Sprint says WiMax on track for end-April
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Sprint Nextel Corp  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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Almost a year after Sprint Nextel Corp. disclosed it would develop a mobile broadband network using WiMax technology, the wireless provider said yesterday it is teaming up with competing provider Clearwire Corp. to help build it.
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Sprint Nextel and its hardware partners sought to convince a small audience at the Consumer Electronics Show that their WiMax plans are on track, despite the recent departure of Sprint&#39;s CEO and the dissolution of its partnership with Clearwire.&quot;We are exactly where we said we&#39;d be,&quot; said Barry West, Sprint Nextel&#39;s CTO and president of the company&#39;s Xohm WiMax business unit. Sprint is in the process of soft-launching in Chicago and Baltimore, he said.Executives from Nokia and Samsung said they both expect to have user devices ready for the second-quarter launch. In addition, Motorola said it is working on a device that will operate over Sprint&#39;s EvDO (evolution, data optimized) cellular network, Wi-Fi, and WiMax.Since the&#160;ouster of Gary Forsee, the former CEO and chairman of Sprint Nextel, who was thought to be a champion of the company&#39;s WiMax plans, onlookers have speculated that the network might not roll out as planned. In addition,&#160;Sprint Nextel ended a partnership with Clearwire&#160;to jointly deploy WiMax, a further cause for uncertainty. Sprint has been hemorrhaging mobile subscribers and recording declining revenues since its purchase of Nextel.Beyond the unrest internally at Sprint, the company faces critics of WiMax who say that the technology won&#39;t work as well as cellular technologies in a mobile environment and that it won&#39;t support international roaming as easily as the cellular standards.But in describing the reasons why Sprint chose WiMax and why it intends to aggressively pursue the network, West further sought to soothe market qualms about the future.&quot;Being first to market is a huge advantage,&quot; he said. &quot;And WiMax technology is here, now, and mature.&quot;While an investment in a totally new technology requires a strong reason for change, this won&#39;t be the first time Sprint&#39;s doing it, he noted. WiMax doesn&#39;t follow on the upgrade path for CDMA, the basis for Sprint&#39;s cellular network, so it requires a totally new network.Sprint did that first when it moved from an analog cellular network to digital, West said. The same went for the move to third-generation technology, although in that case Sprint stuck with the CDMA path.Sprint also considered LTE (Long Term Evolution), a fourth-generation mobile technology, but one big disadvantage is that it&#39;s not yet available, he said.Moving to WiMax represents a shift to a new air interface technology: OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) instead of CDMA, which is the basis of the current 3G technologies. According to West, when CDMA is deployed in a wider section of spectrum, which helps boost throughput, the computational complexity required goes up exponentially. That requires higher-performance chips, which come with a steep price tag, he said.With WiMax, Sprint plans to use a wide section of spectrum that can dynamically switch from carrying data up or down, depending on user requirements, he said.Beyond the radically different network technology, Sprint envisions a very different business model than cellular, one that will support any kind of standard device.&quot;Look at the cellular model. It was very successful but also very frustrating,&quot; West said. He was referring to the business model in the United States where operators subsidize phones and then require long-term subscriptions from users.With Xohm, Sprint will allow any WiMax-compliant device to run on the network, he said. End-users will buy the devices themselves, probably at a variety of retail stores and hopefully for a low price because vendors expect the cost of WiMax chips to drop dramatically, like Wi-Fi. &quot;Since I&#39;ve got no money in you, I don&#39;t need a contract,&quot; West said. That opens the door to a wide array of new pricing scenarios. End-users could pay for the day, week, month, or on a regular subscription, he said.While West declined to cite specific prices, he said a monthly subscription to Xohm will be comparable to existing DSL rates.Initially, Sprint will sell PC cards and modems, but by the end of this year as many as&#160;10 different kinds of devices could be available, he said. Navigation and gaming devices are possibilities, he said.If the market has any doubts about Sprint&#39;s plans for the network, it should rest assured that, regardless, the future of WiMax is more certain, panelists said. &quot;WiMax is bigger than Sprint,&quot; said Sriram Viswanathan, vice president and general manager for Intel Capital and for Intel&#39;s WiMax business.Motorola alone has 17 contracts for networks and is involved in 60 trials, said Fred Wright, senior vice president and general manager at Motorola. &quot;This technology is real, it&#39;s not a fairy tale,&quot; he said.
