on where exactly in the Virginias nTelos will launch, though its headquarters in Waynesboro, Va., might be a good bet. According to RCRWireless, nTelos holds both PCS licenses and Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) licenses, which means its devices could line up with those of Sprint or MetroPCS.

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Those optimistic about 2013 point to the second half of the year (now only four months away) as when we’ll begin to see some stronger growth. In their view, Europe will be better, the U.S. will be stronger, China will begin to reaccelerate in earnest, currency will be stable, and (perhaps most importantly) the year-over-year (YoY) comparisons between 2012 and 2013 will be easier because mid-2012 was so weak. Moreover, as EMC CEO Joe Tucci stated during the company’s recent earnings call, “You can’t starve IT for too long,” which suggests that better times must get rolling again. On the other hand, CEO John Chambers’ statement in the Cisco earnings call, that perhaps 2012 represents the new normal, might be a better indicator of what we can expect in 2013. We’ll see.

That said, here’s what we’re expecting for 2013.

Table 1. 2012 and 2013 worldwide IT spending (in $ billions)

Overall, smartphones and tablets will lead the way, with a 5.6 percent worldwide IT growth rate in 2013. While Apple’s tepid forward guidance in its recent earnings call and its implications for smartphones and tablets gives us pause, we expect the category to continue to lead, with growth in the 20.4 percent range in 2013. In hardware, 2013 will look like 2012, with smartphones and tablets buoying the otherwise-weak spending in the PC, peripheral, and server segments. (This will be offset somewhat by stronger storage and network hardware spending.) Software continues to flourish — especially solutions-related software like SaaS-enabled customer-relationship management (CRM), supply-chain management (SCM), and industry vertical systems like health care. This sector will continue to grow in 2013. Finally, services has experienced a punishing 2012, and this area will only look modestly better in 2013.

A methodological note: We’ve reevaluated our model and determined that we have underweighted business-process outsourcing (BPO) as a service category. As such, we are restating 2012 and 2013 growth rates to accommodate a higher weighting of BPO in our services spending. The net is that growth in services and all spending are a bit more robust, since BPO is growing faster than the aggregate of traditional IT services. The full methodology can be found at the end of this report.

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• IT spending update, third quarter 2012
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Revenue for commercial or business PCs fell 4 percent, and for consumer machines it was off 13 percent, but Whitman saw the bright side.

“Against the backdrop of overall PC market contraction in the fourth calendar quarter, we gained 1.4 points of market share in PCs over the prior year, including a 4.6 point gain in the U.S.,” Whitman said Thursday night. She also cited the company’s new EliteBook Revolve convertible, ElitePad 900 as well as its new Google Chrome-based notebook as reason for optimism going forward.

After Whitman’s opening remarks, Raymond James analyst Brian Alexander pressed her on PSG, noting that its profits were off  50 percent year over year.

“We are committed to this business,” Whitman said in response. “We are going to compete on differentiation, whether that is form factors, increased focus on mobility, a multi-OS strategy, multi-chip strategy, frankly relevant to various industries, we’ve got great response to our ElitePad 900 that can be customized by industry and then services.”

She also acknowledged that pricing will be “problematic and quite competitive … but we think we can manage that.”

HP has wavered on whether it would keep or jettison various businesses over the past year. Its proxy statement in December noted that the company would consider selling off or divesting some businesses as needed. So, given that the company had broached — then retracted a possible PC business spin-off once before — that got tongues wagging again.

This news comes just weeks after PC and server rival Dell announced plans to go private – news which prompted HP to put out its own comments inviting Dell’s customers to avoid the uncertainty of a leveraged buyout and jump ship to Hewlett-Packard.

Given Whitman’s statement of support for this margin-stressed business unit, HP is either in it for the foreseeable future, or talking it up to enhance its value to a potential suitor. Hey, you’ve got to wonder, right?

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I was joking about the tablet “fad” of course; I’ve been sharing details of the fast-growing tablet trend for some time. Over a year ago, I explained in a GigaOm Pro report why the “PC” you buy in three years won’t be a PC, but instead will likely be a tablet (subscription required).

The numbers are in

To be fair, desktops are the dinosaurs of the PC industry as laptops first enabled mobility that smartphones later extended. So maybe the fact that only 20.1 million more desktops than tablets shipped in 2012 doesn’t impress you. Instead, take a look at the laptop market, where tablet shipments approached 63.5 percent of laptop shipments last year.

Think about that for a second. The consumer tablet market arguably started with Apple’s iPad in 2010. And in three years, the market is nearly equal that of desktops and is on track to surpass laptops possibly this year. All it would take is the roughly the same rate of growth for both tablets and laptops.

