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LightSquared says it has signed up five companies for its wholesale LTE service
LightSquared has faced something of an uphill battle in getting its wholesale 4G LTE network off the ground -- even including accusations that it's a threat to national security -- but it looks like it's having fairly good luck attracting some customers. According to Chief Marketing Officer Frank Boulben, LightSquared has signed agreements with five companies so far, including two carriers, one website, a national retailer, and a device manufacturer -- none of which it's able to name, of course. Boulben also revealed that the company, which plans to compete with the likes of Verizon, AT&T and Clearwire, is finished raising money for the "short term," and that it plans to begin trials later this year in Las Vegas, Baltimore, Denver and Phoenix once it finishes its lab testing in Dallas.
4G shocker! T-Mobile USA boss talked to LTE wholesaler earlier this year
Clearwire isn't the only American company building a carrier-independent (if you can call majority ownership by Sprint "carrier-independent") 4G network, you see -- and it would certainly behoove T-Mobile to investigate options that let it stay on a more GSM-aligned path for its next-gen network than WiMAX would, right? That might be where Harbinger Capital Partners comes into play, a group that recently bought up a bunch of satellite and terrestrial spectrum with the intention of creating a wholesale LTE network into which companies -- companies like T-Mobile, for instance -- could buy. Indeed, Financial Times is saying that T-Mobile USA chief Robert Dotson chatted with Harbinger recently about partnership opportunities, seemingly right around the same time that he talked to Clearwire. Clearly, it'd seem that T-Mobile's US division needs to decide very, very quickly how it's going to handle the 4G transition, lest it get caught behind the very same 8-ball it found itself battling in the 3G race; then again, pushing 21Mbps HSPA+ as aggressively as it has been the last few months might just keep it going for another few years. Fast data is fast data, after all.