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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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(InfoWorld) - The GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) family of technologies will continue to dominate the mobile infrastructure business over the next five years, a research company said Wednesday. Sales of network gear for WiMax, the hot new mobile broadband system, will grow by an average of 50 percent per year until 2011 but still only make up about 5 percent of the market worldwide, according to Dell'Oro Group. Meanwhile, versions of WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) will grab share away from rival EV-DO (Evolution-Data Optimized) technologies as mobile operators build their networks, said Dell'Oro analyst Greg Collins. The Redwood City, California, company on Wednesday announced a report on the mobile infrastructure market from 2006 to 2011. Backers of mobile WiMax have painted a bright future for the emerging technology, which is based on the IEEE 802.16e standard and designed to deliver multiple megabits per second over a range of miles (1 mile = 1.6 km). Collins didn't label WiMax a loser but said it will get off the ground slowly because it's an underdog when it comes to carrying voice calls. Emerging WCDMA and EVDO technologies have closer ties to the cellular world and will be better equipped to handle calls over the next few years, Collins believes, so most users will hang onto them. Dell'Oro forecast 2011 revenue of about $2 billion for WiMax network infrastructure that serves end users. Gear for other purposes, such as mobile operators' wireless "backhaul" links to cell towers, wasn't included. Broad adoption of WiMax will drive down its cost, further accelerating the rollout, according to Intel and other WiMax supporters. Dell'Oro's forecast growth rate could impede the technology's progress toward attractive consumer prices, Collins said, although it does share some features with other emerging wireless systems. The emergence of WiMax will be a sideshow to growing dominance of WCDMA technologies in the cellular world, according to Dell'Oro's forecast. Most of the world's mobile operators have grown up on GSM and are upgrading to WCDMA technologies, including the upcoming HSUPA (high-speed uplink packet access) and LTE (Long-Term Evolution) systems. The competing CDMA technology, with its own upcoming versions, has had strongholds in the U.S. and South Korea and been adopted in some other countries. Some CDMA carriers in developing countries, such as India and Brazil, are now migrating toward the WCDMA path, Collins said. Among other things, they want to serve travelers from other countries, most of which use WCDMA, to earn lucrative roaming charges, he said. Even in South Korea, some operators are looking away from CDMA because they are worried about support for future development of a minority technology, Collins said. CDMA's 3G technologies made up 20 percent of spending on mobile infrastructure in 2006 but will represent only about 13 percent in 2011, according to Dell'Oro. One reason WCDMA takes up such a large share of infrastructure revenue is that it's more expensive to upgrade to those technologies, said James Person, chief operating officer of the CDMA Development Group, which represents vendors and operators using CDMA. This is true, but CDMA's global footprint among mobile operators still is shrinking, Collins said.
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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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TechWeb - The company will be one of the first to test mobile Wimax in the United States.
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Sprint Corp., FON.N  the No. 3  U.S. wireless telephone service company, on Monday said its  2004 results would meet its prior estimates, and also released  an outlook for earnings and revenues in 2005.
