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January 8, 2008

Sprint Nextel Says WiMax on Track

By Glenn Fleishman

Nancy Gohring reports from the Consumer Electronics Show that Sprint maintains all is well in WiMax deployment: The firm said to a “small audience” at CES that they are right where they said they would be from a timing perspective. The company’s CTO, Barry West, said that the firm chose mobile WiMax over CDMA due to CDMA’s higher computational cost—and thus equipment cost—when handling larger swaths of spectrum. He also reaffirmed the network’s openness: any WiMax device a consumer buys will be allowed to run on the network.

A senior VP at Motorola noted that Motorola is involved in 60 WiMax trials worldwide, and Intel’s WiMax lead also said that “WiMax is bigger than Sprint.” True, but Sprint and Clearwire have the most scale committed anywhere in the world, and most of the rest of the world is involved in trials, not committed deployments. If they can’t build it here, they may not be able to build it anywhere, and the fortunes of several companies tumble alongside.

Posted by Glennf at January 8, 2008 3:53 PM

Categories: Industry News, hype, launch plans

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