McGuire’s Law

A couple of days have passed now since AT&T’s industry-changing announcement.

Sprint’s official position is clear:

The combination of AT&T and T-Mobile USA, if approved by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC), would alter dramatically the structure of the communications industry.

AT&T and Verizon are already by far the largest wireless providers. A combined AT&T and T-Mobile would be almost three times the size of Sprint, the third largest wireless competitor. If approved, the merger would result in a wireless industry dominated overwhelmingly by two vertically-integrated companies that control almost 80 percent of the U.S. wireless post-paid market, as well as the availability and price of key inputs such as backhaul and access needed by other wireless companies to compete.

The DOJ and the FCC must decide if this transaction is in the best interest of consumers and the U.S. economy overall, and determine if innovation and robust competition would be impacted adversely and by this dramatic change in the structure of the industry.

I won’t comment further, but I’m curious what others think. Feel free to leave your comments.

Today is the five year anniversary of my first post on this blog!

Wow!

A lot has changed in five years.

The industry has gone through a major transformation! (e.g. Five years ago Apple and Google weren’t active in mobile.)

My job has changed significantly. (In 2006 I was director of strategy in one of Sprint’s divisions, today I’m vice president of strategy for the corporation. Five years ago, Sprint and Nextel had just merged and the merger still looked brilliant. )

Life has also gotten busier outside of work.

When I started blogging, my goal was to use the blog to share my opinions on the industry. Early in my blogging career, I set the goal of posting a new piece every weekday. These days, I’m doing well if I post one opinion piece in a month and some weeks I struggle to post anything at all. More than anything, this blog has become a way to interact with customers to help improve their experience with Sprint.

To be honest, I feel stressed out by the pressure to keep this blog current. I think it’s time for a change - time to destress.

I will continue to look for opportunities to help customers and I will continue to look for opportunities to share my opinions on the industry. But I’m calling time-out on my posts of lists covering industry news. I think y’all have better sources for that information anyway.

Over the next few weeks (months?) I hope to revisit some of the major themes that I’ve covered over the past five years.

Stay tuned!

Big Bell Dogma is the innovation stifling mindset, most often seen in large market-dominating companies, where the big company protects the status quo, tries to control what happens in the ecosystem, and believes they can perform tasks better than others in the ecosystem who specialize in that function. Big Bell Dogma hurts consumers, hurts the ecosystem, and slows market growth, but sometimes results in higher profits for the big companies. Here are recent examples:

• Verizon to throttle data speeds for heaviest users
• T-Mobile, AT&T deadlock on 3G data roaming deal
• Will Verizon’s public-safety partnership with Motorola keep competitors from getting D-block spectrum?

Converging products into a cellphone is one way that mobility is getting built into every product, but it’s not the only way. Every month, I’ll focus on devices that are integrating the power of mobility into products themselves in ways that create new value for the customer. Power up!

• Billboards
• Glaciers
• Bee Hives

Research is good. Free highlights from expensive research reports are great. Here are some recent headlines:

• Mobile Music Revenues to Reach $5.5 Billion by 2015 - but Piracy Threatens
• Femtocell Deployments More Than Double in 12 Months with Strong Growth Beyond the Home
• Wireless Local Area Network Chipset Market to Double in 2011 Courtesy of Wi-Fi
• Machine-to-Machine Connections to reach 2.1 Billion Devices by 2020
• Global Data Revenues to Reach $500 Billion by 2015
• One Billion People to Have Access to WiMAX Networks by Year-End
• Industry to Ship 5.5 Million LTE Smartphones by End of 2011
• Global Mobile Transaction Value Will Near $1 Trillion by 2014
• Global HSPA Mobile Broadband Connections Have Surpassed 400 Million
• NAND Flash Consumption in Tablets to Rise Nearly 400 Percent in 2011
• Worldwide Mobile Device Sales to End Users Reached 1.6 Billion Units in 2010
• Mobile Data Bandwidth Jumped by 73% in Second Half of 2010
• Zero to a Billion; 802.11ac-Enabled Device Shipments to Soar by 2015
• Active Users of Mobile Money Services to Exceed 200 Million Worldwide by 2013