Sprint, Back In The WiMax Saddle?

I’ve been following the voluminous press around Sprint’s WiMax partnership announcement today. I’ve been following the news mostly to see if I’m missing anything, and it seems I’m not. It looks like a good news/bad news story for end users of the service. The good news is that there is a solid consortium around Sprint’s Xohm initiative which, until now, seemed increasingly more promise than substance. With the most recent dissolution of the agreement with Clearwire and subsequent deployment delays, I was beginning to think we’d see LTE before WiMax coverage that Sprint had promised. In short, it looks like a solid team – albeit with some fluffy marketing language. Intel’s roadmap was already committed to supplying WiMax chipsets in its devices as a way to drive up sticker price with a small increase in BOM cost, regardless of the network build out.

The bad news: this does nothing to get Sprint closer to reaching it’s committed 100M PoPs with the Xohm service by year’s end as stated in mid-2007. No doubt this will raise questions on the longevity of Sprint as a whole and some doubts around how soon any of us will see Xohm service in North America. It’s also been suggested that the backhaul Sprint has in place (mostly T1) is underpowered for the throughput the Xohm service will need to backhaul once it’s up and running with a decent number of users. Microwave backhaul is an answer to this, but not something that Sprint seems to have invested heavily in.

So, for now it reads to me like a lot of good intentions which do nothing to diminish the daunting task of building out the network and it’s requisite backplane to make Xohm a reality at the level of expectations Sprint and others have built around WiMax. New company or not, what matters now is execution, and the clock is ticking before WiMax begins to lose spotlight to true 4G technologies like LTE.

By Chris Silva

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