Sprint says WiMax on track for end of April
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Sprint Nextel  is on track to  launch commercial services for its next-generation WiMax  high-speed wireless network at the end of April, Chief  Technology Officer Barry West said on Tuesday.
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The Sprint Corporation said that it expected sales and profit to continue growing in 2005 thanks to continued strength in its wireless division.
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Sprint, which recently said it would spend up to $5 billion on a mobile high-speed wireless standard by 2010, said it had awarded the New York WiMax market to Samsung.
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Shares of Sprint Nextel Corp  and Clearwire Corp  both rose sharply on Tuesday following a Wall Street Journal report that the two companies have revived talks to form a joint venture to build a high-speed wireless network using WiMax technology.
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The products are out there for Sprint's WiMAX 4G wireless network, and the network service finally might follow, according to officials of Sprint and the WiMAX Forum.
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Sprint and Samsung have extended their WiMax partnership with the Korean vendor being named the lead provider of infrastructure equipment for the New York market.
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By DAVID TWIDDY    KANSAS CITY, Mo.  -- Sprint Corp...
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In an attempt to put aside speculation that it might sell its Xohm WiMAX service, Sprint dutifully but formally reminded everyone this morning that it's proceeding with its plans for a soft launch.
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Sprint's planned combination with  rival wireless carrier Nextel Communications Inc. will get a  thorough review by the Federal Communications Commission, the  agency's chairman said on Wednesday.
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Sprint Nextel Corp. on Wednesday said it would continue to support its Nextel-branded walkie-talkie network, which industry observers had speculated the company might shutter.
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Sprint Nextel is looking for new ways to fund its WiMax network, according to the Wall Street Journal. Apparently, Sprint investors are concerned about the network's $3bn expense.
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Sprint Nextel Corp., the nation's third-largest cellular provider, said Tuesday it will use an emerging technology called WiMax to build a new high-speed wireless network.
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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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* Sprint&#39;s strong wireless Internet service and Nextel&#39;s walkie- talkie feature popular among mobile professionals would be a competitive combination.
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Sprint Nextel and Clearwire are back in talks about a possible WiMax joint venture after&#160;a previous attempt to work together fell apart last year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing unnamed sources.Sprint&#39;s continued downhill slide, spurred by defecting Nextel customers, means the deal would make even more sense now, Nadine Manjaro, a senior analyst with ABI Research, told IDG News Service.&quot;They&#39;ve lost so much from iDEN (Integrated Digital Enhanced Network) defections, they don&#39;t really have the money to invest in WiMax,&quot; she said. iDEN is the push-to-talk technology used in Nextel&#39;s network, which Sprint bought in 2005 and continues to struggle to digest.Clearwire and Sprint, which own the bulk of 2.5GHz spectrum in the country, said in July last year that&#160;they planned to jointly build a nationwide WiMax network. But in November the companies said they had failed to reach a final agreement, and terminated their letter of intent.Since then, Sprint hasn&#39;t managed to improve its fortunes. The third-largest operator in the U.S., Sprint&#39;s subscriber base declined by 337,000 in the quarter ending Sept. 30. &quot;Sprint is not doing so well now,&quot; Manjaro said.Rather than building a scaled-down network with the assets it has, Sprint would do better if it partnered with Clearwire and also opened up to outside investors, said Manjaro, who worked for Sprint until last April.From the beginning, she said, Sprint hoped to attract investors to help build the network. &quot;They realized it would take a lot of money,&quot; she said. Attracting other parties has now become more urgent. &quot;They didn&#39;t anticipate being in the financial position they are in now,&quot; she said.Ideally, Sprint and Clearwire would create a joint venture that would allow each company to retain a stake in the company but also attract other companies, possibly Intel or Google, to provide needed capital, she said. A combined company would be able to negotiate better deals from vendors, she said.Clearwire has already built wireless broadband networks in 16 U.S. states. Sprint has launched services in Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., under the Xohm brand.Spokespeople from Clearwire and Sprint declined to comment on the possibility of any renewed talks.
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Sprint Nextel Corp  on Tuesday  said it will spend up to $3 billion over two years to build a  high-speed wireless data network using WiMax technology in a  bid to capture new growth from emerging mobile services.
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Despite early adoption woes, manufacturers are still confident the WiMAX standard will take hold.