That’s not an unreasonable assumption and if it holds true, 229 million tablets would hit the market in 2013 while the laptop market would shrink to just under 200 million units.

What’s different? Everything.

Why is this market changing? Again, one need only look to the past to see the future. I said this last March when discussing how tablets could outsell PCs in 2013:

“Mobile devices are enabling new economies, opportunities and functions we couldn’t envision just a handful of years ago. Ignore this trend and you’re sure to think there’s no way tablets could ever outsell PCs, let alone do so within the next two years. Look at the next generation embracing tablets, however, and you start to see that the idea isn’t so far-fetched after all.”

With new application stores selling touch-optimized software on lightweight but capable hardware, tablets — and smartphones to an equal degree — are disrupting the traditional computing markets along with our ideas of what “computing” actually is. Full-featured legacy apps and devices will be around for years yet, but mobile apps are breaking features into bite-sized chunks of instant functionality at the tips of your fingers.

An alternative view of this disruption is to suggest that the PC and tablet market don’t really compete against each other. That sounds reasonable on the surface. After all, if there are tasks you need to complete requiring a desktop or a laptop, you’re likely to use one of those. But three points come to mind with that way of thinking.

Three reasons the trend will continue

First, many consumers and enterprises see tablets as more than just the toys that some dismissed them as in 2010. That’s evident by the actual figures of shipments and to a degree, sales. How often do you see a particular laptop or desktop that’s sold out or has a several week wait before delivery? Now consider the same for tablets: short supply for them could be related to production issues, of course, but strong demand is part of the equation as well.

Second, I’m seeing more and more instances of people hanging on to their older computers longer. That’s just anecdotal of course; I don’t have a massive sample size to work with. Don’t take my word for it, though. Check with your family and friends and see if the trend holds: Potential tablet purchases are likely to outweigh PC acquisitions.

Last, you can see the industry reaction to the tablet market. It’s undeniable; look at WinTel: Intel is working feverishly on getting its chips to work with mobile operating systems while also reducing the power draw. Microsoft’s Surface products? They’re Redmond’s answer to the tablet market with Surface RT trying to offer a best of both worlds between tablets and traditional desktop software such as Microsoft Office.

Again — because I know I’ll get the “PCs aren’t going anywhere” responses — the traditional PC will be around for years yet. Some computing activities just aren’t suited to the capabilities of tablet. But the problem for PC makers, Microsoft and others that figured their market was secure for ages is that the disruption already happened. Reacting now is too late because the market has already shifted in a new direction. It’s only just now that the evidence really shows the PC market won’t have a chair to sit in when the music stops playing.

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Now another analyst house has weighed in, with related but slightly different metrics. This time it’s GfK, which has been looking at the situation specifically in France and reckons that tablet sales will actually overtake those of notebooks this year. Specifically, GfK is forecasting 5.1 million tablet sales and 3.9 million notebook sales during 2013.

Why is this? GfK puts it down to the fact that tablets have gotten much cheaper, and the average price of PCs is actually going up slightly, no doubt due to the profusion of ‘premium’ ultrabooks. Also, 9.4 million French households now have more than one PC and, due to the ability of tablets to substitute in many use cases, the rise of the tablet is lengthening the renewal cycle for PCs.

Note that that’s “many” and not “all” use cases – GfK’s surveying found that 70 percent of French people don’t see tablets as an outright replacement for PCs. Also, the analyst house was keen to stress that the evolution of hybrid tablet-notebooks and the possible success of Windows 8 could change matters during the year.

Of course, this is about tablets and notebooks, not tablets and PCs as such. Most notebooks are built that way to include an element of portability – an area where tablets have them beat. I find it hard to see proper desktop machines or 17-inch laptops going away anytime soon, though, so the question in my mind is what the ratios will look like once the dust has settled on what is clearly a time of much more rapid change than we could have predicted a couple of years ago.

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Worldwide, Dell and Acer were among those PC makers hit the hardest. Lenovo and Acer, which saw positive gains, didn’t fare as badly, as IDC’s chart shows below. Apple, whose sales data from IDC is only available in the U.S. was basically even with Mac sales from the previous year.

To add insult to injury, not only did the PC fare terribly during the gift-giving discount-frenzy holiday season, the results also reflect the inauspicious debut of Windows 8. Even Microsoft is moving its customers toward tablets for basic computing. At this point, it can’t be too much longer until tablets outsell PCs.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user ercwttmn

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Coupled with the markets T-Mobile has already upgraded, it has a new HSPA+ network running in the PCS 1900 MHz in 37 cities, including many of the country’s largest. T-Mobile isn’t updating its coverage figure for the overhauled network, but these new markets will add considerable numbers to its last count of 100 million people covered.

