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.

Full press release:

Sprint Extends 4G Leadership with Nation’s First 3G/4G Dual-Mode Mobile Broadband Service

The ultimate wireless broadband device delivers both 3G and 4G, revolutionizing mobile broadband and giving customers the best of both worlds

OVERLAND PARK, Kan.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Dec. 17, 2008–Sprint (NYSE: S) is about to make wireless history again by bringing the mobile broadband future to its customers now. The 4G leader announced it will make the first 3G/4G dual-mode device, which operates on both the Sprint 3G and 4G networks, available in retail stores Dec. 21.

The Sprint 3G/4G USB Modem U300 delivers the power of the Now Network(TM), the nation’s largest and most dependable mobile broadband 3G network*, while also harnessing the turbocharged speeds of WiMAX on the new Sprint 4G network. Sprint launched 4G in Baltimore in September and plans to launch in other markets across the country throughout 2009. This versatile device will enable customers to experience blazing fast Internet access, greater productivity and enhanced multimedia quality throughout 4G markets, and offer access to the dependable Sprint 3G network virtually everywhere else. The 3G/4G USB modem represents another major development in truly un-tethered broadband access.

"Sprint intends to be the leader in 4G and bring the wireless Internet to life," said Dan Hesse, Sprint CEO. "This first-of-its-kind device allows our customers to take the Internet with them essentially wherever they go by gaining enhanced speed and capability in 4G markets and the nationwide coverage of our 3G network across the rest of the country."

Sprint 4G represents a shift in the way people will use mobile broadband. Businesses, consumers and governments will be able to extend their Internet experience beyond home or office use. For the business customer, a typical user experience might be the ability to participate in a video conference from anywhere within the coverage area in a Sprint 4G city while sharing and retrieving large data files in just seconds. For consumers, it might be the ability to download a song in several seconds or a movie in significantly less than an hour while in the park or moving through the city, three to five times faster than 3G networks. The Sprint 3G/4G USB modem will access mobile multimedia applications at average downlink speeds of 2-4 Mbps within Baltimore Sprint 4G service areas. Where Sprint 4G service has yet to launch, the dual-mode device will operate on the Nationwide Sprint Mobile Broadband 3G Network at average downlink speeds of 600 Kbps – 1.4 Mbps.

The Sprint 3G/4G USB Modem U300, manufactured by Franklin Wireless, is a sleek, easy-to-use data card which connects to a standard USB port. The device is priced at $149.99 with a two-year subscriber agreement, after a $50 mail-in-rebate. Beginning Dec. 21, customers can purchase the USB data card via the Sprint direct business sales force, at most Baltimore-area Sprint stores and at select Baltimore-area retailers. Starting in January, the device will also be available in Baltimore-area Best Buy stores. With the Sprint 3G/4G USB Modem, customers living in and traveling to Baltimore will be able to work even faster while on-the-go. For $79.99 – just a $20 premium on any mobile broadband connection plan – customers will have simple-to-use access to the best possible mobile broadband connection: 3G or 4G. The Sprint Connection Manager recognizes and connects to the fastest connection available. For more information, visit www.sprint.com/4g

"The availability of this first dual-mode mobile broadband device further demonstrates Sprint’s leadership in 3G and 4G services," said Todd Rowley, vice president of Sprint 4G. "Our future device portfolio of single-mode 4G devices, embedded 4G laptops and dual- mode 3G/4G devices will continue to demonstrate our commitment to WiMAX."

Sprint is the first and only national wireless carrier to offer customers its 4G network and 3G network on one device. As 4G service continues to roll out in other cities, Sprint customers with dual-mode devices will be ready to take advantage of its super-fast speeds and will ultimately experience new forms of interactive communications, high- speed mobile Internet browsing, social-networking tools, local and location-centric products and services and city-wide broadband access to multimedia services including music, video, mobile TV and on-demand products.

[via eCoustics]

Jeez – busy enough day, FCC? Hot on the tails of the “white space” decision and approving Verizon’s buyout of Alltel, the FCC has cleared the merger of Sprint’s Xohm WiMax service with ClearWire – no doubt coming as a disappoint for some other carriers.

To recap the details announced back in May, Sprint will own 51% of the new company, which will take on the ClearWire name. ClearWire will have 27% ownership, while Google, Time Warner Cable, Brighthouse, Comcast, and Intel Capital will own the remaining 22%.

This is fairly huge news for 4G mobile broadband fans, as this merger essentially lays the necessary foundation for nationwide WiMax. If all goes well, ClearWire should be offering WiMax to half of the US’ population by 2010 – just as AT&T and Verizon are lighting up their competing 4G technology, LTE. When the battle for 4G technology king comes to a head, who will walk away the winner? The consumer, hopefully.

With the new company carrying on the ClearWire name, is the “Xohm” brand dead? I doubt it. When asked about the fate of the name, Xohm representatives have stated that “new management will be given the opportunity regarding how to position the Xohm name in the market”. While it’s not a household name by any means, Sprint has already done a fair amount of work establishing the brand and associating it with WiMax. I’d imagine that they’ll make use of it in the future, if only as a branding for WiMax dongles and other accessories.

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.

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.

Boy, with all these laptops sucking up the signal, they might want to put those WiMAX points on higher ground!

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.

Pricing and plans vary with four different offerings. A daily pass will set you back $10 while home service is $25. $30 will get you a month of ‘on-the-go’ service and $50 will allow service to two different devices.

Oh, and it looks like Washington D.C. and Chicago are up next. Do we have any Baltimore residents in the audience?

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 comes to cell phone service. WiMax mobile phones would take decades to chip away at that even if they do offer faster data speeds. Today, Clearwire is only offering at-home phone service, not mobile. As for broadband Internet and home phone services, Comcast and Time Warner already compete effectively against the phone companies today with their alternative services over cable.

2. It no longer makes sense to try to own all the pipes because pipes are becoming a commodity. Yet pipes are an expensive commodity. If the idea is to create a new way to stream TV and movies to people, the cable companies no longer have to build out the infrastructure themselves to do that. It would be much cheaper to let the WiMax business prove itself to be viable on its own and cut deals for distribution.

(Photo via Erik Charlton).

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.”

The main focus for Sprint, according to Hesse, is to get its main wireless business back into the black. That’s important, sure, but I’d submit that Sprint should get this Xohm thing up and running as soon as possible because it could probably help turn things around relatively quickly. If the service is fast enough and affordable enough, you’d see a puff of smoke where I’d just been standing in the doorway of my nearest Comcast office after turning in my cable modem.

In preparation for a more widespread Xohm launch (current test cities include Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington DC), Hesse said that later this year, Sprint will be pushing out dual-mode devices capable of working on both CDMA and WiMAX networks.

Sprint: WiMax Partnership With Clearwire Still Possible; Dual-Mode Handsets Out This Year [mocoNews.net]

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]