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Tiny Cellcom lands the iPhone 5; will offer nationwide LTE coverage

Kevin Fitchard — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 16:00:55 +0000

Wisconsin regional carrier Cellcom won’t have to endure another long waiting period before it gets access to Apple’s newest smartphone. The iPhone 5 will go on sale at Cellcom on Sept. 28, just a week after it arrives at Verizon, AT&T and Sprint.

Cellcom isn’t the only small carrier to land the new iPhone. GCI, Appalachian Wireless, C Spire and Leap Wireless’s Cricket Communication will get the device this month as well. But Cellcom has an advantage those other carriers don’t: namely a network covering 230 million people.

Based in Green Bay, Wis., Cellcom was one of the first carriers to participate in Verizon’s LTE in Rural America program, in which Big Red leases portions of its 700 MHz 4G spectrum to regional carriers, who in turn use it to build out LTE networks. As part of the package, Verizon and its partners sign reciprocal roaming agreements. Verizon gets access to Cellcom’s LTE in footprint covering the population centers of eastern Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, while Cellcom gets access to Verizon’s footprint of 230 million in nearly 400 markets. Not a bad trade.

Cellcom’s LTE coverage through its roaming agreement with Verizon

LTE is still young in the US, and so most of the carrier haven’t yet brokered the roaming deals that interlock carriers 2G and 3G networks – and one of the big fears of rural operators is they never will get brokered. But Verizon’s rural LTE program is the exception as Verizon seeks to fill in the gaps between major markets as quickly as possible. Appalachian Wireless is also part of the program though it has yet to deploy a network.

While Leap and C Spire will definitely enjoy the prestige only the iPhone can bring, some of the device’s appeal may suffer from the limitations of their own LTE networks. C Spire launched its LTE network earlier this week in a handful of Mississippi markets and plans to have a coverage in 31 markets by the end of October. But it’s not clear if the iPhone 5 will work over its 4G networks. C Spire hasn’t confirmed what spectrum it is using for LTE, according to FierceWireless, but if it is using the 700 MHz A block spectrum it bought at auction for LTE, then its iPhone 5 will most definitely be sans-LTE. None of the three versions Apple announced Wednesday support that band.

Leap Wireless is still in the process of rolling out its LTE network that will cover 21 million people by year end, but so far it’s been slow going with only a single market live, Tucson, Oka. Leap will also have some spectrum issues supporting the iPhone. It is deploying its LTE network over three bands: PCS, Advanced Wireless Services, and the same 700 MHz A block used by C Spire.

The new iPhone supports the first two bands but only in separate variants. The CDMA model – which Leap will have to sell in order to use its 2G and 3G networks – only supports the PCS band. So how well Leap can take advantage of the iPhone 5’s capabilities depends on how much PCS spectrum it can devote to the LTE band.

Meanwhile GCI has yet to reveal its LTE plans so its iPhone 5 will automatically be a 3G-only device.

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To small carriers the iPhone is about prestige, not activations

Kevin Fitchard — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 22:43:08 +0000

Cellcom CEO Pat Riordan won’t tell you how many iPhones the small Wisconsin operator has sold since it began offering the device on April 29. He will say that the iPhone broke all of Cellcom’s single-day sales records. He will say that iPhone customers sign up for pricier voice and data plans. He just won’t give specific sales figures, and at the end of the day, those numbers don’t really matter.

The iPhone gives Cellcom a critical tool in competing against the big operators in its little swathe of eastern Wisconsin and northwestern Michigan. Cellcom prides itself in providing better service and coverage than the big national carriers, Riordan said, and that’s allowed it to grow to 300,000 subscribers in a fairly limited territory (its largest market is Green Bay, Wis.). The problem is customer loyalty can only carry Cellcom so far if it’s not offering one of the most desired smartphones in the US.

“Customers were telling us they were simply going to leave us because we didn’t have the iPhone,” Riordan said. “We know our sales had been falling between the end of the year and April, and we think not having the iPhone was the reason.”

Cellcom’s 3G footprint

Riordan doesn’t think that it will suddenly start raking in hundreds of thousands of new customers because of Apple, though it is giving Cellcom’s current customers a lot of reasons to stay: 75 percent of its iPhone sales were upgrades.

The iPhone’s other key benefit is its allure, Riordan said. While there are definitely customers that enter Cellcom’s stores and zero in on the Apple display — ignoring all other merchandise — a good deal of customers are lured into a Cellcom retailer by the iPhone only to leave with an Android device, Riordan said.

Of the seven small US operators that landed the iPhone, only two revealed specific sales numbers for the second quarter: Alaska Communications sold 11,000 iPhones (which it gave away free with 3-year contracts) and regional competitor GCI sold 9200. Considering that Alaska has 120,000 total customers and GCI has 141,000 those are significant returns. But at any of the big three operators, Apple sells millions of devices each quarter.

Apple isn’t going to push the meter on its global device sales through small-fry carrier distribution, but the iPhone will have plenty of tangible benefits for those operators. Many of these regional and rural players already have the network tools and community standing to compete with the big operators in their little corners of the US. Cellcom, for instance, built its own LTE network by leasing Verizon’s 700 MHz spectrum, and it offers nationwide service through roaming agreements. It’s quarterly sales skew between 60 percent and 70 percent toward smartphones, just like the big operators.

The addition of the iPhone, however, gives Cellcom a complete smartphone portfolio and the final reason for Midwesterners to take it just as seriously as Verizon or AT&T.

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U.S. Cellular launching LTE in March with 2 Samsung gadgets

Kevin Fitchard — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:19:32 +0000

Soon consumers in smaller towns and cities across the U.S. will have access to their first LTE network as U.S. Cellular ramps ups its commercial 4G service. The regional CDMA operator will start selling two Samsung devices – the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in March and the Galaxy S Aviator smartphone in April — making the odd move of launching a connected tablet before it releases its first 4G phone.

The network will go live in several small communities in Iowa, Wisconsin, Maine, North Carolina, Texas and Oklahoma, as well as in some of U.S. Cellular’s bigger markets such as Milwaukee, Madison and Racine, Wis.; Des Moines, Iowa; Portland, Maine; and Greenville, N.C. (You can see full coverage maps here.) U.S. Cellular said the launch will cover 25 percent of its CDMA footprint, which currently serves 6.1 million customers.

The big exception on that list is Chicago, the carrier’s largest market and headquarters. When U.S. Cellular and its spectrum partner King Street Wireless bought their 700 MHz 4G licenses at auction in 2008, they failed to win a key Chicago license, leaving a big hole in the operator’s 4G footprint. They appear to be working to rectifying that situation though. U.S. Cellular and Verizon Wireless are currently negotiating a spectrum swap that could put a critical 700 MHz Windy City license in regional operator’s hands.

U.S. Cellular said in many of its smaller launch markets, customers will see their first LTE service, though Verizon’s juggernaut 4G rollout has already beaten the carrier to many of the bigger towns like Milwaukee, Des Moines and Greenville. U.S. Cellular also didn’t reveal any details on how it would price the service, though its current 3G plans offer a hint. U.S. Cellular sells a 5 GB stand-alone tablet plan for $55 a month, and it bundles 5 GB in with its smartphone voice and SMS plans for about $40 a month.

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