This Sunday, Sprint customers in the Baltimore area will be able to purchase a USB modem that’s capable of handling both 3G and 4G (Wi-Max) wireless signals. That’s a combined total of 7G! The device – called the U300 – is made by Franklin wireless and will cost $149 with a two-year contract and after a $50 mail-in-rebate. It’ll also be available in Baltimore-area Best Buy stores early next year. Customers will be able to purchase a $79.99 per month data plan that includes both 3G and 4G access – 4G, of course, only being available in Baltimore at the moment. Seems like it might not be a bad idea to roll this thing out in markets OTHER than just Baltimore so that people signing up for a 3G data plan don’t blow a fuse once 4G rolls out in their city and they have to go buy yet another device. Remember, though, this new Sprint WiMax initiative is contract-less so if you’re planning to go 4G-only, you might want to just wait until it’s fully available in your area since adding 3G to the mix requires a two-year contract. → Read More
The promise of Wi-Max is nothing less than high-speed wireless internet practically anywhere you go. Of course, the reality falls short, as it often does, but it still shows itself a worthy successor to normal 3G and wi-fi. This industrious tester zoomed around Baltimore and tested it out in different areas (70% of the city is covered at the moment), finding that speeds were generally on the order of 3-4Mbps, or about 400KB/s. That’s plenty for me, personally, which is good because technical max of 20Mbps probably isn’t going to happen unless you’re perched on the WiMax tower. Right now you can really only hit up the WiMax in Baltimore, but Sprint is working on dropping another $5bn into the rollout of a nation-wide network. Deep pockets! Maybe Sprint can help with the national debt. → Read More
Outside of Xohm, what does Sprint have going for it? According to some sort of investor advisory group, Glass, Lewis & Co., Sprint is also home to America’s most overpaid executives. Now that’s something it can brag about! Reuters lays it out simply: “top managers [were] awarded pay valued at nearly $74 million last year when the company struggle.” Sprint defends itself by calling 2007 a “highly unusual” year, one that saw the company hire a new CEO to help stop the bleeding, that is, customers fleeing to other carriers. And like a top-notch shortstop, the CEO received a hell of a signing bonus. The new CEO, Dan Hesse, earned a total of about $28.3 million last year. Normally, no one would much care how much a bunch of Sprint (or whatever other company) executives made, but when you see stories like AIG going hog wild at some lavish spa when the average guy is worried about his next mortgage payment during an election year, well, it’s probably something Sprint would rather not deal with. → Read More
Oh my! Three of the biggest laptop makers out there all announcing 4G/WiMAX/XOHM service. All on the same day, too. It’s almost as if it was planned. Acer has it in their big ones, Toshiba has it in their little ones, and Lenovo has it in just about their entire line. Boy, with all these laptops sucking up the signal, they might want to put those WiMAX points on higher ground! → Read More
Laptop Magazine, the most popular laptop magazine in the Scranton Airport, jetted down to Baltimore where they tested Sprint’s XOHM service in the wild. The results, when compared to Verizon EV-DO were impressive. It took 6 minutes to download a 233MB video while EV-DO tool 24 minutes while web pages loaded in about half the time, consistently, when compared to EV-DO. Their video, live from a Starbucks in Charm City, is kind of unthrilling – it’s just a dongle – but where is EV-DO going once this goes live? → Read More
Right as it leaves the starting gate, there might already be a bit of controversy surrounding Sprint’s 4G WiMax offering, XOHM. Silicon Valley Insider did a bit of digging through the XOHM policy agreement, and came across this little gem: “To ensure a high-quality experience for its entire subscriber base, XOHM may use various tools and techniques designed to limit the bandwidth available for certain bandwidth intensive applications or protocols, such as file sharing.” Looks like Sprint is giving themselves a bit of leeway to keep any bandwidth hungry protocols — such as BitTorrent, or Skype — from clogging up the pipes. Sorry Sprint – Comcast tried it, and you just can’t do that. No one likes it when a few people bog down the network for everyone else, but no one wants service providers quietly limiting the performance of their favorite applications, either. Be it that the FCC gets wind of this and holds true to their previous decisions, Sprint may have to change their game plan. If they follow in Comcast’s foot steps, this may mean bandwidth chokes for the heaviest users. → Read More