T-Mobile will begin selling the iPhone sometime next year, but in the interim it has been trying to lure customers with unlocked iPhones over to its network. Its biggest obstacle, however, was the fact that its old network configuration could only supply the iPhone with 2G speeds. By relocating its HSPA+ from the Advanced Wireless Service (AWS) to the PCS band, it can now link to the iPhone’s 3G radios, but T-Mobile also clears up space for its LTE launch next year.

Update: Interestingly enough, T-Mobile customers won’t be the only ones benefiting from this upgrade. T-Mobile mobile virtual network operator Solavei said it would take advantage of its wholesaler’s reconfigured network to support the iPhone as well. Like T-Mobile it won’t sell the iPhone, but it will sell a micro or nano-SIM that fits into an unlocked iPhone and allows customers to take advantage of its $49 unlimited voice, text and data plans. Other MVNOs like Straight Talk already offer similar iPhone SIM activations, though they work mainly on AT&T’s HSPA network. Now that the reconfiguration is well underway, expect more MVNOs to start offering iPhone support over the T-Mobile network soon.

Here is the full description of the new upgraded markets from T-Mobile’s blog:

• New York, including The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island
• Newark, N.J., including the surrounding cities of East Orange, Elizabeth, Jersey City, North Bergen, Paterson and Union City
• Boston and Cambridge, Mass., including the surrounding cities of Amherst, Andover, Arlington, Bedford, Belmont, Billerica, Braintree, Brockton, Brookline, Burlington, Canton, Chelmsford, Chelsea, Chicopee, Dedham, Everett, Framingham, Hadley, Holbrook, Holyoke, Lawrence, Lexington, Lowell, Ludlow, Lynn, Malden, Marblehead, Medford, Melrose, Metheun, Milton, Nahant, Natick, Needham, Newton, Quincy, Reading, Revere, Salem, Saugus, Sommerville, Stoneham, Swampscott, Tewksbury, Wakefield, Walpole, Waltham, Watertown, Weston, Westwood, Weymouth, Wilmington, Winchester, Winthrop and Woburn
• Springfield, Mass.
• Providence, R.I., including the surrounding cities of Cranston, North Providence, Pawtucket and Warren
• Philadelphia
• Detroit and Warren, Mich., including the surrounding cities of Dearborn, Romulus, Royal Oak, Sterling Heights and Troy
• Dallas, including the surrounding cities of Arlington, Carrolton, The Colony, Denton, Farmers Branch, Flower Mound, Frisco, Garland, Grand Prairie, Irving, Lancaster, Lewisville, McKinney, Mesquite, Plano, Richardson, Rowlett and Southlake
• Fort Worth, Texas, including the surrounding cities of Keller and Mansfield
• Austin, Texas including the surrounding city of Round Rock
• San Antonio
• Tampa, Fla., including the surrounding cities of Clearwater, Largo, Safety Harbor, St. Petersburg and Vinoy Park

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• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE
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Dish didn’t get everything it wanted though. While Dish wanted its satellite spectrum re-designated for mobile carrier use, it wanted to keep using satellite’s much higher transmission power, which ultimately would have allowed it to build a much more powerful network and boost the value of its spectrum.

Sprint, however, has designs on spectrum neighboring Dish’s 2 GHz licenses. It’s been waiting for the FCC to auction off licenses in those airwaves – known as the PCS H block – adding their capacity to its LTE network. Sprint claimed that Dish’s proposal would produce such a high-powered network that it would wash out any signals in the H block. Sprint asked for restrictions on Dish’s transmit power, and it appears to have gotten them.

We haven’t seen a final order, but an FCC spokeswoman said the commission has approved both Dish’s terrestrial network and a proposal that paves the way for an H-block auction next year. Both Dish and Sprint have put out statements saying they’re pleased with the results.

The question is now whether Dish actually plans to build a network or if it will just flip its spectrum. As you might expect, now that Dish has its 4G approval its stance on building or running a competing network appears to have become more fluid.

“Following a more thorough review of the order and its technical details, DISH will consider its strategic options and the optimal approach to put this spectrum to use for the benefit of consumers,” Dish SVP and senior counsel Jeff Blum said in a statement.

There are rumors bubbling up that Dish and Sprint will now put aside their differences and run a joint network, using Sprint’s infrastructure and Dish’s airwaves. Of course, Sprint is the subject of a lot of rumors these days. Reports are again surfacing that Sprint plans to buy out its WiMAX provider Clearwire before its takeover deal with Softbank closes.

Dish photo courtesy of (CC BY 2.0) Flickr user Dave Lindblom.

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