Sprint, Clearwire in WiMax network pact
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Sprint Nextel Corp and Clearwire  Corp  plan to connect their WiMax high-speed wireless  services to allow customers to move between their networks  thereby boosting demand for the technology and cutting costs.
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Sprint Nextel is taking a different path to high-speed wireless than its rivals: Instead of bidding billions of dollars on airwaves in a federal auction, Sprint is building a network that uses WiMax technology, a move that has attracted plenty of criticism.
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Now that&#160;WiMax has been certified as a form of 3G mobile data infrastructure, Sprint Nextel is changing its tune about the WiMax network it plans to launch commercially in April.Last year when Sprint was shopping around for a &quot;4G&quot; technology, it had a lot to say about how 4G would do something 3G networks couldn&#39;t. WiMax won out as its 4G network of choice. But in a keynote address Thursday at CTIA Wireless I.T. &amp; Entertainment in San Francisco, an executive of Sprint&#39;s WiMax business, Xohm, sang a different tune.&quot;I think we spend entirely too much time talking about the Gs,&quot; said Atish Gude, senior vice president of mobile broadband operations at Sprint. Last week, the Radiocommunication Sector of the International Telecommunication Union certified WiMax as a 3G technology, providing a seal of approval many governments require for carriers to deploy it. Wider deployment generally means lower equipment prices, which helps service providers.That&#39;s not to say the carrier no longer wants to differentiate WiMax. In his presentation, Gude played up the wide band of spectrum Xohm will be able to use, which he said will cut down on delays for individual users the same way a multilane freeway can move faster than a two-lane highway even when the speed limit is the same. In the real world, a lot of people want to use the network at the same time, he said.But more important is the business model of the two networks, Gude said, characterizing the traditional cellular business as more closed and controlled, while Xohm&#39;s business will tap into the dynamics of the open Internet. The company is opening itself up to partners for application development as well as connected devices, he said. The best known of these deals, announced in July, was&#160;an agreement with Google to develop a variety of Internet-based services.Sprint hopes a wide range of devices, including cameras, media players, and in-car electronics, ultimately will connect to the WiMax network. Instead of Sprint stores, they will be sold in the most logical places for their device types, such as consumer electronics stores. The first devices to come for Xohm next year will be wireless cards for notebook PCs, which Gude expects to be sold in the computer departments of electronics stores.The company will also have open API for third parties to develop services to run on the network. As an example, Gude envisioned a video portal that users could navigate using the five buttons traditionally found on video players. Xohm will probably charge for some of what it offers to third parties, but its aim is not to stifle innovation, he said.Sprint isn&#39;t getting out of its cellular business now that it&#39;s starting Xohm -- which it expects to reach 100 million U.S. residents by the end of 2008 -- but seems to be looking at it in a different light now.&quot;We are a content distribution industry,&quot; Gude said. It&#39;s just that for most of cellular&#39;s history, all the content has been user-generated and consisted of talking.
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Motorola is going after the emerging WiMax market in a big way. This week the company has been showing off its new hardware and software at WiMax World USA in Chicago -- one of six U.S. metropolitan areas in which Motorola will build the network infrastructure for Sprint Nextel&#39;s high-speed &quot;Xohm&quot; network.
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U.S. telecom carriers Sprint (NYSE: FON) and SBC Communications (NYSE: SBC) have announced a reciprocal deal, under which their customers will be able to use both companies' wireless Internet connections more easily.
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Clearwire  and Sprint Nextel   have made progress on reaching terms for a roaming deal  for their high-speed wireless networks based on WiMax  technology, Clearwire's Chief Executive said on Wednesday.
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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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Wireless Internet provider Clearwire Corp. and cellular operator Sprint Nextel Corp. have reportedly restarted talks to combine their high-speed wireless WiMax networks.
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Through a deal with rival SBC Communications Inc., Sprint Corp. will almost double the number of places subscribers can wirelessly log on to the Internet at high speeds, according to a report from the Kansas City Business Journal.
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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 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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Rumors that Sprint and Clearwire may be reuniting for purposes of WiMAX have investors feeling good.
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Intel and Clearwire, Craig McCaw&#39;s wireless broadband services company, plan to jointly develop and deploy wireless broadband WiMax networks, the companies announced today.
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SAN FRANCISCO - Intel Corp. will work with Clearwire Corp., a wireless Internet service provider founded by cellular pioneer Craig McCaw, on future networks based on WiMax wireless broadband technology.