Turns out the September launch date rang true after all. Sprint announced this morning that their next-generation wireless data network, XOHM, has been launched in Baltimore. For $25-$30 a month or $10 a day, customers can ride the 2-4 Mbps waves without any need for a contract. Folks around the Baltimore area can nab XOHM-ready Samsung air cards for $60 bucks, a ZyXEL XOHM Modem for $80, or wait until XOHM-enabled laptops and tablets begin trickling out closer to the end of the year. [Via Phonescoop] → Read More
The WiMAX rollout should be right ’round the corner and Motorola is here with the USBw 100 adapter just in time. The companies first WiMAX device is coming in three tasty flavors – 2.3GHz, 2.5GHz and 3.5 GHz – to ensure a compatible version is available for your network’s frequency range. Thanks to multiple antenna technology and some Motorola wizardry, the USBw should provide seamless WiMAX network access. Pricing wasn’t announced, but Motorola at least let us know that it’s coming before the end 2008′s fourth quarter. → Read More
Remember just last week, when someone at Sprint said they’d still be launching their XOHM WiMax service in September? Turns out “September” is just a fancy way to spell “October” around the Sprint campus, with the company announcing that XOHM will launch in Baltimore come October 8th. Don’t cruise out to Baltimore to try to bask in the glorious rays of WiMax right off the bat, however. According to PhoneNews, the October 8th debut won’t be a commercial launch, with only select individuals gettin’ the chance to paw at the service immediately after the announcement. Once the switches are flipped in Baltimore, expansions are in the works for Washington, DC., Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Providence, with the latter four not expected until at least 2009. → Read More
After missing breezing right past the original April target, Sprint set September as the launch window for the Baltimore debut of its WiMax service, Xohm. As September draws to an end without word from Sprint, folks are starting to get worried that it might slip back again. Fortunately, Gearlog went and asked. The Response? “Launch still on for September.” That leaves just under two weeks for Xohm to make its first commercial debut. However, DSLReports is reporting a tip they received, saying that while the announcement will come on September 26th, the actual launch won’t occur until October 6th. Either way, it’s better than 2009. → Read More
After being delayed and delayed again, Sprint appears to finally be ready to roll out its high-speed WiMAX network, XOHM. The service will be offered to consumers in Baltimore starting in September. It’s been tested in Chicago and the Baltimore-Washington D.C. area but September will be the first month that XOHM will be commercially available to everyone. Chicago and Washington D.C. will get the service officially as well, likely not long after Baltimore. Sprint’s CEO Dan Hesse said that the two cities would get XOHM later this year, according to InfoWorld. It’d stand to reason that a more widespread rollout would ensue early next year. Sprint claims speeds of 2-4Mbps per user on the XOHM network. I’ll be most interested to see how it’s priced. If the monthly fees are aggressive enough, we might just see people ditching their cable and DSL connections altogether. → Read More
Sprint’s finally giving the thumbs up to its Xohm service, currently being tested in the DC area. Xohm is Sprint’s deployment of WiMAX, and it has spent millions getting it ready as a 4G network to replace the current 3G system. WiMAX is widely regarded as the successor to current generation cellular service, and Sprint’s the first one out of the gate with implementation. Look for devices to start appearing this summer as it starts turning on the service in markets across the country. → Read More
Speaking of Xohm, Sprint’s WiMAX initiative, rumors are swirling around Wall Street that Sprint will announce a partnership with Clearwire tomorrow, unifying their two disparate networks as one nationwide WiMAX network. This is fantastic news for WiMAX fans and a step in the right direction if the technology is going to take on competitor LTE, or Long Term Evolution, a wireless standard backed by AT&T and Verizon, among others. The partnership would also include Google, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Intel and would likely take the form of a joint venture. It could be announced as early as tomorrow morning. Sprint needs to trim some fat, but at the same time it needs to get its WiMAX network, which it’s already spent billions of dollars on, on its feet. Clearwire’s already in operation in many markets across the country, and by joining together both the networks and billing, it can do both. → Read More
