Sprint to Gain Access to 2,300 SBC Wireless-Fidelity Locations
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Sprint Corp., the No. 4 US mobile- phone company, said its customers will get access to 2,300 public wireless Internet connections run by SBC Communications Inc.
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Sprint Nextel has started selling femtocells, small base stations for homes to improve coverage.
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(InfoWorld) - Sprint Nextel's ambitious Xohm WiMax vision will be based on a radical change in the way users pay for the service compared with cellular plans. Users will sign up for wireless broadband for a day, a month, or a year without a contract tied to a specific device. Payment could be made via a credit card wirelessly. The pricing approach, described in broad strokes by Sprint chief technology officer Barry West Wednesday at WiMax World in Chicago, will be designed on the principle of "affordable" broadband and "around the needs of the individual," he said in an interview. That approach breaks down the concept now seen with cellular plans, in which users typically buy a two-year contract in part to subsidize the cost of a single mobile device that a user is locked into using. A Sprint spokesman explained that the proposed pricing will rely on subscriptions, but not contracts in the sense associated with typical cellular contracts. And the longer the subscription a customer buys, the cheaper the service will be, he said. West said Sprint will announce pricing early next year, but also said it will probably be based on tiers of service. The cost of devices, such as laptop cards able to transmit mobile WiMax, will approximate the cost of a 3G broadband laptop card today, he said. In response to a question from an audience member, West also said that Xohm will not be backed by what the industry calls service-level agreements, a kind of guarantee that a minimum bandwidth will be provided or the customer receives a refund. "We will give you a good experience, but not SLAs," West said. Several Sprint executives have described Xohm WiMax speeds that are expected to be 2Mbps to 4Mbps, although the technology is capable of 10Mbps. At a demonstration onboard a moving tour boat on the Chicago River Tuesday night using Motorola gear, mobile WiMax shared across 12 laptops and cell phones was clocked at 2.5Mbps downward. West noted that the demonstration was across only one channel, and that Sprint will be able to offer many channels to handle users at a single antenna site, offering plenty of bandwidth for many users. West, who calls himself a technology "pragmatist," said he does not envision any hidden technology bugaboos in the nationwide rollout of Xohm planned for next year. In the next three years, he has predicted 50 million devices, such as laptops and mobile phones, will be WiMax-certified. Getting the certification process for interoperability in order will be difficult, but he said that even if there are 100,000 different devices, it is conceivable all of them could be served from only 10 different chip sets. "That's not unmanageable," he said. By contrast, West said Xohm's biggest challenge will be servicing the needs of 210 million Internet users in the United States alone, and meeting their demands for access, applications, and services. In his keynote, West said some critics have already begun to question whether West's predictions for Xohm's growth are too ambitious. He said commercial rollouts are still on schedule for the second quarter of 2008, and work has begun on 10,000 base stations nationally, with 20,000 WiMax antennas. The initial rollout in Chicago and Baltimore/Washington in December is "pretty much on target," he added. As for competition, West said he doesn't see Verizon Wireless or AT&T.
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Ushering in New York City's fourth-generation high-speed wireless internet, Sprint Nextel taps Samsung to provide WiMax infrastructure for the city. The same duo will create infrastructure and equipment for similar networks in Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Boston.
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Sprint Corp. (FON.N) said on  Friday it made a deal that will let it nearly double the number of places it offers short-range wireless Internet connections.
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Sprint Nextel has decided to consolidate its two headquarters, eliminating a relic of the merger of Sprint and Nextel Communications in 2005.After that deal closed, the new company set up its corporate headquarters in Reston, Virginia, which had been the home of Nextel, and established an operational base in Sprint&#39;s home of Overland Park, Kansas. Now it will have just one main office, in Overland Park.The move was widely anticipated as a new CEO, Dan Hesse, took over the troubled operator. Consolidating the networks and corporate cultures of Sprint and Nextel has proved harder than merging them financially, and it has weighed down a company that has enough problems already, according to industry analysts. Sprint is losing subscribers and struggling to distinguish itself as the number-three player in the U.S. behind AT&amp;T Wireless and Verizon Wireless. It is close to a limited launch of its WiMax mobile broadband network but is unlikely to reach its WiMax coverage goal by the end of this year, an executive said Wednesday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.Since Hesse took the helm in December, the company&#39;s top financial, marketing and sales executives have left, and it has announced plans to lay off 4,000 employees.Consolidating management in Overland Park will cut travel costs, bring executives closer to the company&#39;s operations and make better use of Sprint&#39;s real estate assets, according to a company statement. The move will require relocation of only a small number of executives, and Sprint will continue to have &quot;a very significant employee presence in Reston,&quot; the company said. Sprint has about 4,400 employees in the Washington, D.C., region and about 13,300 in the Kansas City, Missouri, area, where Overland Park is located.Sprint traces its roots to the Brown Telephone Co., founded in Abilene, Kansas, in 1899, according to the company&#39;s Web site.
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Wireless carrier Sprint has signed contracts with Lucent, Nortel and Motorola for network upgrades, including the development of high-speed Internet services.
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SBC Communications Inc.  said on Monday it would offer access to its network of 3,900 public Wi-Fi Internet access points to its high-speed Internet subscribers for &#36;1.99 per month.
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OVERLAND PARK, Kan. -- Sprint (NYSE: FON - message board) and SBC Communications Inc. (NYSE: SBC - message board) today announced a reciprocal Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) Internet service roaming agreement that
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Residential and small business customers of SBC Communications Inc. in Flint, Ann Arbor and metro Detroit can now access their home and wireless voice mail as well as e-mail accounts
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Customers of Sprint and SBC Communications will be able to use both companies&#39; wireless Internet connections with less hassle under a reciprocal deal announced Friday.
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Sprint and SBC Communications have reached an agreement under which their Wi-Fi customers will be able to use both companies&#39; wireless hot spots.
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WASHINGTON (CBS.MW) -- SBC Communications said Monday it will offer high-speed wireless access for $2 a month to customers of the company&#39;s DSL Internet service.
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Sprint has awarded a $3 billion contract to Motorola, Nortel and Lucent to upgrade its wireless network to handle high-speed Internet traffic over mobile phones and computers.
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With 36 rounds of bidding concluded Wednesday morning, the Federal Communications Commission auction of the highly coveted 700-megahertz band of the wireless spectrum has shifted to a faster-paced stage 2. Under rules designed to promote more competition, the number of new bids rose from 87 in Round 35 to 203 in Round 36.
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Sprint Corp. said yesterday it will acquire Nextel Communications Inc. in a $35-billion deal that will create the nation&#39;s third-largest wireless phone carrier, Sprint Nextel.
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InfoWorld - Sprint Nextel plans to cooperate with enterprises on the rollout of its WiMax mobile broadband network, letting the customers install and own short-range base stations in their buildings with automatic roaming onto the carrier&#39;s WiMax network outside.