MetroPCS Communications, a leading provider of unlimited prepaid wireless communications service will launch Long Term Evolution 4G mobile broadband services in the second half of 2010. Ericsson will provide infrastructure while Samsung Telecommunications America will provide the company's initial LTE handsets.
The network upgrade likely will have wider implications for consumers using other service providers as well, as MetroPCS likely will offer more affordable mobile broadband prices and packaging than have been available to date, from tier one and other providers.
As MetroPCS has made a market largely on users who are substituting mobile service for landline, one suspects the firm might be tempted to try the same thing for broadband access.
As MetroPCS uses the CDMA air interface for voice and text services, it will introduce dual-mode LTE/CDMA devices as part of the plan.
MetroPCS has been a price leader in the prepaid space, and the new capabilities likely will put pressure on the tier one carriers to lower their mobile broadband tariffs further.
One wonders whether the tier one providers might not also, as part of that shift, create differentiated mobile broadband tiers that are quite a bit more "application specific," or at least tailored in key ways to the usage profiles different users have.
Business users have different requirements in the reliability area than casual consumer users. Heavy users of mobile video will require more bandwidth, but might also be offered heavy-usage plans at a higher price.
The challenge is to balance simplicity with consumption. The problem right now is that few mobile users have any idea how much bandwidth they consume and for which applications. That means consumers will have a hard time figuring out which plans they ought to buy.
Providers, on the other hand, might need to work on their billing and operations processes so they can flexibly track usage, make that information available to end users, and then create differentiated plans tailored to actual end user behavior.
It isn't yet clear what packaging innovations MetroPCS might be willing to introduce. But it has long positioned itself in several clear market segments, including users who can replace wired telephone service with a mobile, especially users with low needs for mobile support outside of the home market.
Its mobile broadband efforts are likely to build on that profile.
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