Sprint's WiMAX Plan

January 10, 2007, 10:47 PM by Scott M. Fulton, III

Scott Fulton, BetaNews: Sprint Nextel showed off WiMAX capability at CES this week, while at the same time, they put forth some pretty lofty-sounding predictions numbers. But when you take an in-depth look in the numbers, as Sharon Fisher did, they may not be lofty enough. Sharon?

Sprint said it plans to launch WiMAX services in four cities this year – Baltimore, Chicago, Washington D.C., and one other – and that WiMAX service will be available to 100 million people by 2008. Not that they'll have 100 million subscribers, but 100 million potential subscribers.

So what does that mean?

WiMAX is like WiFi on steroids. You go into Starbucks' and you can use their WiFi within the store and maybe for a couple of hundred feet outside the store. That's because WiFi is a local-area network. WiMAX (which stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, and is IEEE 802.16e) runs in the 2.5 GHz spectrum (which Sprint acquired through its purchase of Nextel) and is a wide-area network, so a station can transmit data for more like three miles, at speeds of from 2-5 Mbps. It has the range of a cell phone network, but whereas a cell phone network – even a 3G one, which can transmit data – is primarily focused on voice, WiMAX is primarily focused on data, said Daryl Schoolar of In-Stat. In fact, Sprint is calling it "4G."

Sprint is partnering with Intel – which recently said it's putting WiMAX functionality into its Centrino chipset, which will let vendors cheaply make WiMAX devices; Samsung, Motorola, and now Nokia. Basically, each of those three phone vendors is going to be given a city to launch in – Motorola said it will have 1,000 sites in Chicago, Samsung will have Washington D.C., and Nokia will have its own city. Sprint is doing the network, and over the next couple of years they plan to invest $3 billion in it. In addition, LG Electronics said they going to develop an 'infotainment' device, and hopefully they'll have HD figured out by then.

So what you're eventually going to have is WiMAX built into phones, tablets, laptops, cameras, camcorders, and then you can upload and download data from anywhere, Schoolar said. You can go out to Yosemite and take a picture and upload it to Shutterfly, assuming they put a WiMAX transmitting station out there. And that's actually one big advantage of WiMAX – because of its wide range, you could put one transmitter in rural areas and more economically provide broadband Internet service to those areas.

The other interesting thing is that Sprint is saying it may charge a flat fee for unlimited devices, on the order of $55 per month including wireless service, instead of charging per device. And of course that's certainly going to inspire vendors to make it broadly available and consumers to use it broadly. However, there are no mobile WiMAX devices certified yet, so it'll be at least six months before we see any of those, which is why the deployment isn't expected til later in the year, Schoolar said.

Now, a population of 100 million by 2008 isn't that big. Cingular has more than that with its 3G network now, and people have already been complaining that it isn't available enough, which is why Apple didn't use it for the iPhone. 100 million people doesn't even comprise the top 100 major metropolitan areas, though Sprint already has enough spectrum to cover 85% of those markets. So I'm still not going to be able to get it in Idaho anytime soon.

Scott Fulton: We're most of the way through a week's worth of CES coverage, and we still haven't found a solution to the Idaho broadband access problem. Let's see if we can converge WiMAX with Idaho by Friday. Sharon, thanks.