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(InfoWorld) - WiMax World 2007 opens in Chicago Tuesday with major service providers and network equipment vendors expected to offer demonstrations and a few details on plans for mobile WiMax deployments that will hit their stride next year. Sprint Nextel CTO Barry West will provide an update of Sprint's Xohm wireless network in a keynote Wednesday. In August, he said the service will be launched in Chicago and the Washington/Baltimore area by year's end and will reach 100 million users by the end of 2008. Motorola, meanwhile, is planning to demonstrate its coming mobile WiMax technology from a boat in the waters of Lake Michigan. Many of the WiMax plans are focused on major hardware devices being sold to carriers for backhauling wireless signals from outdoor mesh networks that have Wi-Fi connectivity. Sprint's Xohm will be open access, giving WiMax-certified devices like laptops and handhelds the ability to operate at speeds up to 4Mbps, perhaps five times faster than what carriers call third-generation wireless speeds, West said in August. However, one vendor, MobileAccess Networks in Vienna, Va., announced new WiMax hardware today that will work in remote wiring closets of businesses to deliver WiMax capabilities alongside Wi-Fi, cellular, and public safety networks. The MobileAccess WiMax module, to be shown at the trade show, will undergo WiMax certification from Sprint, said MobileAccess CEO Cathy Zatloukal in an interview. "We expect several existing customers will be interested in it," she said. The module will fit inside an existing MobileAccess MA-2000 Universal Wireless Network box now deployed in many businesses to aggregate multiple wireless signals for Wi-Fi, cellular, and public safety, she explained. The value of having a WiMax module to add-in is that it will work alongside existing infrastructure and provides a single cabling infrastructure to support it. One MobileAccess customer, Tommy Russo of Akridge Real Estate Services in Washington, said he plans to add the WiMax module to his MobileAccess hardware when it is available. "WiMax will give us bigger play and more robust service," said Russo, CTO at Akridge, which provides Wi-Fi and cellular services in a downtown building for hundreds of employees and customers. "As more devices use WiMax, which will happen, it enables more things to connect, everything from telephones to laptops with WiMax." Russo said he expects building management and lighting controls could run over WiMax. Someday, WiMax could even be used to merge Wi-Fi and ZigBee, a wireless standard for embedded control devices, he said. Russo said he has seen the MobileAccess module, but he has not tested it and is eager to start testing as soon as possible. His building has been using voice-over-Wi-Fi for about 18 months. The price for the module has not been announced, Zatloukal said. MobileAccess' module is so far unique, although placing WiMax alongside other wireless modes inside a building will be important to other vendors, said Craig Mathias, an analyst at The Farpoint Group in Ashland, Mass., and a Computerworld columnist. MobileAccess competes with LGC Wireless in San Jose and Interwireless in Universal City, Calif., he said. At WiMax World, there will be plenty of demonstrations, including the module by MobileAccess, Mathias said. "The WiMax market is here now, and we'll see a rollout of commercial services this year, so the show is a chance to get your hands on it, to see what it does and what it costs. The reality is coming quickly, and we'll see how successful it will be." Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate
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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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WiMax products abounded at a large trade show this week, but Sprint's long-term WiMax plans remain hazy as the troubled carrier sorts out its priorities.
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Sprint Nextel and Clearwire announced a plan to build a nationwide WiMax network in the U.S.
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The message is clear at this week's Intel Developer Forum: The company wants to help you get more mobile. It's putting its weight behind WiMax, a wireless-data standard that has been five years in coming and still hasn't hit the consumer market.
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Sprint Nextel yesterday announced a series of partnerships aimed at deploying a high-speed wireless network called WiMax, as it offered glimpses of the new technology at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
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KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- 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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(InfoWorld) - Sprint Nextel has given WiMax technology a green light, becoming the first major U.S. carrier to back WiMax for its fourth-generation (4G) wireless data network. The third-largest U.S. mobile operator plans to start rolling out the WiMax network in late 2007 and hopes to reach as many as 100 million people with the service by the end of 2008. Offering downstream speeds of 2M bps (bits per second) to 4M bps, WiMax promises new power for bandwidth-hungry applications like mobile videoconferencing and large enterprise file transfers. With 4G, enterprises will be able to buy guaranteed throughput from a carrier, something they can't do with 3G, said Tad Neeley, an analyst at Gemini Partners Inc. For example, if a company paid for 1.5M bps upstream and downstream, remote employees could count on that speed no matter how busy the network was. Hardware partners Intel Corp., Motorola Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. will equip notebook PCs and a variety of mobile devices to use Sprint's 4G network. The 4G service will complement Sprint Nextel's 3G EV-DO (Evolution-Data Optimized) services, executives said. The carrier already offers video, music and other multimedia services on 3G, but that technology doesn't deliver the economics Sprint needs, said Barry West, Sprint's chief technology officer. WiMax service prices will meet Sprint's frequently stated goal of offering 1G byte of data per month for less than $20: "We are significantly south of that," West said. Motorola and Samsung's position in the device market, along with Intel's marketing power, will make this a turning point for WiMax, said IDC analyst Shiv Bakhshi. "WiMax was in need of a major player signing on to it," he said
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Sprint Nextel and its hardware partners today sought to convince a small CES audience that their WiMax plans are solid.