Dan Dooley: machine-to-machine solutions will
generate lower ARPUs, but there will be millions
of applications
Sprint provides the US mobile connection to
Amazon’s Kindle e-reader
Dan Dooley is looking forward to providing mobile services not for people but for machines.
Some of the machines will be used by people — to monitor their health, to check their children or to feed their e-readers with news — but they won’t be what we know today as mobile phones.
And for Dooley, the president of Sprint Wholesale Solutions, that means a whole new set of markets for the company he has worked for since 1996.
“Of course, machine-to-machine solutions will generate lower ARPUs,” concedes Dooley: each of them will produce less revenue for Sprint than a conventional human user with a smart phone or a 3G dongle.
But there’ll be so many of them that the result will be good for the company, he says. “There will be millions of units, though the revenue won’t really start until 2011.”
Machine-to-machine is just one of the areas under Dooley’s management at Sprint. He’s also in charge of what most people in the business understand as wholesale. “On the one side, carriers outside the US want to penetrate the US,” he says.
Some of them — he points to the Japanese operator KDDI — have a relationship with Sprint for both wireless and wireline customers.
Global MPLS
And there are the smaller carriers which want to sign a single deal that will allow their customers to call into US numbers. “We want to collaborate with them. We have a global MPLS network that is engineered to be congestion-free, and we can offer a seamless connection. We’re the leader in having carriers from outside the US come in to extend their MPLS networks.”
On the MPLS side Sprint has deep connections around the world, he adds — to operators north and south of the US border in Canada and Mexico, and to others around the world. “We have the same quality network outside the US that we have inside,” says Dooley.
Sprint has been an international operator for 20 years or more, notes Dooley, who once ran the company’s operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa from its office in Brussels.
In the 1990s and early part of this decade operators had so much capacity that it was impossible to fill. “We’re finally getting to the point with content that the capacity is filling up,” he says.
And technology is moving on, to serve customers that need end-to-end ethernet access. “We’re working with 20 partners round the globe on ethernet,” says Dooley, listing countries such as India, Brazil and Chile where businesses are starting to want ethernet from premises to premises.
Across Russia
Customers want more advanced applications, where low latency is important, he adds: applications such as Citrix and Salesforce.com. That’s one of the key reasons Sprint has invested in a cable across Russia and Mongolia, providing a shorter and therefore faster route between Europe and the Asia-Pacific.
Previously Sprint, as a US company, tended to hub everything in the US. When latency was not so important, that didn’t matter. Today end users want their Citrix and Salesforce connections to be fast.
Sprint’s terrestrial link across Russia is good for its service level agreements — “twice the levels of our competitors”, says Dooley — though it is more expensive to operate than a traditional submarine cable the long way round.
Dooley’s business also focuses on wholesale deals at home in the US with cable operators and others wanting to offer mobile services as MVNOs.
Sprint’s competitors AT&T and Verizon are both expanding from fixed and mobile communications into TV services, so Sprint wants to help cable operators — which are already offering fixed telephone services — to expand into mobile.
These use Sprint’s 3G network and the 4G WiMax service run by its associate, Clearwire, in which Sprint is the 51% shareholder.
“This is a real growth area for us,” says Dooley. For operators “the bundle is becoming king in the US, and people want all their services in one bill”. Cable operators do not have their own mobile licences — so need to pair up with Sprint to offer mobile phone and internet under their own brand as a bundle with TV, fixed telephony and fixed internet.
Even though the use of mobile phones “is getting pretty saturated”, he sees no limit yet to the number of mobile devices in the world.
“Every day there are 10 new mobile devices being made for every baby being born in the world,” he says.
Child-tracker
And many of those devices will soon be on washing machines, or camcorders, or on other machines. There’s a child-tracker, which will fit on to a backpack and alert parents. Smart power grids will be controlled by mobile devices, he adds. And people will use mobile devices to monitor their heart — feeding the information quietly back to a health centre.
“This is the new growth area,” says Dooley. “At least once a week we get phone calls from people with new ideas for applications.”
There were applications in asset tracking of everything from taxis to packages in the early days, and Sprint got off to a good start with consumer-oriented machine communications with Amazon’s Kindle electronic book: the pioneering US version is uploaded and managed automatically through the Sprint network, though Amazon has shifted to AT&T for its international version.
There are other e-readers on the way, that he can’t say much about: “a really cool e-reader based on newspapers” that “hits the streets in May”.
That all goes to prove, he concludes, that “wireless is a great industry to be in”. GTB
Dan Dooley
President of Sprint Wholesale Solutions
1984-88 Indiana University at Bloomington
1988-90 MBA, Fairleigh Dickinson University
AT&T, holding management positions in finance, marketing and sales, ending as Brussels-based managing director of Europe, Middle East and Africa region
1996 Joined Sprint, initially responsible for 270 bilateral relationships
2006 VP international and wireline markets
2008 President of wireline business unit for Sprint Nextel, responsible for $6 billion business
2009 President, Sprint Wholesale Solutions