Sprint’s Xohm WiMAX networks is facing another delay, though this one’s not because of faulty technology or delays in development, but because the T1 lines carriers traditionally use as the backhaul, or landline connection, aren’t adequate to support the base stations. In other words, Xohm is just now realizing that a 1.5Mbps T1 doesn’t have the throughput, or even a fraction of the throughput, needed for this kind of network. This means that new connectivity to the Sprint network, and thus to the Internet, will have to be put in place at all Xohm WiMAX base stations before it can be turned on. The problem isn’t the technology, but rather licensing and zoning. There are also problems with the billing system, but really until the data is there to be used, it’s a moot point. → Read More
The cost of your next notebook might just be subsidized by a wireless carrier. Acer today announced the Aspire 5920 notebook, which will contain a WiMax chipset and will be sold by upcoming WiMax providers like Sprint along with service packages, much like mobile phones are sold. The notebook is currently being manufactured by Taiwan’s Quanta Computer and will actually be available to all WiMax operators (not just Sprint), but they won’t be for sale “until Sprint or other companies start selling the devices with their WiMax services,” according to IDG News Service. → Read More
WiMax is going nowhere fast but that is not stopping a consortium of cable and tech companies from considering a plan to invest $3 billion more into a proposed bailout-through-merger of Sprint Nextel’s WiMax business (known as Xohm) and Craig McCaw’s Clearwire. The consortium that is reportedly being put together would include Comcast ($1 billion), Intel ($1 billion), Time Warner Cable ($500 million), Bright House Networks and Google ($500 million). This latest plan comes after Sprint Nextel’s disastrous $30 billion write-down last quarter of its Nextel acquisition, and is an attempt to salvage something out of that train wreck. It also comes after Intel recently balked at putting up $2 billion itself. Intel wants to sell WiMax chips and has already sunk $600 million into Clearwire. But even Intel has its limits. WiMax is a promising technology and these are early days. But even an extra $3 billion won’t be enough. Building out a nationwide WiMax network could cost as much as $8 billion to $12 billion. And there could be more technical hiccups. (An Australian WiMax provider is already giving up). Clearwire, which is already operating its broadband wireless service in parts of the country, lost $727 million last year, on revenues of $151 million. So far, it has raised at least $2.75 billions dollars through private investors ($900 million in 2006), an IPO ($600 million), and a $1.25 billion line of credit. As for Xohm, it has only soft launched with employees in three cities. Nevertheless, last year it cost Sprint Nextel $577 million in capital expenditures and operating expenses. I can see why Google might throw its hat into the ring here—anything to promote more broadband wireless networks. But Comcast and Time Warner Cable should stay away. The logic behind the investment seems to be that the cable companies could use the WiMax network to counter the moves by Verizon and AT&T into their turf (with TV service over phone lines). It is being suggested that the cable companies would be able to launch their own white-label mobile phone and high-speed Internet services over WiMax , or use it to distribute their TV content to computers and new digital devices. Here’s where that logic breaks down: 1. WiMax is more an alternative to fixed broadband Internet access than it is to mobile phone service. Verizon and AT&T have a huge head start and customer lock-in when it → Read More
Dan Hesse, Sprint Nextel’s new CEO and the man in charge of turning the troubled company around, said in a conference call yesterday that Sprint’s still exploring the possibility of a WiMAX partnership with Clearwire. “Sprint has an enormous asset—nearly 100 megahertz of un-utilized spectrum—and we have the opportunity to have a three-year head start with our Xohm service, true wireless broadband with multi-megabit speed,” he said, according to a mocoNews.net article. “We have had wide ranging discussions with Clearwire on potential relationships but no final agreements have been reached.” → Read More
Since when did Sprint become part of the technological avant garde? Its investment in WiMax, what it’s branding Xohm, is beginning to pay off, with the company rolling out the wireless broadband service in D.C., Baltimore and Chicago in the coming weeks. Speeds of 2-5mbps are expected, which is more or less the typical home broadband speed, but the expected range for the signal is now around 3-5 miles, down from the original predictions of 30 miles. But how about this: with broadband everywhere, wouldn’t it be conceivable for companies to make VoIP cellphones without the “cell” part?VoIP-only phones, usable anywhere and everywhere? Maybe throw in a little Android action and you could well have yourself a truly decent phone. Wouldn’t that be nice, a decent phone without having to deal with the stupid phone companies? Rebirth of WiMAX Super Network = Death of Cellphone? [Popular Mechanics] → Read More
