Sprint WiMAX set to blast off in two US cities by end 2008

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Sunday, 18 May 2008 20:13

Opinion and Analysis

US telco Sprint is finally moving ahead with its WiMAX plans and will have a WiMAX 4G network installed in Baltimore and Washington DC by the end of 2008, after a year of endless testing - but two cities is far from complete US coverage.

BetaNews has reported, amongst many other news sources, on Sprint finally getting its act together on the WiMAX front.

After dropping an earlier deal to launch WiMAX with its partner Clearwire, which caused concern over whether WiMAX would get off the ground in the US, Sprint has done a new deal with WiMAX spectrum holder Clearwire to get Sprint's stupidly named "Xohm" (read Zoom) network up and running at last.

Sprint is desperate to launch WiMAX in 2008 before AT&T and verizon launch their own 4G technologies in 2009, based on LTE - or Long Term Evolution technology, the successor to 3G and 3.5G technologies.

Samsung is one of the major companies providing wireless equipment for both testing and sale to the public, including an E100 PC Card for notebook computers and one of Samsung's UMPCs (ultra mobile PCs) with an inbuilt WiMAX module.

A series of earlier tests were successful, but now we are getting to the meaty stage of the equation, with an actual end-of-year rollout date at last.

BetaNews quoted Sprint CEO Dan Hesse from a February analyst conference call saying: "Now taking data to the next level [will be] 4G or fourth generation [wireless], which is often referred to as WiMAX. I am extremely encouraged with what I have seen. Our soft launches in Baltimore, Washington, and Chicago offer confidence in the performance of the technology."

WiMAX will get a further boost when Intel starts building WiMAX modules directly into notebook computers, much as it did with the Centrino platform where it started including Wi-Fi 802.11b, and later a/b/g modules, as standard.

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