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(InfoWorld) - Sprint Nextel and Clearwire have entered an agreement to jointly build the first nationwide WiMax network in the U.S., the two companies announced Thursday. The vendors will work together on the WiMax network and expect to offer service to a broad range of users, including the U.S. government, public safety agencies, businesses, and consumers, they said. The two companies plan to reach 100 million U.S customers by the end of 2008, said Gary Forsee, Sprint Nextel chairman and CEO, during a press conference. The WiMax network, which will be marketed under a common brand, will compete with and compliment existing broadband services, he said. The deal "will fundamentally change the communications landscape in this country," added Ben Wolff, Clearwire CEO. "By working together, a nationwide network becomes possible." Sprint Nextel will build out about 65 percent of the network, and Clearwire will build out the remaining 35 percent, the companies said. The agreement still needs to be finalized, and it will be subject to regulatory approval by the U.S. Department of Justice and spectrum transfers from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. Sprint Nextel will focus on geographic areas covering approximately 185 million people, including 75 percent of the people located in the 50 largest U.S. markets, while Clearwire will concentrate on areas covering approximately 115 million people. A year ago, Sprint Nextel announced its plans for a nationwide WiMax network. The partnership with Clearwire allows Sprint Nextel to invest less money to create a nationwide network, Forsee said. The agreement will also allow the two companies to provide customers with "more breadth and depth of support," he added. The partners said the wireless network will provide broadband-speed Internet access to customers. The agreement will enable "seamless" roaming across the network, Forsee said. WiMax is designed to operate more than five times faster than current third-generation wireless networks. The arrangement will allow the exchange of spectrum between Sprint Nextel and Clearwire to enable each company to build out its portion of the network and to enhance service in its buildout territory, the companies said. Clearwire will be able to use some of Sprint Nextel's wireless infrastructure. The initial term of the arrangement is 20 years, with three 10-year renewal periods.
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Sprint said on Friday it has made a deal that will let it nearly double the number of places it offers short-range wireless Internet connections.
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(InfoWorld) - With wider national coverage than either company could have had on its own, Sprint Nextel Corp. and Clearwire Corp. say they can achieve on their joint WiMax network some of whatÂ Google Inc. and others want to seeÂ in the prized 700MHz band. TheÂ companies announced Thursday they will link their respective WiMax wireless broadband networks to give subscribers a seamless roaming experience across territories that eventually will cover 300 million U.S. residents. The network will deliver between 2M bps (bits per second) and 4M bps downstream and about half that speed upstream, they said. Sprint and Clearwire plan to use WiMax so that subscribers can choose among a wide range of devices built to the open standard on which the technology is based. In addition, they intend to let users access any application or service on the Internet, said Atish Gude, senior vice president of mobile broadband operations at Sprint. The upcoming auction of 700MHz radio spectrum around the U.S. has sparked a fierce debate between traditional carriers and Google Inc., Frontline Wireless LLC and others over how that spectrum should be used. Current mobile operators generally sell a limited set of devices locked to their networks and favor their own applications among the offerings their customers can access on their phones. Google told the FCC on Friday it won't bid unless the government requires any-device, any-application networks. It also wants a rule forcing the winners to sell wholesale network access to other service providers. Sprint doesn't have plans for wholesale access. Sprint, which announced its WiMax plans last year, said Thursday it owns spectrum licenses for the WiMax band that cover 185 million U.S. residents. Clearwire has spectrum in the same band to serve 115 million people. The combined network should be fairly comprehensive, covering urban, suburban and rural areas across the country, which today has a population just over 302 million, the Census Bureau estimates. After "soft" launches in Chicago and Washington, D.C., at the end of this year and commercial availability starting next year, the companies together aim to reach 100 million people by the end of 2008. This is the same 2008 goal Sprint had given previously by itself, but it was an aggressive goal then and is now a conservative estimate, Gude said. The companies did not estimate when the full network would be completed. Given the higher frequency Sprint and Clearwire plan to use, at 2.5GHz, their network is likely to need more base stations than a similar network using 700MHz, which travels over long distances and through walls more easily. Clearwire already operates a wireless broadband service and has been planning to convert it to standard mobile WiMax, which is only now emerging as a commercial technology. The company is backed by heavy hitters including Intel Corp. and Motorola Inc. Sprint, struggling against larger rivals AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless Inc., could use Clearwire's helping hand. The deal may let Sprint realize its WiMax dream at less expense, said IDC analyst Godfrey Chua. There seems to be little overlap between the two carriers' licenses, so the partnership won't really hurt competition and is likely to win government approval, Chua said. The first users will access the network with standalone modems, notebook add-on cards or PCs and smaller Ultra Mobile PCs with embedded modems, Sprint said. But it sees mobility as the key driver of the network and believes WiMax handsets will arrive by 2009, Gude said. However, Chua thinks ever-faster cellular technologies have the edge for mobility. The Sprint-Clearwire network will compete mainly against DSL (digital subscriber line) and cable modem services, with the advantage that subscribers can set up a notebook away from home and enjoy the same service. It could significantly boost broadband competition, he said. "It's making the world a little bit more interesting now," Chua said. Â