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February 14, 2005

More Details on Sprint WiMax Plans

By Nancy Gohring

We’ve covered Sprint’s WiMax intentions here before but some more solid details have surfaced: Sprint appears to have solid plans to build WiMax networks, once the mobile version is available. The company plans to test WiMax this year but won’t do anything commercial until the mobile equipment is available. Sprint also said it would use WiMax to backhaul existing cellular base stations.

I’m a bit surprised that Sprint would make known such aggressive plans only because the mobile version of WiMax is quite a ways into the future. The company will have a long wait before the gear is available to it.

My initial reaction to these plans was to wonder why Sprint wouldn’t decide to use an existing technology, especially given Nextel’s use of Flarion, even if the existing offerings are proprietary. But it’s probably important to keep in mind that Sprint has been burned before trying to use its MMDS licenses. It was an early mover in building out networks several years ago after it bought a slew of MMDS licenses but the equipment it used, from a company called Hybrid, just wasn’t quite there yet so Sprint shelved the effort. Perhaps that experience means Sprint now wants to wait for a technology that is built on a standard, which presumably goes through a rigorous testing and development procedure before hitting the market.

Posted by nancyg at February 14, 2005 5:06 PM

Categories: operators

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