On 2008-04-25, Todd Allcock <elecconnec@AmericaOnLine.com> wrote:
> At 25 Apr 2008 03:07:25 +0000 danny burstein wrote:
>> Oh, and another reason to "leave some GSM capacity up"
>> is to prevent the FCC, on behalf of a competitor, pulling
>> a "you didn't use it, now you've lost it" line.
>
> Alltel is already using the bandwidth for CDMA. But, as a rural carrier,
> they have more capacity than they need, and from what I understand, just
> leave a few channels of GSM running for roaming use alongside their CDMA
> system.

All available evidence I have says there's not a lot of money to be
made providing roaming service these days, however. As far as I can
tell the trend now is to drive intercarrier charges for roaming down
close to nothing and to make your money not from other carriers'
customers' use your network, but rather from your customers' use of
other carrier's networks. That is, the value of roaming agreements isn't
the revenue from other carriers, it is the cheap access to other
carriers' networks that you can sell to your own customers.

What this means is that providing roaming service using a technology
your own customers don't use doesn't usually make sense. You won't
make much money from other carriers' customers, and you won't make any
more money from your own customers since they can't use the other carrier's
network. I'll hence bet that Western Wireless may actually have
had some GSM customers or other contractual commitments that are forcing
Alltel to keep the network up.

Also as far as I can tell (and it isn't what I would have guessed)
running a dual-technology network actually seems to add significant
costs. I know Movistar shut down the CDMA half of the network they
acquired in Mexico (taking pretty much all CDMA coverage along highways
in rural northern Mexico with it), and the amount Telefonica claimed
in their financial reports to have saved by doing this was surprisingly
large. I also know that the difference between the highly profitable
China Mobile and the never profitable China Unicom, two companies which
started out at pretty much the same place, is widely blamed on the additional
costs China Unicom took on to build and maintain their dual-mode
CDMA/GSM network. It seems to cost real money to do that.

Dennis Ferguson