bellhead.net

CrunchGear picked up a rumor via mobile mag which I find hard to digest. Supposedly Verizon Wireless is looking at purchasing Alltel wireless, the nations largest tier 2 wireless provider, a title earned after their acquisition of Midwest Wireless last year, who pretty much fills in those undesirable areas the tier 1s miss. Today they claim 10 million subscribers, enough to put Verizon Wireless over the current subscriber heavyweight at&t (cingular) if bought.

However, this is a non-trivial matter given Sprint’s recent 10 year roaming agreement with Alltel, to include high speed data services, that was just inked last summer. Clearly Sprint is in no position to make a counter offer, but never say never.

Furthermore there is the operational nightmare of integration. Yes, Alltel is CDMA, but the only practical interoperability point in the architecture is at the handset. I know Motorolla would argue against such a claim with its IOS technology (a standard open interface between the Access gear and the Mobile Switching Complex), but it’s insignificant when viewed in the context of the whole CDMA market. The end result is a single vendor solution usually being deployed in a geographic region. For Verizon this division of vendor gear is based on legacy fiefdoms going back to the Bell Atlantic Mobile, AirTouch Cellular, PrimeCo PCS, and GTE Wireless assets that were merged to form Verizon Wireless. This is unlike Sprint, where there had been some unity to its CDMA deployments (at least until it inherited Nextels GSM/IDEN mess), or at least a unified operational plan. Devil in the details will most likely show that the Alltel offices are mismatched to the Verizon regions, requiring a new operational paradigm or the eventual call for the proverbial forklift.
And let us not forget how one-sided Verizon has treated its roaming arangements, unlike Sprint with its affiliates and roaming partners. There is a distinction to be made between the aftertaste of competitors merging and that of a hierarchical master-serf coming together.

Nevertheless, customers should benefit when the dreaded roaming icon is pushed further back to the edges of nowhere.