Wednesday, April 30, 2014

AT&T Aims at GoGo, Plans to Offer In-Flight LTE by 2015

AT&T Mobility (NYSE: T) announced that they will make use of LTE technology and some of its spectrum to offer in-flight Wi-Fi services that will likely be operational by 3rd quarter of 2015. This move will directly challenges the current in-flight connectivity company like Gogo, Inmarsat, Row 44, and others.

Aircell's GoGo has dominated the slow-paced in-flight internet market, it looks like they will have a big competition poking their market. AT&T will be in partnership with Honeywell’s aerospace division to develop both broadband and "onboard" entertainment systems for aircraft.

John Stankey, chief strategy officer at AT&T said: "We are building on AT&T's significant strengths to develop in-flight connectivity technology unlike any other that exists today, based on 4G LTE standards. We believe this will enable airlines and passengers to benefit from reliable high speeds and a better experience. We expect this service to transform connectivity in the aviation industry."

As of the moment, specific details of AT&T's service in-flight service is still not clear, like the speeds of the service that they will support or the spectrum that they will use to power the service, and how much will it cost.

GoGo last fall said that they are developing a technology that will significantly speed up existing services.

This will be interesting since AT&T has deep pockets and lobbying muscle that can kick GoGo out of the top.

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Monday, March 10, 2014

Even With T-Mobile's Price Disruption Wireless Prices Still Rising

Although there are a lot of talk about T-Mobile's price disruption, the overall prices for the industry is still rising according to an article published by the Wall Street Journal.
Overall prices for wireless services are not going down and big names in the business including T-Mobile are being very careful to avoid a price war. Although, we must admit that T-Mobile have positively affected policies like early termination fees and contracts. 

Although John Legere the CEO of T-Mobile is all talk about their disruptive pricing on Twitter, the company's CFO Braxton Carter is privately telling their investors that they don't want a price war:

"T-Mobile raised the cost of its core unlimited data plan on Friday. The carrier says it has been competing more effectively by doing away with subscriber "pain points" like service contracts and international data fees. But its executives have also been signaling that they don't plan to start a price war. "When you really analyze a lot of the pricing moves that have been made, there has not been a significant repricing," Chief Financial Officer of T-Mobile Braxton Carter said at a Morgan Stanley conference last week.

It is basically the top guy in terms of finance of the company saying that they're not being really as disruptive on price as suggested on their commercials. Verizon has also said that the price war seen on the media is just hype:

"I think it is interesting given my years in the industry, how you hear things like price war and all that being kicked around in the media today and this is really nothing different than we have seen over the last couple of decades," Verizon Chief Executive Lowell McAdam said on a conference call last month.

Given that Verizon have been dominating with 80% of the retail market and special access market through AT&T. They don't see that there is a significant price war because AT&T and Verizon holds the big piece of the pie while T-Mobile don't have a commanding share at the moment. However, this could all change, if T-Mobile is allowed to merge with Sprint.